He was born on June 5, 1954, the middle of three children of Mr. Tahsin, an insurance agent, and Mrs. Bedriye, a housewife.

He graduated from Izmir Turkish College. In his last year of high school, he joined the theater branch of his school and became a student of Cahit Gürkan.

He received his first award in the inter-high school theater competition organized by the newspaper Demokrat İzmir. Upon the invitation of Ragıp Haykır, the theater director on the jury, he worked as a guest actor at the Izmir State Theater.

He became famous in England during his teenage years. So much so that he was on the cover of a magazine in England with the title "the sexiest Turk".

In 1987, he came to Istanbul for the first time for the filming of Gecenin Öteki Yüzü (The Other Side of the Night) and on the set of this movie he met Zuhal Olcay, whom he would marry in 1992.

She lived between Istanbul and London for a while. After their marriage in 1992, the couple starred together in the "Indiana Jones" series in Hollywood and in Yavuz Özkan's "Two Women" in Turkey. In 1996, she starred in Tomris Giritlioğlu's "80th Step", followed by award-winning films such as "Istanbul Under My Wings", "Usta Beni Öldürsene", and "Masumiyet".

Wanting to continue his acting career on the theater stage, Haluk Bilginer founded the Theater Studio with Ahmet Levendoğlu and Zuhal Olcay in 1990. He played the lead roles in Theater Studio's plays Deception (Harold Pinter), Blood Brothers (Willy Russell), Take a Deep Breath (Ben Elton), Garbage (Turgay Nar), Hysteria (Terry Johnson) and Balcony (Jean Genet). In 1993, he presented Turkey's first reality show, Sıcağı Sıcaca. In order to own a theater hall, Bilginer and Olcay rented the Odeon Movie Theater and started construction, but a fire in 1996 wasted all their efforts; nevertheless, Bilginer and Olcay did not give up and left the troupe and founded Oyun Atölyesi in 1999 in a hall they rebuilt in Moda. In 2004, he separated from Zuhal Olcay, whom he married in 1992. She married pop music artist Aşkın Nur Yengi in 2006 and has a daughter named Nazlı from this marriage. In 2012, she divorced Aşkın Nur Yengi.