lit a candle 5h agowait, didn't even know who he was till today. sad anyway
Their story
Igor (Ihor) Oleksandrovych Tetruev, whose name is also written Tietruiev, was a Ukrainian actor of stage and screen and the deputy director and artistic director of the Kyiv Academic Puppet Theatre, the children's theatre known to Kyiv as the Castle on the Hill. He died on 8 November 2026, aged…
Igor (Ihor) Oleksandrovych Tetruev, whose name is also written Tietruiev, was a Ukrainian actor of stage and screen and the deputy director and artistic director of the Kyiv Academic Puppet Theatre, the children's theatre known to Kyiv as the Castle on the Hill. He died on 8 November 2026, aged 70, after months of treatment for an aggressive cancer.
Tietruiev came to the theatre by way of music. He graduated from the Lviv Conservatory as a performing musician and later trained at the State Academy of Managerial Personnel of Culture and Arts in Kyiv, where he qualified as a director of mass festivals and public celebrations. That combination of music and large scale staging served him well in a theatre where sound, rhythm and stage machinery matter as much as the spoken word.
He worked as an actor in theatre productions, often in leading roles, and appeared in Ukrainian television series, usually in supporting and episodic parts. Much of his working life was given to the Kyiv Academic Puppet Theatre, which plays in a fairy tale castle building on Volodymyrskyi Descent above the Dnipro. There he both performed and helped run the company as deputy director and artistic director, keeping its repertoire for children and teenagers alive, including through the years of full scale war. Productions such as Puss in Boots were part of the theatre's repertoire during his time there.
In the summer of 2026 it became known that he was seriously ill. In August the theatre launched a public appeal to raise money for his treatment. Medical documents shared at the time described a pleomorphic undifferentiated soft tissue sarcoma of the right thigh that had spread to the lungs; he had already undergone five courses of chemotherapy and a course of radiotherapy.
The theatre announced his death on 8 November. Colleagues described him as an integral part of the theatre family, a man who could always be relied on, and remembered his professionalism, humanity, kindness and devotion to the theatre. "Today our Castle has lost not just a colleague but a close person who was part of its life and history," the theatre wrote, sending condolences to his wife and family. A farewell was arranged at the theatre on 11 November 2026.
Biography adapted from Kyiv Academic Puppet Theatre statement; ZN.ua, TSN, Suspilne, Focus, 24 Kanal, Blik and Detector Media (8 and 9 November 2026).
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