Nader Bayat: An Actor Remembered
"Stranger in the World" (circa 1962)
Not only because he was my father, but because he was a true lover of film and theatre. He didn’t need to be actively acting to be involved. He didn’t watch films, he devoured them and was able to even recognize the actors involved in the shortest of scenes. He loved his chosen craft in the real sense of the word.
Nader Bayat studied acting in Germany and appeared as Napoleon Bonaparte in a Kurt Fleischer feature film alongside Vera Chekova before returning to his native Tehran and join the Anahita School of Acting established by the pioneers of “method acting” in the early 1960s. The Oskui couple had studied under the guidance of Yuri Zavadsky, a direct student of Yevgeny Vakhtangov, himself a favorite of Stanislavsky at the prestigious Moscow state Institute of Performing Arts.
What Anahita Theatre offered students who underwent the two-year training was the opportunity to become repertory actors. They toured, to great acclaim, such classics as Shakespeare’s Othello, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.
At the age of 25, Nader Bayat made his directorial debut with his own screenplay about a young deaf artist living by the Caspian sea who falls in love with the unattainable girl due to their social class divide. I was a Stranger in the World was considered an art film at a time when "film Farsi" (superficially-themed films that often included cabaret scenes of song and dance as well as honor fights) was the way to safisfy box offices.
In addition to the screenplay, which he wrote in his early 20s, Nader essentially undertood any and all tasks involved in a feature film production including dubbing 9 different voices in post-production, editing and producing (supported by his family).
Nader Bayat was fluent in German, English, Spanish, Azeri Turkish and Persian.
Nader Bayat in: "dar donya biganeh budam" (1962) with Azar Hekmat Shoar, Ali Azad, Nadereh, Vala Magham, Moghbeli and Akbar Hashemi.