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Alexander Borisovich Godunov (Russian: Александр Борисович Годунов; November 28, 1949 – May 1995) was a Russian-American ballet dancer and film actor. A member of the Bolshoi Ballet, he became the troupe's Premier danseur. In 1979, he defected to the United States. While continuing to dance, he also began working as a supporting actor in Hollywood films. He had prominent roles in films such as Witness (1985) and Die Hard (1988).
Godunov was born in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk (Sakhalin, Russian SFSR, USSR) in the Russian Far East. He began his ballet studies at the age of nine in Riga in 1958 in the same class as Mikhail Baryshnikov. He said his mother put him in ballet to prevent him from becoming "a hooligan".He and Baryshnikov became friends and helped each other throughout their years there.
Godunov joined the Bolshoi Ballet in 1971 and rose to become Premier danseur. His teachers there included Aleksey Yermolayev.
In 1973, Godunov won a gold medal at the Moscow International Ballet Competition.He received the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR in 1976. After playing Vronsky in 1975's Anna Karenina and Lemisson, the Royal minstrel, in the 1978 film version of J. B. Priestley's 31 June, he became well-known in the Soviet Union as a movie actor.
Godunov also began working in Hollywood as a film actor. His acting roles included an Amish farmer in Witness (1985), a comically narcissistic symphony conductor in The Money Pit (1986) and one of the thieves in Die Hard (1988). He declined roles which typecast him as a dancer or as an action villain, as in Die Hard.[1] In the mid-1990s he appeared in Canadian television commercials for Labatt Ice Beer.
Godunov drank alcohol to excess and this became a problem as he got older. On May 18, 1995, Godunov's friends became concerned when he had been uncharacteristically quiet with his phone calls. A nurse, who had not heard from him since May 8, went to his home in the Shoreham Towers, West Hollywood, California, where his body was discovered. He had been dead for several days. Godunov's death was determined to be due to complications from hepatitis secondary to chronic alcoholism.
Godunov was cremated and his ashes scattered into the Pacific Ocean. A memorial to him at Gates Mortuary in Los Angeles is engraved with the epitaph "His future remained in the past.
Die Hard is a 1988 American action film directed by John McTiernan and written by Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. It stars Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, and Bonnie Bedelia, with Reginald VelJohnson, William Atherton, Paul Gleason, and Hart Bochner in supporting roles. Die Hard follows a New York City police detective, John McClane (Willis), who becomes entangled in a terrorist takeover of a Los Angeles skyscraper while visiting his estranged wife during a Christmas Eve party.
Filming took place between November 1987 and March 1988, on a $25 million to $35 million budget and almost entirely on location in and around Fox Plaza in Los Angeles.
Expectations for Die Hard were low; some marketing materials omitted Willis's image, ostensibly because the publicity team determined that the setting was as important as McClane. Upon its release in July 1988, initial reviews were mixed: criticism focused on its violence, plot, and Willis's performance, while McTiernan's direction and Rickman's charismatic portrayal of the villain Hans Gruber were praised. Defying predictions, Die Hard grossed approximately $140 million, becoming the year's tenth-highest-grossing film and the highest-grossing action film. Receiving four Academy Award nominations, it elevated Willis to leading-man status and made Rickman a celebrity.