Mahmut Tuncer

Mahmut Tuncer — Biography

A Turkish folk singer, composer, actor and television presenter as well as a former footballer, Mahmut Tuncer was born in Şanlıurfa on 5 May 1961 and is of Turkmen origin. He was born as the fifth child of a family from the Karakeçili tribe that had migrated from Malatya to Şanlıurfa.

In his youth he played football professionally for Urfaspor. His entry into music came by chance: after performing at a celebration of Urfa's liberation in 1979, he met the manager Mehmet Ali Yanıkoğlu, who took him to Ankara, where Belkıs Akkale taught him folk music. He won the TRT Radio examination in 1979 and released his first album, Uyandım Sabah ile, in 1980, going on to record an album almost every year. He has written around eighty compositions, some of which were performed by artists such as Zeki Müren and Muazzez Abacı.

From the 1980s onward he starred in roughly twenty feature films and hosted entertainment shows on television through the 1990s and 2000s. In 2024 he appeared in Bakkal Amca: Mahmut Tuncer, a film about his own life. He is married to Işıl Tuncer and has four children.