Anton Yelchin

Info

Full Name: Anton Yelchin
Date of birth: March 11, 1989
Location: San Petersburgo
Country: Russia
Died at: 27 years old (June 19, 2016)

Anton Yelchin died 10 years ago, on June 19, 2016. Their last recorded film was in 2018, and their first in 2001. They were active for 17 years, appearing in 33 films that averaged a rating of 6.6/10.

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Tráiler en VOSE de 'Harry Potter' T1

Biography

Anton Viktorovich Yelchin was born in Leningrad on 11 March 1989, and six months later his parents put him on a plane and walked away from everything they had. Viktor Yelchin and Irina Korina were pair figure skaters, fifteen years with the Leningrad Ice Ballet and well known faces across the Soviet Union.

Ranked third nationally, they had qualified for the 1972 Winter Olympics, and the authorities refused to let them go. Their son told the story more than once without ever being able to settle it: he never knew whether it was because they were Jewish or because the KGB simply did not want them travelling.

They arrived in the United States in September 1989 with refugee status and settled in the San Fernando Valley. She went on to work as a skating choreographer, he as a coach, and he was the first trainer of Sasha Cohen, who went on to take Olympic silver. Their son, by his own account, was a fairly ordinary skater. A Los Angeles Times reporter covering the family's arrival wrote down a line from his mother that reads strangely now: he will be actor.

The boy who acted like a grown up

His debut came at eleven, in 'A Man Is Mostly Water', and by 2001 he was carrying two serious films. In 'Hearts in Atlantis' he was the lead, a boy who befriends the mysterious lodger played by Anthony Hopkins, and he won the Young Artist Award for best leading young actor. That same year he played a kidnapped boy in 'Along Came a Spider', opposite Morgan Freeman.

Television gave him two long jobs. First came Jacob Clarke in 'Taken' (2002), the science fiction miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg, then Byrd Huffstodt, the troubled teenage son of Hank Azaria, across two seasons of 'Huff'. In between he shot 'House of D' (2004) and 'Fierce People' (2005), where he acted opposite an equally young Kristen Stewart.

The part that changed how people talked about him was 'Alpha Dog' (2006). His Zack Mazursky is a teenager taken hostage by small time dealers who spend three days failing to decide what to do with him, a character lifted almost directly from the real Nicholas Markowitz case. Emile Hirsch, Justin Timberlake and Bruce Willis are all in it, and the film still belongs to him. A year later he took the title role in 'Charlie Bartlett', a high school comedy with Robert Downey Jr as the headmaster.

Chekov, Kyle Reese and everything else

2009 arrived twice over. J.J. Abrams cast him as Pavel Chekov in the 'Star Trek' reboot, alongside Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Zoe Saldaña and Simon Pegg. He came back for 'Star Trek Into Darkness' (2013) and 'Star Trek Beyond' (2016). That same summer he was the young Kyle Reese in 'Terminator Salvation', next to Christian Bale.

With two franchises behind him the obvious move was more blockbusters. He did the opposite. There was a turn as Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster's son in 'The Beaver' (2011), led the 'Fright Night' remake opposite Colin Farrell and a scenery chewing David Tennant, and went to Sundance with 'Like Crazy'.

Drake Doremus's largely improvised romance, about a British exchange student who overstays her American visa and the boyfriend she leaves stranded on the other side of an ocean, won the festival's Grand Jury Prize and paired him with Felicity Jones and Jennifer Lawrence. It remains the film his admirers reach for first.

There was plenty of voice work too. He was Clumsy Smurf in 'The Smurfs' (2011) and its sequel, the Albino Pirate in Aardman's 'The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!', and Shun in the English dub of 'From Up on Poppy Hill', Goro Miyazaki's film for Ghibli.

The run of small films he made in those years says more about the actor he wanted to be than any of the franchises. There was Jim Jarmusch's 'Only Lovers Left Alive' (2013), with Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, then Joe Dante's zombie comedy 'Burying the Ex' and Michael Almereyda's 'Experimenter' (2015). 'Odd Thomas' and '5 to 7' came in the same stretch.

His best adult performance was 'Green Room' (2015), Jeremy Saulnier's siege thriller about a punk band locked inside a neo Nazi venue in rural Oregon. Imogen Poots and a quietly terrifying Patrick Stewart were alongside him, and the film went out through Cannes Directors' Fortnight before Picturehouse released it in Britain.

A guitar, a camera and a secret

He learned guitar while shooting his first film and never really put it down. The Hammerheads, a punk band with a blues streak, had him singing and playing, and he recorded his own songs, most of which nobody heard properly until after he died. Photography was not a casual hobby either: portraits of the Los Angeles underworld, dark and oddly funny, exhibited at the De Buck Gallery in New York in January 2018 under the title 'Provocative Beauty'.

There was one more thing he kept to himself. Yelchin was born with cystic fibrosis. His parents told him when he was seventeen and he decided almost nobody else needed to know, not close friends, not people he worked with, and certainly not the press. It only became public after his death.

19 June 2016

Friends found him at 1.10 that morning in the driveway of his home in Studio City, pinned between his 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee and the brick pillar of his mailbox. The car had rolled backwards down the slope while he was out of it. The Los Angeles County coroner recorded an accidental death from blunt traumatic asphyxia. He was 27.

The model was part of a recall covering more than a million vehicles, prompted by a gear selector that left drivers believing they had parked when they had not. The recall notice reached his address a week after the accident. His parents sued Fiat Chrysler and the maker of the shifter, and the case ended in a confidential settlement in March 2018.

Films kept arriving. 'Porto' (2016), 'We Don't Belong Here' and 'Rememory' all came out posthumously, along with 'Thoroughbreds', Cory Finley's debut with Olivia Cooke and Anya Taylor-Joy, which was his last live action role.

'Star Trek Beyond' opened a month after he died with a dedication in the credits. On 'Trollhunters', Guillermo del Toro's Netflix series, he had recorded as far as the middle of the third season. Emile Hirsch, a friend since 'Alpha Dog', finished the character, and the show signed off in 2018 with Yelchin's name on screen.

A bronze statue was placed over his grave at Hollywood Forever in October 2017. His parents set up the Anton Yelchin Foundation, which supports young artists living with illness or disability and which donated a million dollars a year later to the USC hospital that had treated him for a decade.

Then in 2019 came 'Love, Antosha', Garret Price's documentary, produced by Drake Doremus and narrated by Nicolas Cage, assembled from the letters, tapes and photographs he left behind. Watched now, the filmography does not look like a finished career. It looks like one that had barely got going.