Kevork Malikyan

Kevork Malikyan — Biography

Kevork Malikyan was born on 2 June 1943 to an Armenian family in Diyarbakır; because his father could not afford to educate him, he was sent at ten to Istanbul to be raised as a priest, first at the Karagözyan Orphanage and then at the Surp Haç Tıbrevank school. An English clergyman who was impressed by his performance in a school Shakespeare production helped him win a scholarship, and at twenty he moved to London to train at Rose Bruford College. He began appearing on British television in the late 1960s, made his film debut with The Man Who Haunted Himself in 1970, played the prosecutor in Midnight Express in 1978, and gained wide recognition as Kazim in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989. On television he played Max Papandrious in Mind Your Language, and he also spent years performing Shakespeare with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at Shakespeare's Globe. He went on to play Rady in the 2004 Flight of the Phoenix remake, Inspector Durmaz in Taken 2, Jethro in Exodus: Gods and Kings, and roles in the Armenian genocide dramas The Cut and The Promise. In 2011 he returned to Turkey after decades away to appear in the series Bir Ömür Yetmez, and from 2017 took the recurring role of Parvus in Payitaht: Abdülhamid. He married Maida Kupelian in 1965 and has a daughter and a son, Sevan, who is also an artist.