Iroda Aliyeva

Iroda Mirzaxonovna Aliyeva was born on 17 December 1929 in Tashkent. In 1951 she graduated from the Ostrovsky Theatre and Art Institute in Tashkent and that same year joined the company of the Hamza Uzbek State Drama Theatre.

She remained on that stage until 1972. Her first noticed part was Olya Ulyanova in I. Popov’s play “The Family”. She went on to play Nasiba in Abdulla Qahhor’s comedy “Aching Teeth”, Muqaddas in Odil Yoqubov’s “True Love”, Shirin in Nazim Hikmet’s play about a legendary love story, and Maryam in the production of Mohammed Dib’s “Algeria Is My Country”.

In the 1960s and 1970s she became one of the leading actresses of the Uzbek stage, playing Asal in an adaptation of a work by Chingiz Aitmatov and Nazokat in Uyghun’s “Parvona”. She was known chiefly for lyrical roles and was valued for her fluent stage diction and her subtle rendering of a heroine’s inner life.

In 1967 she was given the honorary title of People’s Artist of the Uzbek SSR.

From 1972 she worked as an actress at the Uzbekfilm studio. Outside Uzbekistan she is best remembered as the witch Almauz-Kampir in the children’s films “Akmal, the Dragon and the Princess” (1981) and “The New Adventures of Akmal” (1983); she also had small parts in “Odinozhdy odin”, “Pirates of the 20th Century” and “The Youth of a Genius”. Her soft, resonant voice made her a natural for radio plays, and she took part in the Uzbek-language dubbing of several hundred films.

Iroda Aliyeva died in Tashkent on 7 July 1989.