Svetlana Norbayeva

Svetlana (Oydin) Norbayeva was born on 5 March 1944 in Tashkent into the family of an actor of the Hamza Theatre. She is also known as Oydin Norboyeva. In 1964 she graduated from the acting department of the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute.

While still a student, in 1963, she joined the troupe of the Hamza Uzbek State Academic Drama Theatre and worked there until 1990. Sources credit her with more than thirty roles on its stage, among them Aqiqa in S. Azimov's «Bloody Mirage», Cordelia in «King Lear» and Desdemona in «Othello» by Shakespeare, Mary in Schiller's «Mary Stuart» and Antigone in Sophocles' play. She later worked with Mark Weil's Ilkhom Theatre, and from 1990 with the Academic Russian Drama Theatre of Uzbekistan.

Her film debut was the role of Suraya in a film by Uchkun Nazarov (1964); for it she received the diploma «For a Successful Debut» at the film festival of the Central Asian republics and Kazakhstan in 1965. For the role of Nadia in «Don't Shoot on the 26th» she won the Lenin Komsomol Prize of Uzbekistan. At the Tajikfilm studio she played Tahmina in «The Legend of Rustam» and «Rustam and Suhrab».

She also regularly took part in dubbing films into Uzbek. In the late 1970s she was named People's Artist of the Uzbek SSR, and in 1989 she became a laureate of the State Prize of Uzbekistan.

She has lived in Israel since 1999. Her later work includes Grandmother Nina in the series «The Gordin Cell» (2012) and Veronika Illarionovna in the series «Thin Ice» (2016).