Eşref Kolçak

Eşref Kolçak — Biography

Eşref Kolçak was born on 28 January 1927 in Moscow to a father from İspir's Gaziler village and a mother of Russian descent; the family emigrated to the İspir district of Erzurum when he was five or six. He moved to Istanbul in 1941 and left his studies at the Sultanahmet Institute of Fine Arts after his father's death, working as a carpenter, shoe repairer and newspaper seller while taking his first stage roles in plays staged by the People's Houses. He began dancing with the Atilla Revue in 1944, moved from extra work to acting in the 1947 film Fedakâr Ana alongside Cahide Sonku, and became a star after military service with the lead in Affet Beni Allahım in 1951. Through the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the most sought-after leading men of Turkish melodrama and adventure films, winning a best actor award in 1961 for Namus Uğruna. Over a career spanning more than seventy years he appeared in over two hundred productions, including Topal, Cemil, Silah Arkadaşları, Yıkılmayan Adam, Şeref Sözü, Ölüm Görevi, Unutulmayanlar, İdamlık and Berlin in Berlin, and won a Golden Orange for best supporting actor in 2000 for Güle Güle as well as a Sadri Alışık lifetime achievement honor in 1999. He lost his wife, Özcan Hanım, whom he had married in 1954, in 2010, and his son, pop singer Harun Kolçak, to cancer in 2017; Eşref Kolçak himself died in Bursa on 26 May 2019 at 92 of respiratory and multi-organ failure, and was buried, as he had wished, alongside his family.