Yury Petrovich Lyubimov

Yury Petrovich Lyubimov (born September 30 [September 17, Old Style], 1917, Yaroslavl, Russia—died October 5, 2014, Moscow) was a Soviet theater director and actor noted for his two decades of somewhat experimental productions for the Taganka Theatre in Moscow.

Lyubimov served in the Soviet army during World War II, and upon his release in 1946, he joined the company of the Yevgeny Vakhtangov Theatre. In 1953 he began teaching at the B.V. Shchukin Drama School, from which he had graduated in 1939, and in 1964 he became the chief director of the Taganka Theatre. Because his productions did not avoid raising philosophical or political issues that questioned the Communist Party line, the Taganka became a gathering place for intellectuals and dissidents. In 1984, while he was in London, he was stripped of his citizenship. Thereafter he was a guest director for many theaterand opera companies throughout the United States and western Europe.