Motion Picture Director. Born Grigori Mikhailovich Kozintsev in Kiev, Ukraine, he was stage crazy from boyhood and put on amateur shows with the help of friends. Two of them, Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich, joined him in St. Petersburg to form the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEX), a theatre troupe that scandalized audiences and critics alike with their avant-garde versions of the classics, often combining live performance with filmed interludes. In 1924 Kozintsev and Trauberg became a directing team at what is now the Lenfilm Studio, a partnership that would last through two decades and 12 films. At first they carried the experimental style of the FEX into the cinema, but with increasing official criticism under Stalin's regime the duo adopted a more ideologically safe approach. They reached a peak of success with their "Maxim Trilogy" - "The Youth of Maxim" (1935), "The Return of Maxim" (1937), and "The Vyborg Side" (1939) - showing how the 1917 Revolution forged an ignorant worker into a model Soviet citizen. The trilogy was awarded the 1941 Stalin Prize. Kozintsev and Trauberg split up after their final collaboration, "Plain People" (1946), was banned by the government (it was not released until 1958). On his own Kozintsev won international acclaim with three exceptional literary adaptations, "Don Quixote" (1957), "Hamlet" (1964), and "King Lear" (1969); "Hamlet", based on Boris Pasternak's translation, is considered his masterpiece and one of the finest screen versions of Shakespeare in any language. He was awarded the Order of Lenin in 1965. At the time of his death he was planning to film "The Tempest". His other credits, alone or with Trauberg, include "The Overcoat" (1926), "The New Babylon" (1929), "Alone" (1931), "Pirogov" (1947), and "Belinsky" (1953). Most of Kozintsev's films were scored by his longtime friend, composer Dmitri Shostakovich.