Mohamad Mochtar
Indonesian actor (1918-1981)

Mohamad Mochtar (1 July 1918 – 1 December 1981), usually credited as Moh Mochtar, was an Indonesian film actor active from 1939 until his death in 1981.
Biography
Mochtar was born in Cianjur, West Java, Dutch East Indies, on 1 July 1918. He dropped out of school in the first year of Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs (junior high school). Sometime afterwards he was signed by the theatre company Miss Riboet's Orion for their football team; he had been a fan of the game since his youth. Mochtar was later asked to perform on stage. By the late 1930s he was skilled at the traditional martial art of silat.
In 1939 Mochtar met The Teng Chun, owner and director of Java Industrial Film (JIF), while at a barbershop. Mochtar was signed to play opposite Hadidjah in JIF's upcoming film, Alang-Alang, as two lovers who confront bandits in a jungle. The Teng Chun intended Mohamad Mochtar and Hadidjah to become competitors to Roekiah and Rd Mochtar, who had become a popular on-screen couple owing to their success in Terang Boelan (1937) and Fatima (1938). Alang-Alang was successful, and Mohamad Mochtar was dubbed the "Tarzan of Java".
“Mohamad Mochtar” enters the record as indonesian actor (1918-1981). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mohamad, Mochtar and Indonesian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mohamad Mochtar” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mohamad, Mochtar and Indonesian provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 29, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q15621661. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1981, 1939 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mohamad Mochtar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.