NEW YORK — “I remember once I declared love,’’ the visitor told a room full of acting students at the Trinity School on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “It was spring. We were on a boulevard. She had on a lovely white coat. I wanted to start talking, and I suddenly felt that my top lip got stuck to my nose.’’

It was 1988, and the speaker was Oleg Tabakov, a leading actor and director in what was then still the Soviet Union. He was explaining to American students how to tap into the themes of love in Chekhov, and specifically “The Seagull.’’

“Everything is internal,’’ he told them. “Russian critics wrote of Hemingway that only 10 percent is on the surface; 90 percent is underwater. I think Chekhov is 99 percent underwater.’’

Mr. Tabakov, who was visiting under a program of the British American Drama Academy, would have certainly known. Not only had he acted in about 100 Russian films at that point, but he also was an actor and director at the Moscow Art Theater and led its theater school.

When he died in Moscow on March 12 at 82, among those expressing condolences was President Vladimir Putin, who, two years earlier, on the occasion of Mr. Tabakov’s 80th birthday, had called him “a man of exceptional talent and energy’’ and praised him for “uniting like-minded creative people around your captivating plans and ideas.’’

A memorial for him last week at the theater lasted hours as people lined up to walk past his coffin.

The theater, announcing his death on its website, said he had been ill for some time.

Mr. Tabakov was known in Russia for a wide range of film roles, racking up his first credit in 1957 and his last 60 years later.

One of his most acclaimed performances was as the title character in “Oblomov,’’ Nikita Mikhalkov’s version of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 novel, which played at film festivals internationally to considerable acclaim.

He also appeared in “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,’’ which won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1981. But in Russia children knew him best as the voice of a cat in “Three From Prostokvashino,’’ an animated film from 1978.

Mr. Tabakov’s biggest impact, though, was in the theater, as an actor, director, and teacher. He led several important theater companies during his long career, championing not only Chekhov and the other Russian classics but also new works and directors and plays from abroad.

Many actors who studied under him became well-known stars in Russia, and the theaters he ran drew healthy crowds.

Oleg Pavlovich Tabakov was born on Aug. 17, 1935, in Saratov, in what is now southwestern Russia. His father, Pavel, and mother, Maria Andreyevna Berezovskaya, were doctors.

According to his biography on the Moscow Art Theater website, his first public performance came when he was 7 in a skit for an amateur night in which he uttered the line, “Daddy, give me a gun!’’

As a teenager he began performing with a children’s theater group, and in 1953 he was accepted into the Moscow Art Theater School.

In 1956 he and several other young actors founded the Sovremennik Theater, concentrating on contemporary works and hoping to reenergize what they viewed as a moribund theatrical scene by employing the acting principles of Konstantin Stanislavski. He joined the troupe full time once he graduated in 1957, and in 1970 he became its director, holding that post for six years.

Mr. Tabakov began teaching in the mid-1970s, forming a theater company for his young actors and carving a performing space, the Tabakerka Theater, out of an old coal warehouse. He joined the Moscow Art Theater troupe in the early 1980s. In 1986, he took over leadership of its theater school, a post he held until 2000, when he became producing artistic director of the Chekhov Moscow Art Theater, one of two branches formed when the theater split in the 1980s.

As an educator, Mr. Tabakov would handpick promising students from throughout the country for his master classes. In a 2010 meeting with Putin, in which he was asking for additional financial support, he told the Russian leader matter-of-factly, “I suppose if you put together a national team, then half of the players will be mine.’’

Before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Tabakov actively worked to spread Russian theater to the West, staging productions in England, Denmark, Hungary, Germany, Finland, Austria, and the United States.

He also exported his teaching skills, forming partnerships with groups like the Juilliard School in New York and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

And he brought Western works to Russian audiences, sometimes with mixed results.

In 2015, the Russian Orthodox Church showed its displeasure with a production of Oscar Wilde’s “An Ideal Husband’’ by throwing a pig’s head with Mr. Tabakov’s name scrawled on it at the theater.

Mr. Tabakov’s marriage to the actress Lyudmilla Krylova ended in divorce in 1994. He leaves his second wife, the actress Marina Zudina; two sons, Pavel and Anton; two daughters, Alexandra and Maria; and several grandchildren.