Nikolai Nikolayevich Rybnikov was born on 13 December 1930 in Borisoglebsk, Voronezh Oblast.[7] His father Nikolai Nikolayevich, was a factory fitter and his mother, Klavdiya Aleksandrovna, a housewife. He also had a brother, Vyacheslav.[4][5]
With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Rybnikov the elder went to the front, and the mother took her sons and moved to Stalingrad to her sister, believing that it would be safe there. But from the front they received news of the death of his father. Soon after receiving the tragic news, Klavdiya Aleksandrovna also died.[5]
Nikolai Rybnikov grew up in Stalingrad and graduated from the local railway school. Afterwards, he studied at the Stalingrad Medical Institute for two years, but dropped out since he decided that the profession was not for him.[4][5]
In 1948, Nikolai went to Moscow to study as an actor and entered VGIK (Sergei Gerasimov's and Tamara Makarova's course), he graduated in 1953. He was an actor of the auxiliary staff of the Stalingrad Drama Theater.[4][5]
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.[4][5]
In 1958, Nikolai Rybnikov starred in the picture by Eldar Ryazanov, The Girl Without an Address, and 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.[8]
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.[9]
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.[4]
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.[4]
His wife was actress Alla Larionova (1931—2000). He first met her as a student in VGIK. They raised two daughters — Alyona from Larionova's previous relationship with Ivan Pereverzev, and their biological child Arina.[10]
