A ceremony has been held in Almaty to honor actor Vladimir Tolokonnikov, a prominent native of the Kazakh city who died on July 16 in Moscow.
The commemoration was held on July 17 at the Mikhail Lermontov Russian Drama Theater in Almaty.
Tolokonnikov gained enormous popularity and glory across the former Soviet Union after playing Poligraf Sharikov, the loutish dog-turned-man in Heart of A Dog, a 1988 film based on Mikhail Bulgakov's 1925 novel.
He died of heart failure at the age of 74 in Moscow, where he was shooting a new movie. Tolokonnikov will be buried in Moscow's Troyekurovskoye cemetery on July 18, family members said.
Tolokonnikov's relatives, actors of the Lermontov Theater, his fans, and ordinary Almaty residents came to the farewell ceremony. They placed flowers before his portrait and left written remarks in a book.
Tolokonnikov was born in Almaty and worked at the Lermontov Theater for more than 40 years after graduating from a drama school in Yaroslavl, Russia, in 1973.
He maintained Kazakh citizenship after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
