He was born in
Saint Petersburg (later Petrograd in 1914, and Leningrad from 1924 to 1991) into the family of a railway clerk. From 1919 he was a
mime artist in Petrograd's
Maryinsky Theatre, the
Bolshoi Theatre, and elsewhere. After graduating from the Institute of Stage Arts in 1926, he began acting in the
Young Spectator's Theatre in
Leningrad. Cherkasov debuted in film with a supporting role as the hairdresser Charles in Vladimir Gardin’s Pushkin biopic
The Poet and the Tsar (1927). Cherkasov was one of
Stalin's favorite actors and played title roles in
Sergei Eisenstein's monumental
sound films Alexander Nevsky (1938) and
Ivan the Terrible (Part I, 1944; Part II, 1946, though it was suppressed by Soviet authorities and not released widely until 1958). He also played
Jacques Paganel in the 1936 adaptation of
Jules Verne's
The Children of Captain Grant. In the 1947
comedy Springtime, Cherkasov appeared alongside other icons of Soviet cinema,
Lyubov Orlova and
Faina Ranevskaya. For the role of
Alexander Popov in the film
Alexander Popov in 1951, he received a
Stalin Prize of the second degree. In 1957, Cherkasov portrayed
Don Quixote in director
Grigori Kozintsev's
screen adaptation of the novel. , Saint Petersburg In 1941, Cherkasov was awarded the
Stalin Prize; in 1947, he was named a People's Artist of the USSR. He wrote his memoirs, "Notes of a Soviet Actor" in 1951. He died in Leningrad in 1966 and was buried in
Tikhvin Cemetery, the "Necropolis of the Masters of Art", at the
Alexander Nevsky Lavra. The image of Cherkasov in the role of Alexander Nevsky is on the Soviet
Order of Alexander Nevsky, because there are no known portraits of Nevsky himself. ==Filmography==