MOSCOW, September 18 (Itar-Tass) – Russian actor Leonid Bronevoi, who is known around the world for epitomizing on the screen the mysterious Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller in the 1973 Soviet mini-series ‘The Seventeen Moments of Spring’, has been given an emergency heart surgery in Kiev, a deputy director of the theater Bronevoi performs for told Itar-Tass.
Bronevoi, 83, took part in an extensive tour of Ukraine held by Moscow’s Lenkom theater. Ukrainian physicians described his condition after the surgery as “heavy but stable”.
“Leonid Sergeyevich /Bronevoi’s patronymic – Itar-Tass/ felt ill Tuesday morning and an emergency medical team was called up,” said Sergei Volter, Lenkom’s First Deputy Director. “The medics diagnosed a heart attack and took him to Kiev’s Center of Heart Diseases where he was given an emergency surgery.”
Bronevoi, born in Kiev in 1928, is a graduate of the Tashkent Institute of Performing Arts and the Moscow Arts Theater Studio School. He played for a number of theatrical companies in Soviet provincial cities and in Moscow.
The part of Heinrich Mueller, which he played opposite Vyacheslav Tikhonov as the fictitious Soviet agent Max Otto von Stierlitz, propelled him to fame across the USSR and made his name known in many countries where the mini-series was displayed.
His other indisputable screen achievements adored by dozens of millions of TV viewers across the former USSR included the King in ‘The Very Same Munchhausen’ /1977, a TV dramatization by Mark Zakharov/ and variety performer Arkady Velyurov in ‘The Porkovsky Gate’ /first screened by Soviet TV in 1983.
He joined the Lenkom company in 1988.