Veriko Anjaparidze

Biography

Veriko Ivlianovna Anjaparidze was a Soviet and Georgian stage and film actress. Andjaparidze was born in Kutaisi and studied at the Aidarov Drama Studio in Moscow in 1916–1917 and at the Aleksandre Djabadari studio in Tbilisi in 1918–1921. Since 1920, Veriko Anjaparidze was an actress at the Shota Rustaveli State Theater in Tbilisi, and since 1927 she moved to the Marjanishvili Theatre, also in Tbilisi. Later, she became the art director of the theater. She was also teaching at the Rustaveli Theatre. Andjaparidze’s film debut was in Vladimir Barskii’s Horrors of the Past (1925). She then played supporting parts in Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky’s Dina Dza-Dzu (1926) and Nikoloz Shengelaia’s Twenty-six Commissars (1932). In 1929, Andjaparidze starred in Mikheil Chiaureli’s morality tale about alcoholism Saba. She soon achieved a unique status as one of the leading female actresses of Georgian cinema, who was honored under all Soviet political leaders, from Iosif Stalin to Mikhail Gorbachev. She also starred as Rusudan in Chiaureli’s epic Georgi Zaakadze (1942–1946), the kolkhoz director Nino in Nikoloz Sanishvili [ka]’s comedy Happy Encounter (1949), and the lead in Siko Dolidze’s popular rural drama Encounter with the Past (1966). Tengiz Abuladze cast Andjaparidze in a minor yet essential role in his anti-totalitarian testament Repentance (1984).