Tunç Başaran

Tunç Başaran — Biography

Şefik Tunç Başaran was born on 1 October 1938 in Istanbul, the son of carpenter Fikri Başaran and novelist Pakize Başaran and elder brother of stage actress Meriç Başaran. He grew up around the old cinemas of Şehzadebaşı, was nicknamed "John Ford" by his friend the writer İslam Çupi, and ran away from home at seventeen hoping to stow away for America, only to be caught in Adapazarı. While at the Faculty of Letters he spent four years assisting Memduh Ün and also worked under directors Lütfi Akad, Halit Refiğ, Atıf Yılmaz and Ertem Göreç. He began directing in 1964 with an Orhan Kemal adaptation, then left cinema for advertising work in the early 1970s as an erotic-film wave swept Yeşilçam, becoming a leading name in that field. Fifteen years later he returned to film, investing his savings in the self-written Biri ve Diğerleri (1987), which won a jury special prize in Antalya and best Turkish film honors in Istanbul. He followed it with Uçurtmayı Vurmasınlar, which became an Oscar pre-candidate, and Piano Piano Bacaksız, a similar success. He spent years working, on and off, on a documentary about Adnan Menderes; he married singer Füsun Önal and had a daughter, Zeynep Göksu. He received lifetime cinema honors from the Golden Orange in 2003 and the Sadri Alışık awards in 2011, and died of cancer in Istanbul on 18 December 2019, and was buried in Bandırma.