Gdalya Besser is an Israeli theatre and film actor, and theatre director. Besser was born in Poland and at the age of 11, moved to Israel. In his youth, he studied Theatre at Tel Aviv University. Besser has directed a string of plays at virtually every repertoire theatre in Israel and between 1984 – 1988, he was Haifa Theatre’s Artistic Director – a position he shared with playwright, Joshua Sobol. Besser was also Haifa Theatre’s inhouse director – a position which allowed him to direct, among other things, the hit plays Soul of a Jew, and Ghetto – both written by Sobol. Later on, Besser became a founding member of the Herzliya Theatre Ensemble that was active between the years 2000 – 2013.
Highlights of his film credits include: Rockinghorse (Yaky Yosha, 1978), Transit (Daniel Wachsmann, 1980), Lo L’Shidur (‘not to be aired’) (Besser co-wrote the script with director Yeud Levanon, 1981), The Owl (Amnon Rubinstein, 1994), Dummy in a Circle (Aner Preminger, 1993), On the Edge (Amnon Rubinstein, 1994), Newland (Orna Ben-Dor Niv, 1994), Aya: Imagined Autobiography (Michal Bat-Adam, 1994), Rabin, the Last Day (Amos Gitai, 2015), and Outdoors (Asaf Saban, 2017).
