Lâle Yavaş

Lâle Yavaş — Biography

Lâle Yavaş is an actress born in Switzerland to a family of Turkish origin, who works between Turkish and German-language screens. She made her name with a television film role and is still best known as the forensic doctor Rhea Singh in the German crime series Tatort. A Swiss and Turkish citizen, she has also won an Antalya Golden Orange award in Turkish cinema.

After studying theatre and music in Bern, she appeared in the early 2000s in Alles wird gut, I Was a Swiss Banker and Imbissness. Her breakthrough came in 2005 with the two-part ARD film Zeit der Wünsche, a love story set against labour migration from Turkey to Germany; it brought her warm reviews, the Adolf Grimme Prize and a new-talent award from Sat.1. The same year she began playing Rhea Singh in the Saarländischer Rundfunk episodes of Tatort. In 2006 she shared the lead with Peter Lohmeyer in Luxembourgish director Andy Bausch's Deepfrozen; The Last Train dates from the same year.

In the following years she worked on productions from Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria and the Czech Republic, with A Thousand Oceans and Evet, ich will! among the films of this period. In Turkey she appeared in the series Hatırla Sevgili and the atv series Kasaba, and won Best Supporting Actress at the 2012 Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival for Güzelliğin On Par'etmez. Her filmography runs up to the 2025 production Late Shift.