Biography
Elya Baskin is a Latvian-American character actor. Born Ilya Zalmanovich Baskin on 11 August 1950 in Riga, then in the Latvian SSR of the Soviet Union, he trained at Moscow's Theatre and Variety Arts College and won a Festival of Young Actors Award at the Moscow Comedy Theatre.
He immigrated to the United States in 1976. Baskin first gained notice for his role opposite Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson (1984) and is known for playing Mr. Ditkovitch in Spider-Man 2 (2004) and Spider-Man 3 (2007), as well as roles in The Name of the Rose (1986), Air Force One (1997), Angels & Demons (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011). He has appeared frequently as Eastern European characters in film and television.
