Müjde Ar

Müjde Ar — Biography

Daughter of the celebrated lyricist Aysel Gürel and journalist Vedat Ebrem, and the older sister of actress Mehtap Ar, Müjde Ar became a figure who reshaped how women were portrayed on the Turkish screen. She first performed at eight with the Oraloğlu theatre troupe, later dropping out of a German language and literature master's program at Istanbul University at twenty; playing Bihter in Halit Refiğ's 1975 television adaptation of Aşk-ı Memnu made her an overnight star and led her into film. After years in commercial genre pictures, she took on more ambitious parts from 1980 with Atıf Yılmaz's Deli Kan and, the following year, Ömer Kavur's Ah Güzel İstanbul, before Yavuz Turgul's Fahriye Abla (1984) cemented her image as the era's boldest female lead. She went on to headline Göl, Şalvar Davası, Adı Vasfiye, Kupa Kızı, Teyzem, Asılacak Kadın and Arabesk, later playing Tina in Ağır Roman (1997) and, in 2018, joining the International Emmy-winning series Şahsiyet. She has won the Antalya Golden Orange best actress award three times, plus its lifetime achievement honour. Briefly married to director Samim Değer at twenty-one and later partnered for years with composer Attila Özdemiroğlu, she has been married to politician Ercan Karakaş since 2005, and in 2020 founded a noise-pollution advocacy group in Bodrum.