MASTER OF LAUGHTER AND COMEDY

Few stage actors manage to become loved by everyone, Hacibaba Bagirov hardly acted in films at all and then only in minor roles. Nevertheless, every one of us knows what he looks like and loves the shows in which he appeared. "I always preferred the theatre," he said in one of his last interviews. "The theatre, unlike the cinema, is live contact with the audience. Every time I go out onto the stage in one role or another, I improve my performance of that role."

On this year this extremely great actor would have been 82 years old.

The theatre was his whole life

Right from the start the musical comedy theatre was considered to be a second class theatre in the theatrical environment. It opened later than others, just before the Second World War. There were not many shows in the first 20 years; the theatre was on the brink of being reorganised several times, but a new generation arrived, and in the 1960s and 1970s musical comedy became a leading art form. Everybody knows the names of those to whom the theatre owes its success. These are the splendid director Samsi Badalbayli, the actors Lutfali Abdullayev, Nasiba Zeynalova, Hacibaba Bagirov, Siyavus Aslan, and Basir Safaroglu. They were in fact the ones who created the musical comedy theatre that we remember and love.

…He really shouldn't have been an actor at all. In his youth he worked as a machine operator at the depot, then he trained as a railwayman, but, when he quit his job at the end of the 1950s, he joined some amateur actors. Hacibaba Bagirov was eventually accepted into the acting troupe and played various types of roles: Fuad ("Almas"), Sahsuvar ("Komsomol poem"), Rasid ("Step Mother") and others. The parts were small ones. It was obvious that the actor and his theatre did not really suit one another. It was not until 1962 that Bagirov found himself in the none-too-prestigious musical comedy theatre which was what he needed. But just as in a business "everything is determined by the calibre of the staff", which is exactly the case in art too. A whole galaxy of young actors swiftly made the musical comedy theatre the favourite and a really folk theatre.

Hacibaba Bagirov played an enormous part in this. The more than 50 characters that he created over 26 years helped to shape him as a master of laughter and comedy. He promoted the development of the national culture by creating such comic, but at the same time integral, characters as Soltan bay ("Arshin mal alan"; The Cloth Peddler"), Masadi Ibad ("If not that, then this one", Uzeyir Hacibayov), Orduxan ("The 50-year-old Youth", Zulfuqar Hacibayov), Cabi Cumazada ("Hamisa-xanim"), Qulam ("My life, My life"), and many, many more. Yes, he rarely played the main parts, but this is what is splendid about the theatre, that what you remember is not only the main role, often the precious correct character in the Soviet sense, but the comical characters that appear. These were the ones that Hacibaba played.

His fame on the stage very soon brought him into television. "I was always an admirer of his acting talent. On Sundays I used to wait impatiently for him to appear in the programme "Morning meetings" on the Azerbaijani TV channel," his last wife Arzu recounts. "I took an interest in all his parts on television, in the theatre and in films."

The whole country used to watch his performances and TV appearances. His natural artistry allowed Hacibaba to sing songs from memory although he did not have a particularly good voice or a good ear for music.

Simply a good person

"Of course, it never occurred to me that we might meet some time," the actor's widow recalls. "The actress Lutfiya xanim, who was my neighbour, introduced us. Besides being a fan of his as an actor, I also admired him as a person for his polite attentiveness to women and his gentlemanly manner. Although he did not look particularly attractive," Arzu xanim says, "but he had a splendid personality!"

From 1996 he was the manager of the Musical Comedy Theatre. Like many comic actors, in his actual life he was a serious-minded person. This was precisely why the actors would instantaneously get together and stop telling jokes once he entered the theatre. But no one was closer to the actors and their problems than Bagirov; when trying to resolve urgent problems, he was never above ringing some official person and "unravelling" difficult situations. In the years that he ran the theatre, the unspoken rules dictated by seniority were increasingly observed. When he was an artiste, he always knew what actors needed. Such well-known actresses as Xanim Qafarova and Rasmiya Nurmammadova can without any exaggeration be called pupils of the great maestro; the part he played in shaping them as actresses was a very great one.

"The theatre was not so much his second, but his first home," the actor's widow thinks. He often went through hard times, when he did not have any money. When he was divorcing his previous wives, he nobly left them the flats and went to live in the theatre. That was what he was like as a person.

They say that a person senses when he is dying. "They recount at the theatre that the last thought that he expressed to the troupe was: "This life consists of losses, we might not see each other again…"

There can be no doubt that, if Bagirov had not had not loved the theatre so much he could have made a good career for himself in films without trying very hard. He only played seven parts in films, but they were all memorable. Merited Artiste Sugra Bagirzada said the following about Hacibaba Bagirov: "I would like to mention the film "Ulduz", since that was the first major film in which we acted. While that film was being shot, we were in very close contact." The actress recounts that, in spite of the fact that Bagirov is generally regarded as a stage actor, he very rapidly adapted to working on a film set, he had a good feeling for the film shoot. Our cameraman even said that it did not matter from what angle he filmed Hacibaba Bagirov, his talent was always evident," Sugra khanum recalls. "Besides that, we were filmed many times for the "Kinoklub" ["Film Club"] TV programme. I'm very happy that I acted in films with a person like that."

In one of his interviews Hacibaba Bagirov spoke about his part in the film "Ulduz": "I had already played the part of Mokhsun on stage, but when I learned that the operetta was going to be made into a film, I was worried about it. You see, that was my first part in a film. When the film was released, I felt as if I had grown wings, for here I could watch my performance for the first time as an onlooker. I owe my success to the fact the Mokhsun was a part to which I was well suited."

The actor Ilham Namiq Kamal recalls: "I would like to talk about a side of Hacibaba's nature that was not visible, about his humanity. He was of course a brilliant actor, but his personality was on a higher level than his acting. He really loved people, constantly wanted to meet and socialise with them; his soul was a hymn to friendship. He never thought about evil."