Feriha Tevfik

Feriha Tevfik — Biography

Feriha Tevfik, granddaughter of former fish-market superintendent Mehmet Tevfik Bey, was born on 27 May 1910 in Istanbul. In the 1929 beauty pageant organized by the newspaper Cumhuriyet, the jury's first choice, a Miss Hicran, was disqualified for already being married, and a re-vote named Feriha Tevfik the winner, making her Turkey's first beauty queen. The following year she entered the contest again, reached the top twenty, and placed second at the deciding ball; she also represented Turkey at the 5th International Pageant of Pulchritude in Galveston, Texas.

After her pageant win she entered film with Muhsin Ertuğrul's Kaçakçılar, and went on to appear in Bir Millet Uyanıyor, Leblebici Horhor Ağa, Tosun Paşa and Bir Kavuk Devrildi. Also on Ertuğrul's encouragement she moved into theatre, taking part in the first Turkish staging of the play Yalova Otelleri and of Johann Strauss's operetta Die Fledermaus, before leaving the stage entirely in 1939. Married three times, she had one child, Atilla Germiyanoğlu, with her third husband, lawyer Sadi Rıza Dağ, who died in 1955. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1991 and was buried at Kadıköy İçerenköy Cemetery.