One of the big regrets of my life was that I narrowly missed seeing Smoktunovsky on stage in the late 1980s. I was in Leningrad (I think it was still Leningrad at the time) and a Russian-speaking friend managed to get us tickets for The Seagull (which I'd seen very recently in English so I reckoned I could cope), and he was playing the doctor but they had alternating casts and I got the other one!