Motion Picture Director. The only important Russian filmaker whose career successfully spanned the Czarist and Soviet periods. Yakov Alexandrovich Protazanov was born in Moscow. He entered the cinema in 1905 as an actor and made his directing debut with "The Death of Ivan the Terrible" (1909). A versatile craftsman of considerable taste, he took advantage of relaxed censorship during World War I to introduce greater psychological realism in his adaptations of "War and Peace" (1915), "The Queen of Spades" (1916), and "Father Sergius" (1917). Many of his early films starred Ivan Mozhukhin. With the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution and ensuing Civil War, Protazanov moved with his studio to Yalta and then to Paris in 1920; homesickness compelled him to return to the new USSR in 1923. His most famous film, "Aelita" (1924), was the first Soviet science-fiction fantasy, boasting unusual Constructivist settings. "White Eagle" (1928) proved controversial for its sympathetic portrayal of a former enemy of the regime, and is also notable for featuring the only surviving screen performance of legendary director-actor Vsevolod Meyerhold. For many of the USSR's cultural commissars, particularly after Stalin assumed dictatorship in 1928, Protazanov came to symbolize the political and artistic compromises of the 1920s, and he had to wait until 1934 to make his first talkie, "Marionettes". The following year he was named People's Artist of the RSFSR, but his film "The Oddities of Love" (1936) was banned as "irrelevent" and the director faced possible arrest. He rebounded with a hit adaptation of Ostrovsky's play "The Bride Without a Dowry" (1937). His other credits include "The Devil" (1914), "Woman With a Dagger" (1916), "The Black Horde" (1919), "The Man From the Restaurant", "The Forty-First" (both 1927), and "Nasreddin in Bokhara" (1943). He often co-wrote his scripts.