Tanju Gürsu

Tanju Gürsu — Biography

Tanju Gürsu was born on 27 October 1938 in Trabzon's İskenderpaşa neighborhood, one of five children of Hayati and Mediha Gürsu, and an older brother of the director and voice actor Temel Gürsu. After finishing Trabzon High School he studied law at Istanbul University but left in his third year, and in 1962 he broke into film by winning a contest run by Ses magazine; that same year's Fosforlu Oyuna Gelmez was his first credit, and his real breakthrough came in 1964 with Halit Refiğ's Gurbet Kuşları.

Across a career of more than forty years he took roles in upwards of sixty films and series, frequently starring opposite Türkan Şoray, and branched into producing through Anıt Film, the company he co-founded with Özden Çelik, as well as writing eight screenplays and directing five films. He won Best Supporting Actor at the Antalya Golden Orange festival in 1988 for Kurtar Beni, a Best Actor prize there in 1997 for Köpekler Adası that proved controversial, and a Lifetime Achievement Award at the same festival in 2003. In 1978 he led more than 3,000 film industry workers on a march to Ankara against censorship, helped found the trade bodies SESAM, SODER and FİYAP, and served roughly a year as an administrative vice-president of Trabzonspor in 1998-99.

He married his cousin Ayla Gürsu, with whom he had two sons, Kerem and Emre, and in his last years battled Alzheimer's disease before he died in Istanbul of respiratory failure on 7 June 2016; after a funeral at Teşvikiye Mosque he was buried at Zincirlikuyu Cemetery.