Ilan Dar

Ilan Dar was born Ilan Belweiss on 30 January 1937 in Tel Aviv to parents who had come from Poland. He studied drama at the Herzliya Hebrew Gymnasium under teachers including Avraham Ninio, Shraga Friedman, and Menahem Golan, then joined the Ohel Theatre in 1958. Early credits there included Clive in Five Finger Exercise and roles in The Good Soldier Schweik and The Witch. In October 1961 he became one of the founding company actors at the new Haifa Theatre, building a classical and modern repertoire: Andorra, The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Simon), Mother Courage and Her Children, The Servant of Two Masters (Silvio), The Lady with the Dog, Three Sisters (Tuzenbach), Uncle Vanya (as Vanya), and Hanoch Levin's Schitz.

By 1977 he had joined the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv, where he would spend nearly two decades as a leading company member. Cameri roles ranged from comic and contemporary pieces to heavyweight drama: Job's Afflictions, Packing Suitcases (Monia), Everyone Wants to Live, Kastner (as Adolf Eichmann), Michael Kohlhaas, Mother Courage (as a priest), Agnon's Shira (Herbst, the part that brought him the Hanna Rovina Prize and the Tel Aviv Municipality Abraham Ben-Yosef Prize in 1989), Richard III (Buckingham), Angels in America (six roles), and more. He also translated for the Cameri, including A Man with Connections. In 1979 at Tzavta he opened the solo show Like a Bullet in the Head (כמו כדור בראש), which ran roughly 400 performances over about a decade and was later performed in English at the Edinburgh Festival.

After leaving the Cameri roster in 1995 he continued on Israel's major stages: Beit Lessin (including Shmuel Hasfari's Israeli trilogy Kiddush, Hametz, and Shivah; Autumn of His Days; Miriam Kainy's Cloud Break; Gadi Inbar's Last of Her Days; Hillel Mittelpunkt's Anda; Goren Agmon's Mom Is in Love; Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; Eshkol Nevo's The Third Floor; and J. T. Rogers's Oslo as Shimon Peres), Habima (Real Time; The Merry Widows Club), and Beersheba Theatre. As a director he staged Look Back in Anger and translated and directed Ha Ha at the Library Theatre.

Screen work began early, with Not a Word to Morgenstern (1963) and a long run of Israeli films, often as the urbane "Ashkenazi" type in popular burkas comedies with Ze'ev Revach and others (Only Today, The Thief Who Stole from a Thief Is Exempt, Let's Blow Up a Million, Graduation Wounds 80, and more), as well as Michal Bat-Adam's Boy Meets Girl (1982). Television made him a national household face. From 1983 to 1986 he played Ilan, the manipulative, penny-pinching insurance agent married to Tiki (Tiki Dayan), in Educational Television's Krovim Krovim, Israel's foundational Hebrew sitcom, written by B. Michael and Ephraim Sidon and directed by Yitzhak Shauli. Shot weekly before a live studio audience, the series about the extended family at Vitak 9 became a cultural touchstone; Dar later recalled a priest in Rome greeting him with the show's catchphrase "P-T-U-A-H" (Open!). He returned as Ilan for the 2005 reunion episode.

Later television and film kept him busy into his eighties: Judge Binyamin Halevi in Kastner Trial (1994); Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom in Bus 300 (1997); My First Sony (2003); Life Isn't Everything (2005); Amos in We Live Here Happily (2010-2012); The Dreamers (2011); North Star and The Eighties (2015); The Golden Girls, My Successful Sisters, and a cameo as himself in Tzomet Miller (2016); and 2019 features Love in Shleiks, Mossad (reprising Mossad chief Haim), and Good News, plus the series Dad Is Trying. Internationally he is known to art-house audiences for Raphael Nadjari's Tehilim (2007) and especially for Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon's The Farewell Party (Mita Tova, 2014), which won multiple Ophir Awards; Dar played retired veterinarian Daniel in the darkly comic ensemble about friends in assisted living confronting death with dignity, and he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Ophirs.

Honours accumulated late as well as early: an EMI (Israel Artists Association) tribute in 2012 for lifetime contribution to Israeli culture; Yakir Tel Aviv-Yafo (Worthy of the City) in 2018; and the Arik Einstein Prize for the Arts in January 2023. He lived in Tel Aviv with his wife, set and costume designer Ruth Dar; they have a daughter, Ariel. Colleagues after his death stressed the gap between his stingy sitcom persona and his private generosity. Yehoram Gaon called him family; Laura Rivlin remembered a delicate, precise comic timing she had known since her teens; Ephraim Sidon praised his wisdom, humor, and cynicism; Beit Lessin's Tzipi Pines placed him among the "generation of giants" of Israeli theatre; the Cameri and SHAAM issued formal memorial statements.

Dar died on 7 September 2026 in Tel Aviv-Yafo at age 89. The cause of death was not made public. Israeli media reported funeral arrangements at Kiryat Shaul. He is survived by Ruth and Ariel. For millions who grew up shouting "Open!" at Vitak 9, and for theatre audiences who watched him move from Brecht to Agnon to Oslo, Ilan Dar remains one of the clearest voices of Israeli stage and screen for more than sixty years.