About Nonna Mordyukova Nonna Viktorovna Mordyukova (November 25, 1925 - July 6, 2008) was a Soviet actress and People's Artist of the USSR (1974). She was the star of films like director Denis Yevstigneyev's Mama and Nikita Mikhalkov's 1980s hit Rodnya. She co-starred with the best actors of the Soviet era, among them Vasily Shukshin, Yuri Nikulin, Valentin Zubkov, Mikhail Ulyanov, Vyacheslav Tikhonov and others.In 1949, she was awarded the USSR State Prize for the role of Ulyana Gromova in the The Young Guard movie. It was her debut film role. Her impressive filmography reveals, however, that while she has had the chance to work with a constellation of the best Soviet directors, it has usually been for one project only. There is no high profile director with whom she has a continuous working relationship. After her work for Sergei Gerassimov on The Young Guard, she was cast in the last movie of veteran Vsevolod Pudovkin The Return of Vasili Bortnikov (1952). Other one-time collaborations with well-known directors have been with Mikhail Shvejtser for Chuzhaya rodnya (1955), Lev Kulidzhanov for Otchij dom (1959), with Leonid Gaidai for The Diamond Arm, with Andrei Konchalovsky for the Turgenev adaptation Dvoryanskoye gnyezdo (1969), with Grigori Chukhrai for Tryasina (1978), with Eldar Ryazanov for Railway Station for Two, and with Nikolai Gubenko for Zapretnaya zona (1988). She only played once in a film by Nikita Mikhalkov, who structured his village comedy-drama Kinfolk (1981) entirely around the personality of the actress, who had by that time established herself as an epitome of the Russian peasant woman. The role of Klavida Vavilova, a robust and boisterous Red Army Commissar who has accidentally become pregnant, in Aleksandr Askoldov's The Comissar (1967) is Mordyukova's most memorable work. The film, shot in 1966, was shelved and was only released in 1988. By that time Mordyukova was over sixty and had starred in over twenty other films. The wide critical acclaim and appreciation for what is probably her best performance came too late to have any definitive effect on her profile as an actor. She received FIPRESCI Award, Otto Dibelius Film Award, and Special Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Silver Spur Award (Flanders International Film Festival) for The Comissar. During the period of perestroika, Mordyukova appeared in a number of supporting roles in a range of comedy-dramas. Similarly, she has been a highly visible presence throughout the 1990s, with supporting roles in some of the most-popular Russian features, such as Pavel Lungin's Luna Park (1992) and Vladimir Menshov's Shirli-Myrli (1995). In 1999 she played the leading role in Mummy (1999), directed by Denis Yevstigneyev; a family saga loosely based on a real story, mixing action, melodrama and comedy elements and spanning several decades. Reportedly, "Russian cinema goers and critics call Mordyukova one of the best actresses of the 20th century." In over fifty years of work in the cinema she has played in dozens of films, where she acted mainly as ordinary Russian women. Nonna Mordyukava with Vladimir Putin during the Order of Merit for the Fatherland ceremony, 2000 In November 2000, Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree awarding the Order of Merit for the Fatherland, third degree, to Mordyukova.