İdil Üner

İdil Üner — Biography

The films of Fatih Akın and Thomas Arslan brought recognition to İdil Üner, a German-Turkish artist active as an actress as well as a lyricist and director. Born on 1 August 1971 in Berlin's Schöneberg district, she took piano lessons for seventeen years from age six and two years of formal opera training, and graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts. She gained early stage experience in the youth chapter of Tiyatrom, a Turkish-language theatre group her father helped found.

She made her television debut in Tatort in 1993 and her film debut in a Rudolf Thome picture; she then appeared in Short Sharp Shock (Short Sharp Shock, 1998), Temmuz'da (In July, 2000) and Bella Martha (Mostly Martha, 2001). She wrote the lyrics to "Güneşim", the main song of In July; that same year she won Germany's Golden Short Film Award for a short she wrote and directed herself, sharing the lead with Fatih Akın, and in 2004 she sang a Schumann lied in the segment of Visions of Europe that Akın directed. She went on to appear in Akın's Duvara Karşı (Head-On, 2004) and Yaşamın Kıyısında (The Edge of Heaven, 2007), then in Zeit der Wünsche and Anlat İstanbul (2005), Evet, ich will! (2008) and Zweiohrküken (2009). Since 2008 she has been a regular cast member of the crime series Mordkommission Istanbul.