Fuad Kavur

Fuad Kavur' (born 1952 in Istanbul, Turkey) is a British opera and film director and producer.

Kavur came to London in 1963 when his uncle, Kemal N. Kavur, was the Turkish ambassador to the Court of St. James. He comes from a family of diplomats: one paternal uncle, Kemal N. Kavur, served as ambassador to Finland, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland; another, Sadi Kavur, was ambassador to Yugoslavia, Sweden and Portugal.^[1]

Fuad went to the Lycée Français Charles de Gaulle in London, and later studied International Relations at University College London. However, straight after university, Kavur went into arts. In 1973, he directed the British premiere of Gottfried von Einem's opera Der Prozeß, based on Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, at Bloomsbury Theatre, attended by the composer. Fuad then worked at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, as assistant to John Copley. From 1977, Fuad was an assistant to Peter Ustinov on opera productions at the Paris Opera, Hamburg State Opera, La Scala (Milan), the Mozarteum Salzburg and the Deutsche Oper Berlin. In 1978, Fuad directed the revival of Wagner's Ring Cycle at Washington's Seattle Opera in a production originally created by George London (1975).^[1]

In 1984 Fuad produced the feature film Memed, My Hawk (also known as The Lion and the Hawk), based on the novel Memed, My Hawk by the Turkish writer Yashar Kemal. It was directed by Peter Ustinov and starred Ustinov, Herbert Lom, Simon Dutton, Siobhán McKenna, Michael Elphick and Denis Quilley. Memed My Hawk had a royal premiere in London in the aid of UNICEF.^[2] However, both the filming and screening of Memed My Hawk was (and still is) banned in Turkey by the government as "communist propaganda".^[3] Fuad was a company director of Peter Ustinov Productions from 1982 to 1992.^[4] In 2001, he was the executive producer of Atatürk, a television documentary on Kemal Atatürk, narrated by Donald Sinden. Since 2014 Kavur has been preparing a feature film, Atatürk.^[5]

In July 2013, Kavur assembled a group of artists & writers, 30 in all, to sign an open letter addressed to the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, criticising his handling of the Gezi Park Protests in June, which left 8 people dead, 11 blinded and 8,000 injured. The signatories included Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, David Lynch, Sir Ben Kingsley, James Fox, Sir Tom Stoppard, Christopher Hampton, Lord Fellowes, Frederic Raphael, Edna O'Brien, Rachel Johnson, Christopher Shinn, Branko Lustig, Vilmos Zsigmond and Atatürk's biographer Andrew Mango. The letter was published as a full page advertisement in the London broadsheet, The Times, on 24 July 2013 and led to the Prime Minister Erdogan threatening to sue The Times and the signatories.^[3]

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