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Assi Dayan

Assi Dayan was an Israeli actor, director, screenwriter and producer whose career moved freely between performance and filmmaking. Born in Nahalal on November 23, 1945, he became established as a film actor in 1967 with He Walked Through the Fields, Yossi Milo’s adaptation of Moshe Shamir’s novel and play. That same year, he appeared in Micha Shagrir’s Scouting Patrol, a drama about elite fighters pursuing the commander of a fedayeen squad. Dayan soon reached beyond Israeli cinema. In 1969, he co-starred with Anjelica Huston in John Huston’s medieval drama A Walk with Love and Death. His later acting work included Operation Thunderbolt, in which he played the deputy of Yoni Netanyahu, and a supporting role as a prisoner in Uri Barbash’s Beyond the Walls, a milestone in Israeli political cinema. In Eitan Green’s Into the Night, he played Giora Geter, a Tel Aviv pub owner whose life begins to collapse. His range was not limited to acting. Dayan wrote, produced and appeared as Banjo in Fifty-Fifty, part of the Israeli Bourekas Film genre, and directed 16 films. His directorial work included the 1976 military-reservist comedy Giv’at Halfon Eina Ona. In 1992, he wrote and directed Life According to Agfa, another Tel Aviv pub story, which was nominated for the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival and received an Honorable Mention. He later served on the festival’s jury in 1999. For television audiences, Dayan became closely associated with psychologist Reuven Dagan, the central character in BeTipul. The drama ran for two seasons on Israeli television, in 2005 and 2008, and was later adapted by HBO as In Treatment, with Gabriel Byrne in the lead role. By 2008, Dayan had appeared in around 50 films and television episodes—a substantial acting career within an even broader body of work as a writer and filmmaker. He died in 2014.