Haluk Bilginer

From the Ankara conservatory to Albert Square

Bilginer was born in İzmir on 5 June 1954 and finished at the Ankara State Conservatory in 1977, then went to London for postgraduate training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. What followed was unusual for a Turkish actor of his generation. Rather than returning to a state company, he stayed in Britain and took a job in a soap opera.

He first appeared as Mehmet Osman in EastEnders in June 1985 and remained until May 1989, when the character left for Cyprus. Four years of continuous British television made him better known in London than in Istanbul for a while, and left him with working English that later put him into international casts without the usual scaffolding of accent coaching. It is also the reason a sizeable slice of his audience in Britain still meets him through a role he finished nearly four decades ago.

Two theatres, one of which burned down

Back in Turkey he set about building a company instead of joining one. Tiyatro Stüdyosu, founded in 1990 with Zuhal Olcay, ran until fire destroyed its building; he returned to screen work in 1996 while the company had no home. The second attempt held. Oyun Atölyesi opened on 6 October 1999 with Steven Berkoff's Kvetch, again with Olcay, and since 2002 has worked out of its own hall in Moda, Kadıköy, on Dr Esat Işık Caddesi.

The repertoire there has stayed wide rather than safe. Currently active titles include Baba, Hayvan Çiftliği — the Animal Farm adaptation — Uzun Yol, Kel Diva, which is Ionesco's The Bald Soprano, Kızlar ve Oğlanlar and Kırlangıç, sitting alongside a back catalogue that has taken in Shakespeare, Molière, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and Sam Shepard. The Turkey-Germany film festival in Nuremberg, naming him its honorary-prize recipient for 2026, described the company as one of the strongest centres of independent theatre in the country; that assessment rests less on scale than on a quarter-century of continuous programming from a single mid-sized room south of the Bosphorus.

The screen work, and the role that won the Emmy

The cinema credits accumulated in parallel with the theatre. He took the Golden Orange for best supporting actor in 1997 for Masumiyet, and was in the cast of Winter Sleep, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2014. The decisive job came on television: Şahsiyet, in which he played a retired court clerk with Alzheimer's disease, won him best actor at the International Emmy Awards in 2019 — the first Turkish actor to take one.

Since then the work has been steady and increasingly cross-border. He appeared in The Turkish Detective for Paramount+ in 2023 and played Aristotle Onassis in Maria in 2024. On 14 November 2025 he opened in Yan Yana, directed by Mert Baykal and billed as the first Turkish film released in IMAX, playing Refik opposite Feyyaz Yiğit's Ferruh in a reworking of the French film Intouchables. Filming on his next screen job, the eight-part Disney+ series Gustav Maier'in Tuhaf Hikayesi, was reported complete on 11 May 2026; Umut Aral directed, Giray Altınok wrote and leads, Özge Özpirinçci co-stars, and the shoot ran between Istanbul and Budapest.

Baba, and the risk of following Anthony Hopkins

The current stage work is Baba, Oyun Atölyesi's production of Florian Zeller's Le Père, translated by Ezgi Coşkun and directed by Muharrem Özcan. Rehearsals were announced in August 2025, the production opened at the company's own hall on 2 October 2025, and a run at Zorlu PSM's Turkcell Platinum Stage followed on 7 October. Bilginer plays Erdil, an ageing father whose memory is coming apart; Özlem Zeynep Dinsel plays his daughter Azra, with Faruk Barman as Kaya, Mine Nur Şen as Defne, Ufuk Tevge and Ezgi Coşkun completing the ensemble. Kerem Çetinel designed the set, Emir Tatlı the lighting, Makbule Mercan the costumes, Gizem Erdem the movement and Tolga Çebi the music.

It is the second time he has built a performance around cognitive decline, after Şahsiyet, and the comparison that worried Turkish critics was not with his own earlier work but with Anthony Hopkins, who won an Oscar for the 2020 film of the same play. Tolga Yıldız, writing in November 2025, called the attempt a risky undertaking — a reinterpretation of a text already consumed on the global market and tightly bound to one screen performance. His essay reads the production less as a medical study than as a portrait of property, authority and inheritance stripped bare as the father's grip loosens.

The reception has settled on the mechanics of the staging rather than on pathos. Halk TV's piece of 29 November 2025 treated it as the portrait of a mind's collapse and placed it against the demographics of dementia, which it noted accounts for the large majority of cases through Alzheimer's. The construction is the point: scenes do not run in order, furniture and rooms shift between them, and the audience is kept as uncertain about the sequence of events as Erdil is. Şirin Sever, writing in Posta on 16 October 2025, described the continual alterations to the set as the device that transfers his disorientation across the footlights, and reported a woman beside her weeping audibly through the whole performance.

Where he stands in October 2026

At 72, Bilginer is working across three registers at once: a Disney+ fantasy series in post-production, a film still in circulation from last November, and a one-act play he is taking round the country himself. The Nuremberg honorary prize for 2026 formalises a status he has had in Turkey for years without much institutional acknowledgement abroad beyond the Emmy.

Twenty-one performance dates are currently on sale. The autumn run keeps Baba moving between Istanbul venues — the İnal Aydınoğlu cultural centre on the 15th, Caddebostan Kültür Merkezi on the 19th and 20th and again on 18 November, Zorlu PSM on the 26th and 27th — and then out to Eskişehir's Vehbi Koç congress centre on 2 November, the MEB Şura hall in Ankara on the 3rd, Kocaeli's congress centre on the 16th, Trakya University's Balkan congress centre in Edirne on the 23rd and the Ünal Baysan cultural centre in Çorlu on the 24th. The pattern is the one Oyun Atölyesi has used for years: a home season in Moda, a commercial Istanbul run, then regional halls at a rate of one or two a week.