Sara Abdurakhmanovna Ishanturaeva

Born Oct. 26 (Nov. 8), 1911, in Beshbulak, Iangi-Kurgan Raion, Namangan Oblast. Soviet Uzbek actress. People’s Artist of the USSR (1951). Member of the CPSU since 1942.

In 1927, Ishanturaeva graduated from the Uzbek drama studio affiliated with the Moscow House of Culture. The studio formed the nucleus of the Khamza Uzbek Drama Theater in Tashkent. Among her best roles in plays by Uzbek playwrights are Dil’bar and Onakhon in Iashen’s Two Communists and Honor and Love and Dzhamilia in Khamza’s Landowner and Farmhand. Her outstanding roles in classical drama and contemporary Soviet and foreign plays include Katerina in Thunderstorm by Ostrovskii, Ophelia and Desdemona in Hamlet and Othello by Shakespeare, Jocasta in Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, Guli in Alisher Navoi by Uigun and Sultanov, Aini in Algeria, My Homeland! based on the novel by M. Dib, and Hurriiat in Flight by Uigun.

Ishanturaeva is one of the most important representatives of the dramatic art of Soviet Uzbekistan. Her acting is characterized by warmth, and a striving for verisimilitude and dramatically profound character portrayal. Ishanturaeva was a deputy to the second, third, and fourth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and she received the State Prize of the USSR in 1949. She has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, five other orders, and several medals.