Pyotr Stepanov (actor)

Pyotr Gavrilovich Stepanov was a Russian stage actor, associated with the Moscow Maly Theatre, one of the first stage professionals in Russia.

Biography

Born in 1800 into a family close to the Michael Maddox troupe, Stepanov received private lessons from actress Maria Sinyavskaya before enrolling into the Moscow Theatre College which he graduated in 1825 to join the Maly Theatre troupe which he stayed with for the whole of his life.
Stepanov became popular mostly for his comic and eccentric parts, but was also known as an opera baritone and even, occasionally, a ballet dancer. In all, Stepanov had more than 500 parts in Maly, some of them very tiny, by most of them memorable and expressive. Writers like Vissarion Belinsky and Sergey Aksakov were among his fans.
On the Moscow stage Stepanov was the first performer of such parts as Prince Tugoukhovsky, Tyapkin-Lyapkin, Yaichnitsa and Shvokhnev, by Gogol. Among his best remembered roles were those in the plays by Alexander Ostrovsky and Live Not as You Would Like To.