Sagdi Tabibullayev

Sagdi (Sa'dixon) Tabibullayev was born in 1906 in Bukhara. He studied at the Bukhara Pedagogical College and took an active part in an amateur drama circle there.

From 1924 to 1927 he trained at the Uzbek Drama Studio in Moscow. In 1927 he joined the troupe of the Samarkand theatre, which later became the Hamza Theatre, and stayed with it almost all his life, until 1992.

The Soviet Theatre Encyclopedia of 1967 describes him as a vivid character actor of wide range. On stage he played Yakhshibay in Komil Yashin's “Honour and Love” (1936), Mansur in “Alisher Navoi” by Uyghun and Izzat Sultan, Yarovoy and Elisatov in “Love Yarovaya” and Giyas Khoja in “Hamza”; in 1940, in Pogodin's “The Man with the Gun”, he was the first to play Lenin on the Uzbek stage. He was equally known for small roles, such as Telegin in Chekhov's “Uncle Vanya”, Gibner in “The Government Inspector” and Sukhsurov in Abdulla Qahhor's “Voice from the Coffin”.

One of his best-known parts was the Fool in Shakespeare's “King Lear” (1966), for which he received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR in 1967. For Mansur in “Alisher Navoi” he was awarded the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1949.

From the 1940s he also appeared in films, mostly in supporting and character roles: “Tahir and Zuhra” (1945), “Alisher Navoi” (1947, Jami), “The Rich Landowner and the Farmhand” (1953, the village head Elligbashi), “The Fall of the Emirate” (1955), “The Mischievous Boy” (1977, Safar-ata) and many others.

He was a People's Artist of the Uzbek SSR (1949) and received the Order of Lenin (1967), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1959) and the Badge of Honour (1951). Sagdi Tabibullayev died in Tashkent in 1992.