Ayfer Feray

Ayfer Feray — Biography

Ayfer Feray was a Yeşilçam actress who appeared in more than seventy films and gave as much effort to the stage as to the screen. Born in Bornova, she is remembered above all for strong supporting roles for women; Müjgan in Vesikalı Yarim and Sevda in Sakar Şakir are among her best-known parts. Her name lives on: the open-air stage in Bornova carries her name as the Ayfer Feray Open-Air Theatre and hosts music and dance events.

Her screen career began in the early 1950s; after early work such as Dracula in Istanbul (1952) she shared the best actress award at the first Turkish Film Festival in 1953 with Lale Oraloğlu and Nedret Güvenç. The Broken Record (1959), the French production L'Immortelle (1963), Murtaza (1965) and Four Women in the Harem (1965) carried her into the 1960s, and Acı Hayat (1973), Bir Yabancı (1974), Cemil (1975) and Sakar Şakir (1977) are among her later work.

On stage she appeared in plays such as Şahane Züğürtler and Yedi Kocalı Hürmüz and for a time was in the company of the Dormen Theatre. She co-founded the Çevre Theatre with Nisa Serezli; when that company broke up she founded a theatre under her own name, whose players included Osman Alyanak, Ferhan Şensoy, Şevket Altuğ, Kemal Sunal and Hadi Çaman. She was the elder sister of the actress Günfer Feray. Murathan Mungan once said in an interview that her place in Turkish cinema is not sufficiently recognised, remarking that had she been French she would be an icon by now. She died in Bodrum in July 1994.