Semiramis Pekkan

Semiramis Pekkan — Biography

Semiramis Pekkan was born in Istanbul on 30 September 1948, the youngest child of a military officer and a homemaker, and is the sister of singer Ajda Pekkan. She entered cinema in 1964 with Tunç Başaran's Kara Memed, appeared in numerous films, and performed as a guest actress at the Meydan Stage in 1965-1966. Her music career, begun in 1968, brought her two Gold Record awards and three albums on the Columbia, Odeon and Kervan labels, before she stepped away from performing for decades after marrying.

At just fifteen she entered a brief 1963 marriage to Fikret Hakan that ended the same year; she later said it had come about somewhat by force. She married Milliyet newspaper owner Ercüment Karacan in 1978; their son Emir, born the following year, died of leukemia at five, and the marriage ended in 1986. In 1987 she married Gulu Lalvani, a British businessman of Indian descent, and had a second son, Zoran; the couple formally divorced in 1996 but stayed together another fifteen years. She survived the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami while on holiday in Phuket.

After a 54-year absence she returned to music in 2022 with a new recording of "Bana Yalan Söylediler," followed by the single "Unutamadım" in 2024. In 2026 she disclosed she was being treated for lung cancer, saying that August that the treatment was not yet finished.