Dariush AsadZadeh

Dariush AsadZadeh — Biography

Over a working life of more than sixty years, the Iranian actor, playwright and director Dariush Asadzadeh moved from the stage to cinema and then television. He worked at Tehran's Nasr Theatre as an actor, writer and director, and held the first-class Order of Culture and Art of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

His family was from Tehran, but he was born in Kermanshah on 23 November 1923 because of his father's military posting, and he began acting at twenty. The 1960s and 1970s were his busiest period, with more than fifty films: he played Ahmad in Mr. Twentieth Century (1964) and Faramarz in Shookhi Nakon Delkhor Misham (1966), and Amoo Sabzi Foroosh (1967), Dokhtar-e Shaah-e Parian (1968) and The Shooter (1975) also belong to those years. In 1976 he left Iran and lived in the United States for ten years, returning in 1986.

After his return he acted in the series Samandun and Khaneh Sabz; later work included Two Halves of an Apple, Bon Voyage and the 2001 production The Lamp of Magic. His performance in Mohammad Shirvani's short film Dayereh was selected by the international critics at Cannes in 1999. In the 2010s he devoted his work to writing books on the history of theatre in Iran and the history of Tehran. He died in Tehran on 25 August 2019, aged 95.