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Nikita Mikhalkov

Possessing an impeccable artistic pedigree, actor-writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov prospered during the Soviet era and survived the collapse of Communism, becoming his country's best-known and successful film director, not to mention a leading candidate to succeed Boris Yeltsin as President of Russia. His father was Sergei Mikhalkov, a poet and author of children's books, who wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem and whose Communist Party ties (he was head of the Soviet Writers Union) helped shield Nikita from the censorship and persecution that forced other filmmakers to curb their careers or compromise shamefully with the government. His mother, Natalya Konchalovskaya, descended from aristocracy, was a poet-essayist and the great-granddaughter of Vasily Surikov, one of Russia's most famous painters, and her father Pyotr Konchalovsky was a major painter of the post-Impressionist school. Older brother Andrei Konchalovsky, also a renowned filmmaker, moved to the West and made a splash with "Runaway Train" (1985), but his subsequent Hollywood films failed to live up to its promise (or that of his epic "Siberiade" 1979). Remaining behind in his Russian homeland, Mikhalkov managed to forge the more acclaimed career.