Cyrus Ebrahimzadeh

Cyrus Ebrahimzadeh (Persian: Sirous Ebrahimzadeh) was an Iranian actor, theatre director, voice artist, and translator whose career spanned more than six decades across stage, radio, television, and film. Born in Ardabil on 1 April 1937 (12 Farvardin 1316 in the Iranian calendar), he studied English language and literature at the University of Tehran before continuing theatre training in Britain and completing music studies at the University of Birmingham. Those years abroad shaped a performer equally at home with classical drama and popular Iranian cinema and television.

He began professional theatre work in the mid-1950s with Anahita Theatre alongside Mostafa Oskoui, directed his first stage production two years later, and appeared in plays including Othello, Jafar Khan Has Returned from Abroad, and Maliheh. From 1967 he worked extensively in Iranian radio and television. His screen debut came in Ali Hatami's Hassan Kachal (1970), the start of a long association with Hatami that continued in films such as Sattar Khan and Kamalolmolk. Later cinema credits included Sag Koshi, Mosaic, Mummy 3 (for which he won a best supporting actor prize at Iran's Cinema Celebration), Mosafere Rey, Hotel Carton, Max, and Orange Taxi.

On television he was widely recognised for the comedy series Cactus, directed by Mohammad Reza Honarmand and broadcast over three seasons between 1998 and 2004, alongside colleagues including Khosrow Shakibai. He continued directing for the stage into the 1990s; his last known theatre direction was Lazarus at Tehran's City Theatre complex in 1997. In September 2017 the 19th Cinema Celebration of Iran honoured him at Ivanshams Hall in Tehran.

Ebrahimzadeh died on 21 September 2026 (30 Shahrivar 1405) in England after a period of illness, aged 89. Fellow performer Ehteram Boroumand announced his death and offered condolences to the artistic community and to his wife, writer and poet Nahid Kabiri. Iranian and international Persian-language outlets remembered a cultured veteran whose English training, musical education, and long service across media left a distinctive mark on Iranian performing arts. He belonged to a generation of Iranian performers who moved fluently between the seriousness of classical theatre and the reach of mass broadcasting, and who treated radio drama and television comedy as crafts worthy of the same care as the stage. Younger actors and directors often cited his diction, his musical ear, and his habit of preparing roles with scholarly attention to text.

Even late in life he remained a reference point for colleagues who remembered both the Hatami-era films and the living-room familiarity of Cactus. Obituaries in Persian media stressed not only the length of his career but the breadth of it: actor, director, voice artist, and translator, trained in Tehran and in Britain, rooted in Ardabil, and finally mourned from England as well as from Iran.