Sühendan Yıldız

Sühendan Yıldız is a middle-aged actress whose public image as a screen villain gives her a sharp, knowing place in Kemal’s account of Istanbul’s film circles. At the Pelür Bar where Füsun Received an Acting Offer, she is not merely part of the hard-drinking crowd: she watches Füsun’s growing exposure to the industry, warns Kemal about the people around her, and finally asks what Füsun is doing in such a place at all.

Identity and Screen Reputation

Sühendan is introduced alongside Salih Sarılı as one of two new friends Kemal makes among the film crowd. She has earned fame by playing the evil woman, and celebrity magazines have made her familiar to the Turkish public as Conniving Sühendan. Her screen identity is sharply typecast: she is associated with the ordinary vixen rather than the more extreme figure of a true she-devil. The distance between a widely recognized screen persona and the practical, attentive woman Kemal encounters gives her presence an understated complexity.

A Working Actress in the Film Crowd

At the Pelür Bar where Füsun Received an Acting Offer, Sühendan dispenses caution while Füsun moves among the tables with Feridun, meeting people and making new acquaintances. Sühendan’s experience gives weight to her warnings about producers who present themselves as respectable but pursue young women with promises of film roles. She also cautions Kemal about Muzaffer Bey, Feridun’s former employer, who remains close to Feridun as he seeks technical help for his art film. According to Sühendan, Muzaffer Bey had recently wagered that he could seduce Feridun’s wife within a month. Her warnings make visible the risks behind the apparent opportunities Füsun is considering.

Sühendan’s own life in the bar is marked by work and waiting. As she talks with Kemal, she knits a red, yellow, and navy-blue pullover for her three-year-old grandson, following a pattern in Burda. When the men around her mock her for knitting there, she rebukes them for being idle while she waits for her next job. The pullover and the retort place domestic care beside the precariousness of an acting career: Sühendan remains a grandmother and a working performer in the same crowded room. Though generally courteous, she can also abandon ladylike restraint and answer with profanity when circumstances call for it.

Warnings About Füsun

Sühendan’s concern is directed not only at the producers but at Kemal’s role in bringing Füsun into their company. After seeing Kemal alarmed by the vulgar behavior of the film crowd, Salih Sarılı remarks that he would not bring a beautiful female relative to such bars if he were a rich businessman hoping she would become a star. Sühendan makes a related point more obliquely: Füsun is a sweet, good, lovely young woman, at an age when she could become a very good mother, like Sühendan’s own daughter. She then asks what they are doing there. The comment shifts attention from Füsun’s prospects as a performer to the larger question of whether this environment is suitable for her.

Narrative Role

Through Kemal’s recollection, Sühendan serves as an experienced witness to the film world that Füsun is trying to enter. Her warnings expose the gap between the promise of roles and the conduct of the people offering them, while her knitting makes her labor and family life visible amid the bar’s drinkers and aspiring filmmakers. Kemal hears her concern, but his own expectation that he will marry Füsun soon shapes his response: he begins to think she should be made an actress without becoming too involved with such people. Sühendan’s questions therefore anticipate the practical and moral anxieties that lead Kemal, Feridun, and Füsun to consider moving their joint film venture from the bar into an office.