Career
His film debut was as Drozdov in The Team from Our Street (1953). The picture went almost unnoticed, however, next year the directors Aleksander Alov and Vladimir Naumov cast him in the film Anxious Youth. Rybnikov's work as laconic Kotka Grigorenko was positively noted by the critics.
His next role was of rural mechanic, Fedor in Mikhail Schweitzer's film Other People's Relatives.
Fame came to the actor after the film Spring on Zarechnaya Street (1956), directed by Feliks Mironer and Marlen Khutsiev. Next year he acted in another successful film, The Height, directed by Aleksandr Zarkhi.
In 1958, Nikolai Rybnikov starred in the Eldar Ryazanov film The Girl Without an Address. Although the public took the film well (it took second place at the box office), it received weak critical reviews. Nevertheless, in 1961 the actor agreed to appear in a comedy again, when director Yuri Chulyukin invited him to the main role of the lumberjack Ilya Kovrigin in the film The Girls. This picture had a huge audience success.
Nikolai Rybnikov became a favorite of audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s, performing romantic characters of cheerful young men, with integrity and purity revealed through sharp and dramatic relationships with others.
In the following years, Rybnikov acted a lot in film, including in He Submits to the Sky, War and Peace, where he played the role of Vasily Denisov, Liberation, The Hockey Players. The picture The Seventh Heaven (1972) was a great success, in it Nikolai Rybnikov starred with his wife, Alla Larionova.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the actor was invited to appear less often and only in episodic roles. The most vivid role of Rybnikov of this period is pensioner-squabbler Kondraty Petrovich in the film Marry a Captain (1985), for which he received the Soviet Screen Award in 1986 in the category of best actor in an episode role.
Nikolay Rybnikov died on the morning of 22 October 1990 in his Moscow apartment from a heart attack, a month and a half before his sixtieth birthday. He was buried at the Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.
