Returning to Hollywood after a 40-year hiatus, he made several guest appearances in 1990s television series including SeaQuest DSV, Murder, She Wrote and Babylon 5 as well as a number of films.

Bey was born Turhan Gilbert Selahattin Şahultavi in Vienna, Austria, on 30 March 1922, as the son of a Turkish diplomat and a Czechoslovakian-Jewish mother.

[3][4][5] After the Anschluss annexing Austria to Nazi Germany and his parents' divorce, he and his mother immigrated to the United States in October 1938, initially settling in New Hampshire.

[6] Bey appeared in a number of films in small roles, usually playing someone sinister: Shadows on the Stairs (1941), and Footsteps in the Dark (1941) with Errol Flynn.

Bey moved to Universal, where he had small roles in Raiders of the Desert (1941) (which had an early appearance from Maria Montez), and Burma Convoy (1941).

Warner Bros borrowed Bey to play a small role in Background to Danger (1943), a George Raft movie set in Turkey.

[15] When Sabu enlisted in the army, Bey took his place in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), a Technicolor spectacular with Montez and Hall directed by Lubin.

Bey was meant to be reunited with Montez and Hall in Gypsy Wildcat (1944) when MGM borrowed him to play a Chinese in Dragon Seed (1944) starring Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston.

"[19] Back at Universal, Bey was the romantic male lead in the big-budget The Climax (1944) with Boris Karloff and Susanna Foster, an unsuccessful attempt to duplicate the success of Phantom of the Opera (1943).

The Wanger film was Night in Paradise (1946), with Bey playing Aesop opposite Merle Oberon for director Arthur Lubin.

That changed when Turkey declared war on Germany in February 1945, and in June, Bey was inducted into the army at Fort MacArthur.

[27] He served at Santa Ana Army Air Base for a time[28] and performed in a version of Carmen at Fort Roberts.

He returned to Hollywood and was cast in Sam Katzman's Prisoners of the Casbah (1953), billed after Gloria Grahame and Cesar Romero.

[37][30] He announced he had set up his own production company, Metropolitan Pictures, and wanted to produce but not star in Dikov, a film about a boy and his bird.

Bey was in the Fred Olen Ray thriller Possessed by the Night (1994), the drama Healer (1994), The Skateboard Kid 2 (1995), and Grid Runners (1995).

Maxwell Smart claims that after appearing in an unspecified movie involving mummies, Bey was cursed, and his career never recovered.

[citation needed] In a 1980 episode of Alice titled "Dog Day Evening", Vera uses Turhan Bey's name in a rhyming game.

In a season three episode of M*A*S*H, titled "Bombed," Henry Blake, after losing the first good toothbrush he's received in six months, laments that he had teeth like Turhan Bey while using it.