Jeyan Mahfi Ayral Tözüm

Jeyan Mahfi Ayral Tözüm — Biography

Jeyan Mahfi Ayral Tözüm is considered one of Yeşilçam cinema's best-known dubbing voices, lending her voice over her career to dozens of actresses such as Türkan Şoray, Filiz Akın, Fatma Girik, Hülya Koçyiğit, Belgin Doruk, Emel Sayın and Müjde Ar. She was born in Istanbul on 6 August 1928 and grew up as the daughter of stage and screen performer Necdet Mahfi Ayral, who picked her name from a Persian-derived word he found in a dictionary.

She began performing at three, cast by Muhsin Ertuğrul in his staging of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and went on to build a long stage career with the Istanbul City Theatres in productions including Mutlu Günler, Kökler and Kezban.

At ten, with the support of Mahmut Moralı and Samiye Hün, she voiced her first film role, and after 1954 she withdrew from film acting to concentrate on theatre and dubbing, also spending three years as a radio commercial announcer; even so, she kept returning intermittently to film and television work between 1939 and 2018. Her contribution was honoured with an achievement award at the Flying Broom festival in 2005.

Her husband was sound engineer Rauf Tözüm, who died in a traffic accident in 1978; the couple had one daughter, İris. Tözüm herself died on 29 October 2023 at the age of 95 at a retirement home where she had been living, and was buried at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.