Feri Cansel

Feri Cansel — Biography

Born Feriha Tereyağoğlu on July 7, 1944, in Lefkoşa (Nicosia), Feri Cansel spent her youth in England, where she gained British citizenship and trained as a hairdresser in London. Settling in Turkey in 1967, she entered a marriage of convenience with the janitor of her Istanbul apartment building to obtain Turkish citizenship, and began performing as a stripper in nightclubs.

She made her film debut in a small role in Türker İnanoğlu's "Evlat Uğruna" and went on to become one of the leading faces of the erotic-cinema wave that swept Yeşilçam through the 1970s, appearing in more than 140 films and television productions, among them "Malkoçoğlu Cem Sultan," "Kan ve Tabanca," "Son Söz Benim," "Kanunsuz Sokak," "Belanın Kralı," "Kara Cellat," and "Dört Hergele."

On September 2, 1983, at age 39, she was killed in İzmir in what press accounts describe as a crime of passion, witnessed by her daughter, the actress Zümrüt Cansel — a tragic end that Turkish media continue to revisit decades later.