Shukhrat Irgashev

Shukhrat Ibragimovich Irgashev (also transcribed Ergashev) was born on 19 June 1945 in Tashkent. After school he worked as a carpenter and fitter at the Podyomnik plant in the city.

In 1968 he graduated from the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute and the same year joined the company of the Maxim Gorky Tashkent Russian Drama Theatre. He had made his screen debut two years earlier, while still a student, as Shukhrat in the film “Tenderness” (Nafosat).

From 1970 he was an actor at the Uzbekfilm studio. In the Soviet period he was one of the most frequently cast actors of Uzbek cinema, appearing in “The Commander’s Return” (1968), “The Death of the Black Consul” (1970), “The Testament of the Old Master” (1972), “Semurg” (1972), “Abu Rayhan Beruni” (1975), “It Happened in Kokand” (1977), “The Lame Dervish” (1986) and many other films.

In 1989 he was named People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR. In the 1990s, when Uzbek cinema was in a poor state, he also tried his hand at film production; in 1994–1995 he played the Sogdian merchant Zemarkh, the narrator, in two films of the “Call of the Ancestors” cycle, “Great Turan” and “Sogdiana”.

In the early 2000s he moved to Moscow and appeared widely in Russian films and television series, among them “The Fighter” (2004), “Day Watch” (2005), “The Sword” (2009), “Vysotsky. Thank God I’m Alive” (2011), in which he played a KGB general, and “The Sniffer” (2013). Russian and Uzbek press put the number of his film and television credits at more than a hundred.

Shukhrat Irgashev died in Moscow on 17 September 2021, aged 76, and was buried at the Central City Cemetery of Solnechnogorsk in the Moscow region.