Dizi Planet
Tanju Gürsu

Tanju Gürsu

Film director · died at 77

Profile

Age at death77
Birth dateOctober 27, 1938
BirthplaceTrabzon
DiedJune 7, 2016
Place of deathIstanbul, Turkey
ProfessionFilm director, Actor, Screenwriter, Film producer
Zodiac signScorpio

In the rankings

Worked most often with

Filmography / Projects

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 Türkân 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.

Photos

Tanju Gürsu

Reactions

You can pick up to 3 reactions.

Their work through different eyes

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

Halit Refiğ's films of the 1960s are, in my view, the most valuable part of Tanju Gürsu's work: Murat, the son of a family moving from countryside to city in Gurbet Kuşları, and Rüştü in the late Ottoman household of Haremde Dört Kadın. Both films look at a moment of passage in Turkish society, one migration, the other the shaking of an old mansion order, and because Gürsu stands inside those stories his work becomes more than a set of performances.

Yeşilçam Nostalgic A viewer raised on the classics, looking for warm storytelling and strong acting.

Yeşilçam melodrama formulas often leave Tanju Gürsu little room to push back. In Yakılacak Kitap, Ömer, who resents the girl the family adopts, does what a story built on lost identity and supposed siblinghood needs of him, and no more. The depth Gürsu carries in the Refiğ films is missing here; villain parts of this kind sit below his calibre.

These are not reader reviews: they are short editorial takes on this person's screen work, written from different viewer perspectives with AI assistance. Reader comments are below.

Comments