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Zhanna Prokhorenko is one of those actors who shone in her very first role. She became famous in the famous “Ballad of a Soldier”. Then she had a long-term film career and several dozen films, but she will no longer have such a stellar role.
“Ballad of a Soldier” 1959
Zhanna was born in 1940 in Poltava. It is curious that her real name is Zhanneta; at that time it was fashionable to give children exotic names. But after becoming an actress, she still decided to simplify her unusual name.
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When I was still very young, my parents divorced, I lived with my mother in Otradnoye, and my father came to visit me on weekends. Zhanetik came to us whenever possible, for example, she replaced her mother when she was on set. (My parents are also famous artists: my mother is Ekaterina Vasilyeva, my father is Timofey Spivak.) I remember our walks with Zhanetik in the autumn park, how we fed the ducks, rode a boat, collected acorns and chestnuts, fed the squirrels, played “city”.
When I was six years old, my mother and I moved closer to Zhanetik, to the South-West. There I went to school. We lived in neighboring houses. In the evening we went to her for tea (for some reason, her tea always seemed tastier to me than at home). While the adults were talking, I went to her room, dressed up in her hats and gloves, played princesses, and staged some skits. Even then, family friends, jokingly, predicted that I would become an artist. Zhanetik, laughing, answered: “No, she doesn’t need this, let at least one in the family be a normal person!” And it’s true, I denied it until the very end, I refused, I had no intention of going into acting, because I saw and knew from the inside all the difficulties of the acting profession.
Both mom and Zhanetik began to have downtime at work when the crisis struck. Dad worked at the Theater. Stanislavsky did not last long, acted a lot in films, then became a director, then completed several courses at the ISI (Institute of Contemporary Art), and seriously took up teaching. Mom made money by simultaneous translations of TV series and films, fortunately she knew English well after studying at a special school. But Zhanetik, in order not to sit idle when there was no filming, learned the language on her own - she translated English detective stories with a dictionary, and wrote them down word by word in a notebook.
In the evening we went to Zhanetik for tea. While the adults were talking, I went to her room
When did you and Janetik become especially close?
During the crisis years, we began to rent out our apartment with my mother and moved to live with her on Yugo-Zapadnaya. I remember my mother went to Bulgaria for a long time to dub the series “Simply Maria” and “Wild Rose”. I missed her very much, I cried at night. Zhanetik came to me, hugged me, and quietly told me some stories from her life. If she got sick, she never called a doctor and neglected her medications. But if I got sick, Zhanetik didn’t leave my side, she used all her strength to get me back on my feet. She generally had some kind of sacrifice inherent in her. I started living with her when I was 14. My mother had a new family - she got married, gave birth to a sister, Ksyusha, and went to live in her husband’s apartment. So my entire difficult adolescence fell on Zhanetik’s shoulders.
Did Janetik tell you anything about her parents?
A little. Father, Trofim Isaakovich, originally from the Belarusian village of Goryany, a military pilot, died in the war. They said that he repeated Gastello's feat. When I was sick, Zhanetik took out family photographs and showed Eleonora Ilyinichna, her mother. A rather stern, closed woman who has experienced a lot - war, blockade. And Zhanetik told stories from her childhood. She and her brother were very young when the war began. Mom took them to the village, where they went to the field to collect spikelets so as not to die of hunger.
Zhanna Trofimovna was born in Ukraine, her father is from Belarus. But, it seems, she also had Polish roots?
Yes. More precisely, her mother. Eleanor Ilyinichna’s sister, Aunt Vitya, was a Catholic. Zhanetik was born in Poltava, and after the evacuation she, her mother and brother returned to St. Petersburg. And they began to live in a communal apartment with Aunt Vitya. She worked as a tram driver and conductor on a tram. Zhanetik often recalled the “scary” and instructive story of how, as a child, she stole change from Aunt Vitina’s bag as a train driver and bought mint candies. But bringing them home would mean admitting theft, and this is incredibly embarrassing! I had to eat everything along the way. Since then, Zhanetik has developed a persistent aversion to mint candies and a categorical rejection of all lies.
Was she a believer?
Zhanetik is baptized, Orthodox. A believer, but not fanatical. I went to church mainly on holidays. For Easter I baked amazingly delicious Easter cakes. We colored the eggs with onion skins. Everyone went together to bless them at the Church of the Archangel Michael nearby. And once for the Christmas service, Zhanetik decided to go to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, it had just opened. But she didn’t know that the worship service there was closed and admission was strictly based on tickets. Seeing a huge crowd, I decided: why stand, you definitely won’t get in. Suddenly some unfamiliar woman walks straight towards her and hands her a pass to the temple: “This is for you.” And disappeared into the crowd. This is how Zhanetik got into the service. No, they didn’t recognize her, they didn’t tell her: “This is for you, Zhanna Trofimovna.” It's a miracle. And such miracles often accompanied her through life - she didn’t ask for it, didn’t expect anything, and suddenly exactly what she wanted happened.
This happened with our house in the village of Glush. She, then already a famous actress, was offered a government dacha in Yalta. At first Zhanetik said: “What do I care about this village in the Pskov region if we can go to the sea!” But our friends the Levtovs brought us there. Zhanetik arrived and fell in love immediately. And we liked it. And then, by a happy coincidence, it turned out that a house was for sale next to the Levtovs.
