Leonid Yarmolnik

Yarmolnik was born on 22 January 1954 in Grodekovo, Primorsky Krai, where his father, Isaac Yarmolnik, a Soviet Army officer, was stationed. His mother, Faina Ivanovna Yarmolnik (1935), worked as a laboratory assistant in a polyclinic. In 1960, Yarmolnik's family relocated to Lviv. Leonid studied at the local music school and was involved in plays at the Lviv Folk Theater. In 1972, he became a student at the Boris Shchukin Theatre Institute and graduated from the acting class of Yury Katin-Yartsev, a famous Russian actor and acclaimed pedagogue of the Vakhtangov Theater Arts School, in 1976. From 1976 to 1984, he was an actor at the Taganka Theatre. Yarmolnik started his own studio, L-Club, specializing in film distribution, and anchored a TV program with the same name. Until 2012, he was a member of the jury on the popular KVN game show. He was honored with the State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2001 for the role of Zhora in The Barracks. From 2 March to 8 June 2014, he was a member of the jury of the music show ‘Toch-v-Toch’.

Leonid Yarmolnik is married to Oksana Afanasieva and they have one daughter together. Oksana Afanasieva is a former girlfriend of Soviet singer songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky.^[2]

Yarmolnik is Jewish.