Göksel Kortay

Göksel Kortay — Biography

Göksel Kortay, born in Istanbul on 6 April 1939, is a versatile Turkish artist who has worked as an actress, dubbing voice, translator and lecturer. After graduating from Robert College she went to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship, earned a master's degree in acting and directing from Boston University and a diploma in English language and literature from the University of Michigan, and before returning home served as production supervisor on NBC's Say When and The Tonight Show.

Back in Istanbul from 1962 she made her stage debut at the Kenter Theatre as Mrs. Peachum in Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera, worked as a programme specialist at TRT's Istanbul radio station, directed radio drama and wrote and voiced a bank's children's programmes for seventeen years. In 1978 she took part in the tour of Nalınlar, among the first productions by a non-native English-speaking company to stage an English-language play in England, at London's Old Vic; she went on to translate more than thirty foreign plays into Turkish, appeared in some 150 stage productions and over twenty films, served twelve years as chair of TODER, and dubbed roles such as Miss Ellie in Dallas and Ursula in The Little Mermaid into Turkish.

She married actor Kerem Yılmazer in 1979 and lost him in the November 2003 Istanbul HSBC bombings. Her sixtieth year on stage was marked with a plaque at the 2024 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival.