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Successful 1940s film actor whose exotic roles led fan magazines to dub him 'the Turkish Delight'

"Exotic" is the epithet most frequently used to describe the series of Technicolored escapist movies produced by Universal Pictures in the 1940s. These profitable films, often set in a North African or Arabian desert recreated on the studio backlot, featured the Dominican actor Maria Montez; Sabu, the Indian teenage boy; Jon Hall (son of a Swiss actor and a Tahitian princess); and Turhan Bey, who has died aged 90. Bey was often cast as wily, "foreign" villains, or romantic leads in thrillers and Arabian Nights fantasies, for which he was dubbed by fan magazines "the Turkish Delight".

Son of a Turkish diplomat father and a Czech industrialist mother, he was born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Sahultavy in Vienna, but emigrated to the Us with his mother and grandmother shortly before Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938. In California,...

A-Lad-In His Lamp was a 1948 Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny cartoon that had showed an aerial map depicting two bodies of water named Veronica Lake and Turhan Bay. This probably seemed clever 64 years ago but later generations of kids catching it on TV most likely missed the joke. Born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Sahultavy in Austria in 1922, Turhan Bey was dubbed “The Turkish Delight” by his fans and the movie mags. He costarred with exotic Dominican-born actress Maria Montez in seven films including Ali Baba And The Forty Thieves and Sudan. His is an especially sad passing for monster kids as Bey was just about the last living link to The Golden Age of Universal’s Horror films, having starred in The Mad Ghoul, Captive Wild Woman, and opposite Lon Chaney in The Mummy’S Tomb. Bey left Hollywood in 1949 to return to his native Vienna, working as a photographer. However, he...