Afzal Rafiqov

Afzal Rafiqov was born on 21 August 1948 and grew up in Tashkent. He studied at the Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute and began his career as a stage actor.

His first theatre role was the Swiss in Friedrich Schiller's play The Robbers. He later played, among others, Aleksandrov in Leo Tolstoy's The Living Corpse; his most memorable stage parts were Iago in Othello and Lear in King Lear by William Shakespeare. He worked at the Hamza Theatre (today the Uzbek National Academic Drama Theatre).

In film he mostly took episodic and character parts: an episode in Yaratganga shukur (1997), Boybo'ri, Alpomish's father, in Alpomish, the head coach of the national football team in Faqat g'alaba (2007), an academic in Jannat qaydadir?; in the television series Ichkuyov he played Sergey.

Most of the public knows him as a master of dubbing: by his own account he has given Uzbek voices to more than a thousand screen characters. In 1992 he was one of four actors who dubbed the Indian series Mahabharata and so started Uzbek television dubbing. He voiced the elderly Tolstoy in the film Lev Tolstoy, Stalin in the film Victory and Usmon Yusupov in Hayot mazmuni, and read the narration of several documentaries, among them Armon about the Jadid movement. The press has informally called him the voice of Uzbekistan.

Rafiqov recorded an Uzbek audiobook of the Quran in the translation of Sheikh Abdulaziz Mansur; he says it is the most important work of his life. In 2024 the local company AIM Lab offered a way to restore his voice from archive recordings with a neural network.

Afzal Rafiqov is a People's Artist of Uzbekistan.