Ferdi Akarnur

Samsun, a motor diploma, and a chamber theatre

Ahmet Ferdi Akarnur was born in Samsun on 3 September 1945. He went to Fazıl Kadı primary school and then Namık Kemal middle school, which is where theatre found him: his first part was in a one-act play by Reşat Nuri Güntekin, İstiklal. His formal training was not in acting at all — he took the motor division at the Art Institute, a mechanic's qualification.

The year everything turned was 1966. Akarnur helped found the Samsun Chamber Theatre alongside the local Teachers' Association, and in the same year left for Istanbul, where he took his first professional engagement at the Orhan Erçin Theatre. Turkish reference listings also record a best-actor prize that year for his performance in Deli Kaymakam, which places the award at the very start of a working life rather than at the end of one.

A company actor's map of the Turkish stage

What follows in Akarnur's biography is not a career built on single star vehicles but a route through the private companies that carried commercial theatre in Turkey for half a century. After Orhan Erçin came four years at the Avni Dilligil Theatre. Speaking to the newspaper BirGün on 13 February 2018, Akarnur put the apprenticeship at four and a half years under Dilligil and described his own position flatly: he lived with theatre and made his living from theatre, and had never done another job.

From there the list runs through Ankara Oyuncuları and the Lale Oraloğlu Theatre, then the Levent Kırca Theatre from 1980 and the Yasemin Yalçın Theatre from 1992 — two of the best-known comedy houses of their respective decades. Since 2009 his stage work has been associated with Temaşa Gösteri Sanatları. The pattern is consistent: ensemble comedy, written for touring, played to general audiences rather than festival programmers.

Kemal Sunal's films and the undersecretary who would not leave

Akarnur's screen work began in 1977 with Madam Dila and expanded through the 1980s, much of it in the orbit of Kemal Sunal, Turkish cinema's dominant comic lead of the period. Their shared titles include Çöpçüler Kralı, Yakışıklı, Öğretmen, İnatçı and Uyanık Gazeteci. Film reference databases now credit him with more than seventy productions across cinema and television, with comedy accounting for roughly seven in ten of them.

Television gave him the role that made his face public property. As Müsteşar Kemal — a retired undersecretary — in the sitcom Çocuklar Duymasın, he appeared across the show's three broadcast runs, from 2002 to 2004, 2010 to 2014 and 2017 to 2019. In the 2018 interview he treated the recognition that came with it as the audience's affection for the character rather than for himself. Awards followed the series: a Golden Butterfly for best actor in 2015, a best supporting actor prize from the Local and Regional Television Union in 2014, and a most-liked supporting actor award from İstanbul Gelişim University's media awards in 2015.

He has kept working on camera into his eighties. Recent credits include Müstakbel Damat in 2022, Zübeyde: Analar ve Oğullar and Hayatımın Neşesi in 2023, C Takımı and Hükümet Bey in 2024, and Kuzgun and Fahrinayt in 2025.

Counting the seasons, and counting what was lost

Akarnur is unusual among Turkish actors of his generation in that the stage, not the screen, remains the through-line. In the 2024–25 season he marked his sixtieth year in the profession with Aşk Eski Bir Yalan, a one-act comedy written and directed by Burçhan Göze for Temaşa Gösteri Sanatları, which opened on 1 November 2024. He played it with Yelda Alp and Cengiz Güleryüz, on a set by Sırrı Topraktepe, with A. Kaan Başkıran producing and Özge Günay Göze as assistant director. The premise is a matchmaker called Po trying to marry off his ten-thousandth couple before he retires, and finding the job wrecked by a hopeless romantic and a woman with no use for men.

He is also candid about the industry that shaped him having contracted. In 2018 he pointed out that Istanbul had supported thirty-seven private theatres in the 1970s, playing to full houses, and that the number had fallen to a handful; the working week had gone from six performances to two. His remedy was not nostalgia but recruitment — he argued that children who grow up without theatre simply migrate to virtual worlds, and that building the habit early is the only way the audience replaces itself.

Soytarılar: two clowns nobody calls any more

The current production, Soytarılar, was written and directed by Serkan Budak, with Demet Altuner as assistant director, for Batı Performans Sanatları Prodüksiyon. Akarnur performs it with Selahattin Taşdöğen, Nur Yoldaş and Buse Demirel. Sets are by Ramazan Kanur and Gökhan Kanur, lighting by Mustafa Algül and costumes by Nuray Saraçoğlu.

The play concerns Suat and Sami, two clowns who were once famous and are now neither, living in a worn-out house and waiting for work that does not come. An unexpected visitor interrupts the stasis. Budak's stated subject is loneliness treated as a social condition rather than a private mood — the slow disappearance of people who used to be looked at — and the register moves between comedy and something bleaker. For an actor in his sixty-first season, playing a performer who can no longer get on stage is material with an obvious second edge, and the production does not pretend otherwise.

Soytarılar opened in İzmir on 8 July 2026 at the Bornova Ayfer Feray open-air theatre, then played Urladam Ağaçlı Sahne on 9 July and the Bostanlı Suat Taşer hall on 10 July.

Where he stands in September 2026

Akarnur turned 81 on 3 September 2026 and is in the middle of a working year, not a valedictory one. The Soytarılar autumn tour runs from 9 October in İzmir to 22 November in Aksaray, taking in Ankara, Gaziantep, Mersin, Denizli, Muğla, Bodrum, Fethiye, Marmaris, Bandırma, Bartın, Karabük, Kastamonu, Zonguldak, Nevşehir, İskenderun and more — sixteen cities, mostly municipal culture centres, with only two Istanbul dates in the run.

That itinerary is the honest picture of where a veteran commercial actor works in Turkey now: not a long Istanbul residency but a circuit of regional halls, one night each, tickets from roughly 800 to 1,350 lira depending on the venue. Published criticism of the production is thin — ticketing platforms carry a rating of 4 out of 5 from a single logged review, and regional press coverage has so far been listings and previews rather than notices. The evidence of demand is the calendar, which keeps filling.