Haluk Bilginer

Bilginer has run two careers side by side. In Britain he played Mehmet Osman on EastEnders during the 1980s, which is still what British viewers of that generation know him for. In Turkey he became one of the most recognisable actors on screen and stage, and the international work that followed has mostly cast him as the foreign professional standing at the edge of somebody else's story.

The strongest material is Turkish. Winter Sleep (2014) gives him a former actor turned hotel owner and newspaper columnist, a man who has an eloquent answer for everything and is wrong about nearly all of it, and Bilginer plays the vanity without once asking for sympathy; the film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Persona (2018) won him the International Emmy for Best Actor, built around a retired clerk whose medical diagnosis rearranges his sense of what he can still be held to.

The English-language credits are smaller and the films are weaker than he is: Dr. Sartain in Halloween (2018), Simonides in Ben-Hur (2016), Al Fayed in W.E. (2011), a Turkish operator in Buffalo Soldiers (2002), Aristotle Onassis in Maria (2024). Wikipedia notes that he often plays villains and unsympathetic characters, and the casting bears that out. What he actually offers is stillness and a very low centre of gravity, so directors reach for him whenever a scene needs someone who does not have to raise his voice to be the most dangerous person in it.