Sungun Babacan

Sungun Babacan — Biography

Sungun Babacan was a voice actor known in Turkey as the voice of Hollywood stars. He dubbed actors such as Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Tom Cruise and John Travolta, as well as Christian Bale's Batman, Christopher Reeve, cartoon characters such as Daffy Duck and Woody Woodpecker, and Kermit the Frog of Sesame Street; his voice was widely recognised. In 2006 he won Best Male Voice at the DNS Voice-over Awards.

He began in 1970 by doing voice work on TRT's radio programme Çocuk Saati and went on to programmes such as Çocuk Bahçesi and Arkası Yarın. A graduate of Hacettepe University, where he studied business administration, he turned to presenting when television broadcasting started and hosted Cumartesiden Cumartesiye in the mid-1980s; in 1982 he married a fellow stage performer. In film and series he voiced Batman in Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy, the lead in Forrest Gump and Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction, and he gave Lucian his voice in the Turkish version of League of Legends. He was the off-screen voice of Güle Güle Oturun and Evim Şahane and appeared as Seymen in the film Elixir (2014).

He also worked as a translator and dubbing director, directed the dubbing of the series Sevgi Bağları and the documentary Gelibolu, and taught dubbing at the Başkent Academy of Communication Sciences. After a long period of treatment for health problems, he died in Istanbul on 6 August 2022 at 63 and was buried in Burhaniye.