Georgy Zhzhenov, a prominent Russian film and theater actor who survived torture and years of hard labor in the Stalinist Gulag on trumped-up charges of spying for America, died Thursday, according to his theater troupe. He was 90.

Zhzhenov died in a Moscow hospital, where he was staying after breaking his hip last month, said Tatiana Gorina, a spokeswoman for the Mossoviet Theater.

Zhzhenov first starred in a movie in 1932 when he was 17, quickly shooting to prominence, but his film career came to an abrupt halt in 1938, when he was arrested by the NKVD secret police, a KGB predecessor, and sentenced to five years in prison camps on charges of being an American spy.

Zhzhenov said in interviews with Russian media that his arrest followed a chance meeting with an American naval attache on a Trans-Siberian train.

“They kept me standing for seven days during the interrogations,” he recalled in a newspaper interview published earlier this year. “When I would fall, they would lift me by the hair and force me to keep standing. That was how they got the answers they needed.”

He recalled telling his wife, also an actress, during their last meeting in prison before he was sent to the Gulag: “Don’t wait for me; it’s 90% probable that I’m going to die.”

He said that after he returned after serving his original five-year sentence and two more years added on later, he and his wife separated.

In 1949, Zhzhenov was arrested again and sentenced to internal exile in Siberia. He was allowed to return from exile only after his rehabilitation in 1955 and came back to work in the film industry.

Zhzhenov starred in numerous Soviet movies, in roles ranging from that of a Western spy to a KGB general. It was the role of a Western spy who repents and turns over to the Soviet side that brought Zhzhenov nationwide acclaim and kudos from his former tormentors in the KGB.

He said in an interview that when he visited the KGB to receive a prize for the role, he asked the agency officials: “Will you at least give me a sunny cell when you come to arrest me again?” Officials didn’t appreciate the joke, he said.

Zhzhenov received the highest Soviet award for actors, the title of the People’s Artist of the Soviet Union, in 1980, and won numerous other prizes.

President Putin, a KGB veteran, met with Zhzhenov in March when he turned 90 and lavished him with praise.

Zhzhenov continued to work in Moscow’s Mossoviet Theater, where he last appeared onstage in September, said Ms. Gorina, the theater’s spokeswoman.