George almost fainted from excitement when he reported his name and rank to the emperor, and then shook the hand extended to him. He was brought up from childhood that the Russian tsar is almost God and that there is no more important person in the world than his.
But with the 5-year-old Tsarevich Alexei, they very quickly agreed, and he even allowed him to be addressed by name and “you”. George served on the yacht until 1910, and the cabin boy graduated from school in 1911.
Later, Georgy Danilovich always recalled his childhood years with pleasure and never hid his acquaintance with members of the royal family.
At Jung School he received a good all-round education. In addition to excellent knowledge of the exact sciences, history, geography and astronomy, he played the violin well, danced beautifully and recited poetry from memory.
Therefore, he easily entered the Lunacharsky Theater Institute (GITIS), and in 1922 he successfully graduated from it. In the first years after his studies, he served in the troupe of the Krasnoarmeisky Theater in the city of Glazovo, where he participated in propaganda performances. And in 1923 he was invited to the Moscow Variety Theater, where he performed all the pre-war years.
In 1925, when the theater was on tour in Sweden, he received a message that his daughter was born in Moscow. Since Georgy and his wife dreamed of a daughter and had chosen the name Svetlana for her in advance, in honor of the birth of his daughter, he began to perform under the pseudonym “Svetlani”. And in 1926, during the first census of the population of the USSR, he fixed the actor’s pseudonym as an official surname (from birth he bore the surname Pinkovsky).
In early 1941, he was first invited to the cinema to participate in the film “The Artamonov Case”. After the start of the war, the entire film studio was moved to Tashkent, where the actor starred a lot. He continued to work in films after the war.
