80 years old | In his career, Eero Melasniemi has been both a bright Leffatähti and the TV series “Tollo”

Handsome the villa-like house colossus rises on top of the rock. The age of the wooden building is roughly two hundred years. Actor Eero Melasniemi urges further, and spouse Kristina Halkola makes coffee before going to his evening performance at Teatteri Jurka.

They have lived in their house for half a century. “It has been repaired here and there, but keeping the authentic look,” says the host, who also studied architecture.

Eero Melasniemi has always lived in Stadi – what did it look like in the 1940s and 1950s? “We lived in Etu-Töölö next to the Animal Museum, and the basic scenery was the train shaft to the harbor, the Tennis Palace, Kamppi with its coke and wood chip warehouses, the spurs and dösät, the gas station,” he describes. “My school Sykki was on Nervanderinkatu.”

Everything essential was nearby.

in the 1960’s The views of Melasniemi opened up. There was a theater school, central film roles and a political move towards the extreme left.

“It got stronger little by little,” says Melasniemi. “There was so much burning, like hidden memories of the civil war. There were pacifist currents and demands to organize society more fairly than just by the rights of the stronger.”

“A generation came out that didn’t seem to come out of the war anymore.”

Mikko Niskanen guided by Cone under the back -movie (1966) shocked you. It was Melasniemi’s breakthrough. The movie was new wave and deviated sharply from the usual formula. Sexuality was addressed directly.

Melasniemi, Halkola, Pekka Utiovuori and Kirsti Wallasvaara were in the lead roles, and the success was huge both with critics and at the box office.

“It was filmed at Puulavedi in Etelä Savo. Niskanen wanted improvisation, where four young people frolic like calves in a harrow. Mikko searched sensitively, he was like a truffle pig who knows how to find a truffle.”

Melasniemi was the narrow top of the movie actors, and the role Erkko Kivikosken In Untamed Brothers (1969) brought him the Jussi Award for Best Actor.

He liked it of filmmaking, but it stayed. The work at the Theater School took the man for up to 12 years – first as a department head, then as a rector in the institution that became the Theater Academy.

Melasniemi worked in the house through the hardest time of the cultural struggle. Was your alleged political hegemony in the theater world real – or even close to it?

“At the beginning of the 70s, the political struggle intensified, the right-wing set up Eva and the rest of their strategy against all democratic aspirations. Again, it also radicalizes the culture gang,” says Melasniemi. “At some points, point by point, there might have been majority situations, but you can’t talk about the hegemony of the theater, let alone the entire culture.”

“Or can it be claimed that some National Theater was pushing for concrete changes – was creating some new dangerous canon?”

Melasniemi is not ashamed of his ideas and actions.

“I don’t feel the need to change my coat. After all, there were of course too eager people, just like there have been too eager apologists,” he says. From his time as rector, he recalls that after all, mixed theater education could be gathered under the same roof at Teatterikorkeakoulu. That clarified a lot.

As an actor Melasniemi gained new popularity in the 1990s. TV satire series Gentlemen burst into huge viewership numbers when Matti Tuominen trade advisor Johannes Paukkuna and Melasniemi Raimo “Tollo” Koskivuona slurped politicians and other celebrities. The mood was raucous, and the people laughed.

“It was fun to do, and I got to know new interesting people.”

If Eero Melasniemi has indeed reduced his work, the core of the profession is clearly crystallized: “Theatre contains everything, because it is a synthesis of all the arts.”