Rajab Adashev

Rajab Khalimovich Adashev was born on 15 July 1944 in the Urgut district of the Samarkand region. After school he worked for construction organisations and in his spare time acted at the Urgut people’s theatre.

In 1964 he joined the film actors’ studio of the Uzbekfilm film studio as an actor. Alongside this he studied, and in 1970 graduated from the acting faculty of the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute.

He has been on screen since the mid-1960s: he appeared in his first film in 1965 and over the following decades played many character and supporting parts, among them a jester (masxaraboz) in “The Khorezm Legend” (1978) and the militiaman Nuriyev in the children’s films about Akmal (1982–1983). In all he has appeared in more than sixty films.

One of his best-known performances is in “Abdulladzhan, or Dedicated to Steven Spielberg” (1991), for which he received a prize for best male role in 1993. In the 2000s he appeared in “Boys in the Sky”, “Khoja Nasreddin and Azrael” (in which he played Khoja Nasreddin), “Dil payvandi” and other films; Russian-language sources give “Udar” (2014) as his latest credit.

He was named Honoured Artist of Uzbekistan in 1997 and People’s Artist of Uzbekistan in 2010.