Soad Hosny

Soad Muhammad Kamal Hosny was born in Bulaq district in Cairo, Egypt. She was born to Egyptian parents according to her birth certificate.[5] Her father was an Egyptian calligrapher named Mohammad Hosni,[6] and his second wife, Soad's mother, was an Egyptian woman called Gawhara.[7][8][9][10] She also had eight half-siblings from her father's first marriage. Her parents divorced and her mother remarried, to an Egyptian man, Abdul Monem Hafeez, with whom she had six more children, thus giving Soad and her two sisters no fewer than 14 half-siblings.[7] Her father's household was known as "the artists' home" because leading artists from across the Arab world regularly visited Hosni's home in Cairo for tuition and social interaction with the master calligrapher. Her father, whose artistic output included the production of frames for the silent movies and book covers, was well known across the artistic community. A number of his children became performance artists. Soad's half-sister, Najat, was an actress and singer.[8] Her half-brother, Ezz Eddin Hosni (1927–2013), was a music composer and taught both Soad and Najat music and singing. Another sibling, Sami Hosni became a cello player, jewellery designer and also calligrapher.[11] while yet another brother, Farooq, was a painter and his daughter Samira was also an actress.[12]

Soad Hosny with Salah Zulfikar in Appointment at the Tower (1962)

At the age of three, she began her career when she sang in the popular children's TV program, Papa Sharo. Her work included a wide range of genres – from light comedies and romances through to political satire.[13] Her film debut was in Hasan and Naeima (1959).[14] She is credited with acting in films with the most notable Egyptian film stars such as Omar Sharif, Salah Zulfikar and Rushdy Abaza. Her most well-known role was that of a college student who fell in love with her professor in the film, Hassan El Imam’s Watch Out for ZouZou (1972).[15]

Other important film credits include her roles in Hassan Al-Imam's Money and Women (1960) opposite Salah Zulfikar who she starred with in Appointment at the Tower of Ezz El-Dine Zulficar (1962). In 1964, she starred alongside Nadia Lutfi in Mahmoud Zulfikar's For Men Only, the film was a box office hit where she played a role of a girl disguised in a man's appearance to have the opportunity to work in a gas project. Hosny starred in Too Young for Love (1966) with Rushdy Abaza.

Soad Hosny with Henry Barakat while filming, c. 1970

In 1970, she starred alongside Salah Zulfikar and Rushdy Abaza and in the political film; Sunset and Sunrise (1970) of Kamal El Sheikh. She worked in two films with Youssef Chahine during her career starting with The Choice (1970), and One Day, the Nile (1972) with Salah Zulfikar. In 1974, she starred in Kamal El Sheikh's Whom Should We Shoot? (1974) alongside Mahmoud Yassin. Her next role was a student and political activist, who was tortured in Karnak (1975), the film was based on the novel by Naguib Mahfouz. In the film, Shafika and Metwali (1979) with Ahmed Zaki and People on the Top (1981) with Nour El-Sherif, she transformed the musical numbers into scathing satires which gave voice to the oppressed. For this and her other hard-hitting, politically relevant roles, she was seen as part of the intelligentsia.[13]

Soad Hosny shaking hands with President Anwar Sadat, c. 1979

During her lifetime, she was known as the "Cinderella of the screen". She starred in films of every important Egyptian director during the 60s and 70s and played women in complex plots. In her later career, she played women who had been abused or victimised.[16] Due to illness, she retired from acting in the 1991.[17] Hosny's final screen appearance was in The Shepherd and the Women.[4]

Soad Hosny with Ali Badrakhan

Soad Hosny was married four times.[18] Around 1968, she was married to cinematographer Salah Kurayyem; the marriage lasted for approximately one year. In 1970, Hosny was married to the Egyptian film director Ali Badrakhan; this marriage lasted for approximately eleven years. She was then married to Zaki Fatin Abdel Wahab, son of Fateen Abdel Wahab and Leila Mourad in 1981. This marriage lasted only five months.

Soad Hosny with Salah Zulfikar in Money and Women (1960)

She was romantically linked with various celebrities including the Egyptian film star, Abdel Halim Hafez.[19] Despite never wearing a wedding dress in all her marriages, Hosni wore the wedding dress many times on screen through her films, and her first film husband was the Egyptian film star Salah Zulfikar in Money and Women of 1960. The rumor of her marriage to Abdel Halim Hafez was not the first in her life. In late 1962, a strong rumor spread in the Egyptian press about her marriage to Salah Zulfikar while filming Appointment at the Tower. Filming of the film scenes began in the Cairo Tower, and the team continued for two weeks on board the ship "Aida" in the Mediterranean, and after filming ended, the rumor of her marriage to Salah Zulfikar spread in newspapers and magazines at the time. Zulfikar did not forget the nature of his previous work as a police officer and began with his sense of security to investigate the source of the rumor, to make sure that the lighting worker in the film crew was the owner of the rumor after a kiss was filmed between Zulfikar and Soad Hosny, where the kiss lasted for 3 minutes, until Zulfikar sensed it took them too long and told the cinematographer, "Stop", and so the worker built this rumor because of the shot, but this rumor was denied and the two film stars participated together in more than one film after that.[20]

Stuart Tower in Westminster, England

On 21 June 2001, Soad Hosny died after falling from the balcony of her friend Nadia Yousri's apartment in Stuart Tower building in London. Her death was surrounded by controversy, with authorities initially failing to provide details of how she fell; an omission that fuelled media speculation and rumors that her death may have been a suicide or murder, rather than accidental.[21] Soad's body was flown home to Cairo[18] and her funeral there was attended by over 10,000 people. She was buried in a family's plot of land on the outskirts of Cairo.[22] She had no children and was survived by her last husband, writer Maher Awad, whom she married in 1987.[23][24]

In 2013, Lebanese filmmaker Rania Stephan used snippets from Hosny's films to re-tell Hosny's story and the history of Egyptian cinema in The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosny.[25] It was featured in Berlin's Art Week.[26] The Three Disappearances is an important archive, which while following the chronology of Hosni's career, simultaneously documents the costumes, sets and styles used from the 1950s to the 1990s, a period that marked the peak and decline of Egyptian cinema.[27]

One of Hosny's songs, I'm going down to the Square became a popular "anthem" during the Arab Spring of 2011.[27]

She appeared in more than 80 films.[14]

• Top 100 Egyptian films.
• List of Egyptian films of the 1960s.
• List of Egyptian films of the 1970s.

• Terri Ginsberg, Chris Lippard, 2010: Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema, Scarecrow Press.
• Ashraf Gharib, 2001: Soad Hosni: Al-Hulm Al-Dai (Soad Hosni: The Lost Dream). (Cf. "Return of Soad". Al-Ahram Weekly. 11–17 November 2001. Archived from the original on 18 October 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2012.)
• Mohamed Soweid, 2004: Cabaret Suad, Beirut: Dar al-Adab. (Cf. "The cornflake predicament". Al-Ahram Weekly. 16–22 June 2005. Archived from the original on 14 March 2012. Retrieved 27 February 2012.)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Suad Husni.

• Soad Hosny at IMDb
• "...Zouzou"
• Profile (citing 1943 year of birth), ElCinema.com; (in Arabic) accessed 26 January 2015.