Cüneyt Arkın

Who is Cüneyt Arkın?

Cüneyt Arkın is a Turkish film actor, director and producer. His name by birth is Fahrettin Cüreklibatur and his parents are descendants of a Crimean Tatar family.

He is not only a doctor of medicine, but also a renowned martial artist in seven different disciplines. Having starred in somewhere around 248 movies and also TV series, he is widely considered as one of the most prominent Turkish actors of all time. His movies shown abroad featured him as George Arkin. His films have ranged from well-received dramas to mockbusters, throughout his career.

His most notable movies are historical dramas, taking place during the first centuries of the Ottoman Empire and Anatolian Seljuks. Malkoçoğlu Cem Sultan and Battal Gaziare a few good example of these movies. While gaining success with such action-based films, he also took part in political films in the late 1970s, the most famous of those being The Adam Trilogy directed by Remzi Aydın Jöntürk.

He became known abroad for the movie Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, an extremely low-budget science fiction tentatively famous for featuring bootlegged scenes from Star Wars. Today, despite being a B movie, it has a cult following.

On the set, Arkin was well known to perform many incredible feats of his martial arts combat skills, like jumping on the trampolines and splitting papier-mâché boulders with his fists. In one incident, an extra was harmed when he got into an argument with him over the validity of his martial arts abilities. The two sparred but the fight ended quickly when Arkin kicked him hard in the kneecap of his left leg, instantly causing the leg to buckle in the opposite direction. Later on, Arkin felt very bad for what he has done and paid a visit to the man in the hospital to apologize.