Oleg Yankovsky, Russian actor

Mr. Yankovsky, born to an aristocratic family exiled to Kazakhstan under Josef Stalin in the 1930s, last performed on stage this year at Moscow's Lenkom Theater, where he spent most of his more than four-decade career. He returned to Russia in February from Germany to act in "The Marriage," a comedy by Nikolai Gogol.

Leading Russian politicians, actors, and directors paid tribute yesterday to the actor, who played the father in Tarkovsky's semiautobiographical 1975 film "The Mirror" and the writer star of "Nostalghia" in 1983.

Mr. Yankovsky was perhaps most famous in Russia for the title role in "The Very Same Munchhausen," the 1979 television movie of the tales of an 18th-century aristocrat who travels to the moon and dances with Venus. An English-language film of the stories with Uma Thurman and Sting was released in 1988.

"Tsar," the Pavel Lungin film in which Mr. Yankovsky plays his last film role as Metropolitan Filipp, the childhood friend and adviser to Ivan the Terrible, screened at the Cannes film festival in the Un Certain Regard section on May 17 and is scheduled to open in Russia this fall.

Actor Robert De Niro, a friend, visited Mr. Yankovsky last month while in Moscow for the opening of the Nobu restaurant. "I was happy to see him and his son and his grandson, and have him see my son," De Niro told reporters at the time. "It was a good reunion."