The Curse of Woland
A main theme of The Master and Margarita, death under mysterious circumstances, remains topical. Several deaths of actors that have occurred since the shootings of Vladimir Bortko's series Master i Margarita from 2005 feed the idea for many Russians that a curse rests upon those who participate in a film adaptation of The Master and Margarita. Some actors died at a young age, others in mysterious or even suspicious circumstances.
Some events are not reported accurately, though. Some media report that the 29-year-old daughter of Valentin Gaft (Kaifa) would have hanged herself shortly after the shootings. But that’s not exact: Olga’s body was discovered on August 24, 2002, three years before the shootings of the series. The following facts, however, are true.
On October 2, 2005, two months before the premiere of the series, the actor Alexander Chaban, who played the role of the NKVD investigator Sidorov, was found dead in his apartment. He was 47 years old and died under unclear circumstances. He disappeared shortly before the premiere of the series and was found dead in his apartment.
Alexander Chaban
Actor Alexander Galybin, who played the role of the master, said that he has had a terrible accident five days after the end of the shootings. Returning home with his wife from his mother-in-law, his car rolled over due to a blizzard and ended up on a side street. He doesn’t believe, though, that his role in the series had anything to do with it.
Alexander Adabashyan, who played the role of Mikhail Berlioz, got a heart attack soon after the shooting. However, like Galybin, he made no link with his role in the series. More than once, he made jokes on how members of the film crew used the name of the devil at work. For example, they said that the evil spirits themselves made them drink too much on the day before the shooting.
Actor Stanislav Landgraf, who played the role of the critic Latunsky, died on December, 27, 2006. The cause of death was a heart attack. In the series, Margarita passionately wanted to kill his characterwith a shot in the heart.
Stanislav Landgraf
On March 27, 2007, the actor Evgeny Merkuryev, who played the role of Vassily Stepanovich, the accountant of the Commission on Spectacles and Entertainment of the Lighter Type, died tragically while he was gone fishing. By sheer accident, he fell through the ice on Lake Ladoga near Priozersk.
Evgeny Merkuryev
Kirill Lavrov, who played the role of Pontius Pilate, died on April 27, 2007, after several exhausting attempts to defeat leukemia. His daughter Maria helped him extending his life by six months as a a donor for a bone marrow transplantation.
Kirill Lavrov
Valery Zolotukhin, who played the role of Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, lost his 27-year-old son Sergey on July 2, 2007. He committed suicide. Zolotukhin himself died on March, 30, 2013. He was 71 years old and suffered from a brain tumor.
Valery Zolotukhin
Aleksander Abdulov, the unsurpassed interpreter of Koroviev, died of lung cancer on January 3, 2008. Abdulov was a smoker throughout his adult life. In August 2007, the actor experienced health problems, supposedly an ulcer. However, in September of the same year he was diagnosed with lung cancer in an Israeli clinic. Abdulov had extremely tense relations with the tabloids in the last years of his life. He fervently resented all false information about him and hated those unscrupulous journalists who tried to pry into his personal life. All this, together with the fact that he was very successful with women, resulted in several speculations being spread around his death. One of which was that he would have been poisoned.
Alexander Abdulov
On April 7, 2008, Andrei Tolubeyev died. He did not play a role in de series, but he dubbed the voice of Gennady Bogachov as Aloisy Mogarych. He died from a cancer of the pancreas at the age of 63. Colleagues helped him by raising the necessary funds for a treatment at the Israeli clinic, where Alexander Abdulov had tried to recover. But the disease was stronger.
In 2009 and 2010, several actors from the series died. On January 25, 2009, Yuri Oskin, the doorman Nikolai of the Griboedov restaurant, died at the age of 72 - three years later, his son, actor Tikhon Oskin, died suddenly as a result of a cardiac arrest. On December 23, 2009, Galina Borkova, the saleswoman in the Torgsin department store, died at the age of 73. Valentina Egorenkova, the nurse in the hospital of Doctor Stravinsky, was 65 years old when she died on April 20, 2010. Five months after her, on August 20, 2010, the actor Stanislav Sokolov, the secretary of Pontius Pilate, died due to postoperative sepsis at the age of 70.
Mikhail Surov is a somewhat shadowy person who was convicted a few times for criminal offenses and who was also active in regional politics in his hometown Vologda. In his spare time he played extra roles in TV series. In Vladimir Bortko's series he was an extra in the crowd who did not even appear in the credits of the series. On August 11, 2011, he died tragically in a car accident at the age of 55. He was thrown through the window and died on the spot.
Vladislav Galkin, known for his role as the poet Ivan Bezdomny in the series, was suffering from a drinking problem. In July 2009, he was charged with hooliganism using a weapon against a policeman in a bar. In December, he was convicted to a suspended sentence of 14 months. In January 2010, Galkin underwent treatment at the Botkin hospital in Moscow for an inflammation of the pancreas. One month later, on February 27, 2010, he was found dead under suspicious circumstances in a rented apartment in Moscow. He was 38 years old. The official cause of death was a cardiac arrest. However, according to his family and friends, he was murdered based on evidence indicating the presence of other people in his room just before his death and the disappearance of 130,000 dollar from his apartment.
Vladislav Galkin
On April 5, 2013, actor Dmitriy Poddubny, who played the role of a NKVD agent in the series, died under obscure circumstances. The day before, he had been hospitalised at the City hospital number 15 in Saint Petersburg. His wife said that Poddubny had a slight spasm and no injuries when she and her daughter brought him to the hospital. However, the doctors said that he died from a head injury and the police reported that he already had this injury when he was admitted to the hospital. According to Poddubny's wife, the doctors did not want to give her official documents indicating her husband’s diagnosis.
More actors died after the shootings of the series. Ilya Oleynikov who played the role of Grigory Rimsky, the financial director of the Variety Theater and Stanislav Pryakhin, who played a pickpocket (uncredited), died both in 2012. In 2014, Stanislav Fesyunov, who was the doorman at the Torgsin store, also died. But those deaths did not happen under strange circumstances.
Maybe we should not blame the novel of a curse. Creative people are a often superstitious people, and in the thrall of prejudice, we could forget the phrase that Mikhail Bulgakov put into the mouth of Woland: «Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal, there's the catch!»
Talking about Woland, his role in the series was initially offered to the actor Oleg Yankovsky. However, at the last moment he refused, saying that, in his opinion, no one should ever play the role of the devil or the role of God.
Oleg Yankovsky
By the way, more famous actors refused to play in the series. Alexander Kalyagin refused the role of Berlioz, Vladimir Mashkov could have been the master, but he didn't want to. And finally, Alexander Pankratov-Cherny refused the role of Varenukha. But Bortko decided not to give up the actor and offered him the role of Stepan Lichodeev in return. He agreed with that.
