Feri Cansel

Feri Cansel — Biography

Feri Cansel (born Feriha Tereyağoğlu) is among the most remembered faces of the erotic-film wave that rose in Yeşilçam in the 1970s. Her loose, rough way of speaking on screen earned her the nickname "Kasımpaşalı Emmanuelle". The Cyprus-born actress died violently in 1983 at the age of 39, and the Turkish press still returns to her story today.

She spent her youth in Britain, trained as a hairdresser and worked at it in London for a time. She came to Turkey in 1967 and began performing striptease in nightclubs; that same year she made her first screen appearance in a small role in Evlat Uğruna. She is also said to have entered a marriage of convenience with a building caretaker to obtain Turkish citizenship. In her early years she turned up in ordinary Yeşilçam productions, mostly as flirtatious women: Turist Ömer Arabistan'da, Malkoçoğlu Cem Sultan, Kan ve Tabanca, Son Söz Benim, Belanın Kralı and Kanunsuz Sokak belong to this stretch. When the sex-film craze took hold in the mid-1970s she became one of the genre's indispensable players, appearing in films such as Dört Hergele and Kara Cellat. She is credited with roughly 140 films, the large majority of them erotic.

On 2 September 1983 she was killed by her partner at her home in Cihangir, Istanbul; her daughter, the actress Zümrüt Cansel, was present at the time.