Oleg Vidov
Russian matinée idol dubbed the ‘Soviet Robert Redford’ who staged a dramatic escape to the West
OLEG VIDOV, who has died aged 73, was a blond, blue-eyed Russian matinée idol described in People magazine as “the Soviet Robert Redford” when he defected to the United States in 1985. From the age of 16 when he got his first bit part – riding a motorcycle in a film about juvenile delinquents – Vidov made more than 30 films in Russia, often playing the romantic leads in adventure films. He enjoyed all the privileges accorded to the Soviet elite and married a former ballet dancer who was friendly with a daughter of the Soviet president, Leonid Brezhnev.
He was trusted enough by the authorities to be allowed to travel abroad to take the leading role in The Red Mantle, a 1967 Danish-swedishicelandic co-production based on the Viking story of Hagbard and Signy, a pair of lovers whose tale was told in the 12th-century work Gesta Danorum. He spent three months on location in Iceland, two in Stockholm and one month in Copenhagen. “When I got to Stockholm,” he recalled later, “nobody asked me for the visa or even my passport. This was unthinkable for a Soviet citizen. I couldn’t get over it. The same thing happened in Iceland and Denmark.”
The film had enormous success inside the Soviet Union. Vidov’s performance was singled out by the critics when it was shown at the 1967 Cannes Festival, and the Italian director, Federico Fellini, hoping to cast Vidov in Satyricon (1969), dispatched the actor John Frederick to find him. The Soviet embassy was reluctant to reveal his whereabouts but Frederick managed to track Vidov down to Yugoslavia, where he was working on The Battle of the River Neretva (1969). Vidov, he recalled, “indicated that he was interested in a return to the West, because he had just had a fabulous experience”.
Subsequently Vidov was given a small role in Waterloo, Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1970 epic, mainly shot in Russia, and the film’s producer Dino De Laurentiis offered Vidov a sevenyear contract. But the Soviet authorities vetoed the idea – as they did Fellini’s overtures.
Vidov took leading roles in the 1972 Soviet-cuban Western The Headless Horseman and in the 1974 Sovietjapanese romantic drama Moscow, My Love. But his taste of life in the West had left him frustrated by the restrictions imposed on Russian actors. He turned his hand to directing, but a short film about transportation problems in the Soviet Union was criticised for its ideological shortcomings and a feature film about how the revolution came to one of the Soviet republics was cancelled in pre-production.
Vidov’s marriage, too, had broken down and, according to Frederick, Vidov’s ex-wife did her best to use her contacts to poison his career. When Frederick arrived in Moscow for a sightseeing trip in 1983, he found the actor frustrated and under constant surveillance by the KGB. Although he still had an enormous following in Russia, the parts had dried up.
In 1983 Vidov was given permission to live and work in Yugoslavia with his second wife, a Yugoslav actress. But when a West German film company picked him to appear in the television miniseries, Secret of the Black Dragon, word got back to the Soviet authorities and in May 1985 they gave him 72 hours to return to Moscow.
Fearing imprisonment, Vidov contacted an actor friend in Vienna who drove to an airport just inside Yugoslavia and flew to Belgrade. There, he took Vidov to the Austrian embassy and persuaded the staff to stamp an Austrian visa on Vidov’s Soviet passport. Together they drove to the Austrian border where the Yugoslav guards were engrossed in watching a football match on television and waved Vidov through without looking. With the help of friends, including Frederick who agreed to act as his sponsor, Vidov obtained a refugee visa from the American embassy in Rome and moved to the US in August 1985.
Oleg Borisovich Vidov was born on June 11 1943 in a small village near Moscow, but spent most of his childhood living with an aunt in Alma Ata, a large city on the Chinese border. He attended the local cinema, which showed Soviet animation films and American and German films captured from the retreating Germans during the war. “We were all mad about Tarzan in those days,” he recalled. “We were [also] bowled over by Spartacus starring Kirk Douglas.”
When he was picked for his first bit part, Vidov was working as a hospital orderly. Shortly afterwards he won a place at the Moscow Film Institute.
Many of the films he made in Russia during the 1960s and 1970s are still played on Russian television today.
After defecting to the US, Vidov appeared in several Hollywood productions, including the 1988 action film Red Heat and the 2000 Cuban missile crisis thriller Thirteen Days.
He married, thirdly, Joan Borsten, with whom he co-founded a company specialising in the restoration of the Soviet animation films he had loved as a boy. Returning home after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, he visited the headquarters of the old Soviet animation house Soyuzmultfilm and secured the distribution rights to the studio’s award-winning catalogue outside the former Soviet Union, a job that proved unexpectedly challenging as it involved complicated negotiations with copyright-holders in the West, whose claims had been ignored by the Soviets.
In 1999 the legality of the deal was challenged by Soyuzmultfilm, with the Russian courts siding with Soyuzmultfilm and the US courts with Vidov. In 2007 the Vidovs ceded the rights to the library to the Russian tycoon Alisher Usmanov.
Vidov’s wife survives him with two sons.
Oleg Vidov, born June 11 1943, died May 15 2017