Successful 1940s film actor whose exotic roles led fan magazines to dub him 'the Turkish Delight'
"Exotic" is the epithet most frequently used to describe the series of Technicolored escapist movies produced by Universal Pictures in the 1940s. These profitable films, often set in a North African or Arabian desert recreated on the studio backlot, featured the Dominican actor Maria Montez; Sabu, the Indian teenage boy; Jon Hall (son of a Swiss actor and a Tahitian princess); and Turhan Bey, who has died aged 90. Bey was often cast as wily, "foreign" villains, or romantic leads in thrillers and Arabian Nights fantasies, for which he was dubbed by fan magazines "the Turkish Delight".
Son of a Turkish diplomat father and a Czech industrialist mother, he was born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Sahultavy in Vienna, but emigrated to the Us with his mother and grandmother shortly before Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. In California,...
"Exotic" is the epithet most frequently used to describe the series of Technicolored escapist movies produced by Universal Pictures in the 1940s. These profitable films, often set in a North African or Arabian desert recreated on the studio backlot, featured the Dominican actor Maria Montez; Sabu, the Indian teenage boy; Jon Hall (son of a Swiss actor and a Tahitian princess); and Turhan Bey, who has died aged 90. Bey was often cast as wily, "foreign" villains, or romantic leads in thrillers and Arabian Nights fantasies, for which he was dubbed by fan magazines "the Turkish Delight".
Son of a Turkish diplomat father and a Czech industrialist mother, he was born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Sahultavy in Vienna, but emigrated to the Us with his mother and grandmother shortly before Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. In California,...
- 10/10/2012
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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