Born in tehran in 1959, Iraj Tahmasb graduated in art from the fine arts college,and in stage direction from tehran university's college of Dramatic Arts.At the height of his popularity , Tahmasb taught puppet shows at tehran and Arts universities.
As a teenager, Tahmasb studied puppet shows, story writing and animation filmmaking at the institute for the Intellectual Devlopment of children and young Adults, thus preparing himself for the visual depiction of the innocent world of childhood which was to be his life long preoccupation.
His active professional career began in 1979 when he started stage performance and direction in theatrical productions intended for young audiences. inspired by the revolutionary atmospeare of the period, he staged a number of political and
controversial plays, including An Eye For An Eye, The Bear That Wanted to Remain aBear , (based on jorg Stainer's famous story),olduz and the crows ,(based on apopular story by iranian writer Samad Behrangi), A Pair Of Shoes For Zahara, and A Delicate story.
However, Tahmasb owes his Popularity to the T.V. series created and his greatest challenge in this period of his career was the creation of entertaining programs on a professional basis.To infuse the joyful element of intertainment into T.V. programs demanded professional courage as well as expert knowledge and technical mastery which Tahmasb possessed.
The result was the huge and sudden popularity Tahmasb`s T.v. puppet characters that were tenacious, talkative. and at times nervous and badtempered,but still loveable under all cricumstances, The best-known series he made include School for the Mice (puppet-master, 1983), When the Demon Goes out (puppet-master,1983), Suicide (actor, 1983), Dictation (Puppet master, 1983), and other T.V. series such as A House in Expectation (1987), Heads or Tails (1987), Puppet Doctor and Babies and Kolah Ghermezi and Pesar Khale . A part from the artistic characterization of the puppets, the series owe their great popularity to Tahmasb`s masterly gift for improvisation as a puppet-master.
Another prominent feature of Tahmasb`s puppet characters is their clearly recognizable Iranian identity and their topicality . It is these specific features of the two series Heads or Tail and Kolah Ghermezi and Pesar Khaleh (1993) which earned them great popularity and encouraged Tahmasb to make a cinematic version of Kolah Ghermezi and Pesar Khaleh that broke previous box office records and won the Best Film Award of the young jury at the 10th International Festival of Film and Video for children and Young Adults in Isfahan, although it clearly lacked the artistic features of the longer T.V. version.
A turningpoint in Tahmasb`s career was his collaboration with actor-director Hamid jebeli who was to become a constant friend of the Years to come. The outcome of the artistic duo`s successful colaboration included two T.V. seris -The Blood thirsty wolf, the crafty fox and Grandma`s House - in which Tahmasb (1985) and The Singer Cat (1991) - as well performance in the feature film The Bottem Line which was intended for adult viewers. The high point of Tahmasb`s collaboration with Jebeli was the highly popular T.V. series Kolah Ghermezi and Pesar Khale as well as its cinematic version the collaboration continued in other cinematic works written and directly by Tahmasb such as Once upon a Time (2000), The Patry Girl, Kolah Ghermezi and the cedar (2000). Their collaboration also included a feauture film written and dircted by Jebeli in Which Tahmasb performed. A longside of his work with Jebeli, Tahmasb also collaborated as puppet-master in the T.V. series The Fat and the thin.Tahmasb also performed in a number of films for adult audiences, including The Bottom Line (1985), Days Of Expectation (1987), The ascent (1987), The resistance
(1987), Grand Day(1988), Book of Love (1989), Under The city's Roofs(1989) Kowkab's Secret(1990), Dark Class (1990), and the almost forgotten T.V. series star-stodded Hotel.
Dissociated from the dream world if children and his constant collaborator-Jebeli-Tahmasb appears as a sombre performer, lacking the delicacy and richneses of his work on the children's T.V. series and films.