Nadia Lutfi

Nadia Lutfi نادية لطفي
Born	Poula Mohamed Mostafa Shafiq بولا محمد مصطفى شفيق (1937-01-03)3 January 1937 Cairo, Egypt
Died	4 February 2020(2020-02-04) (aged 83) Cairo, Egypt
Other names	Nadia Lotfi
Years active	1958–1993
Spouse(s)	Ibrahim Sadek Mohamed Sabry Adel El Beshary
Children	Ahmed Adel El Bashary

Nadia Lutfi or Nadia Loutfi (Arabic: نادية لطفي‎; born Poula Mohamed Mostafa Shafiq (Arabic: بولا محمد مصطفى شفيق‎); 3 January 1937 – 4 February 2020) was an Egyptian actress.^[1] During the apex of her career, she was one of the most popular actresses of Egyptian cinema's golden age.

Life and career[]

Nadia was born in Cairo as Poula Mohamed Mostafa Shafiq to an Egyptian father and an Egyptian mother named Fatma.^[2][3][4][5] Family of Nadia Lutfi was Muslim.^[3][6] Nadia began acting as a hobby; when she was 10 years old she participated in a play at her school and did very well. When the 24-year-old was about to make her screen debut in 1958, Omar Sharif was the reigning king of Egyptian cinema, and his wife, Egyptian superstar Faten Hamama, its queen. The star couple had just had a smash hit with the film La Anam with Hamama as "Nadia Lotfy", a willful teen who destroys her father's marriage. Poula adopted the forename and a variation of the surname of the character as her own.^{[citation needed]}

Under her newly changed name, the young actress was spotted by director Ramsis Naguib. Her first film role was in a modest, black & white drama, Soultan in 1958.^[7] Her second picture was a smaller role in one of the film landmarks of its time, Cairo Station. In 1963, she played a Frankish woman warrior of the Crusade era, donning full armor to go into battle against her Christian-Arab lover, in Naser Salah el Dine (occasionally shown on television in the United States as Saladin and the Great Crusades). In Lil-Rigal Faqat aka For Men Only (1964), Lutfi and co-star Soad Hosny played women geologists who, denied employment, respond by disguising themselves as men and going to work, where they find they must suppress their romantic instincts to sustain the disguise.^[8]

Nadia Lutfi and Salah Zulfikar in Faceless Men (1970)

In the mid-1960s, she starred in two films that were based on stories by Nobel-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, just a few years following the publication of his widely banned novel Awlad Haretna اولاد حارتنا which symbolize God and Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, Children of Gebelawi. Lutfi finished the decade starring in Abi Fawq Al Shagarah aka My father Over The Tree (1969) as a nightclub dancer who beds a much younger man, then discovers that she once knew his father equally well.^[8] She starred in several films with Soad Hosny, including Al-Saba' Banat (The Seven Girls).^[9][10]

In the 1970s, her career wound down as Egypt's "Golden Age" for films drew to a close. Having made close to 50 films in the first 11 years of her career, she only made three in the decade that followed, and did not work in films since 1981. In 2006, she returned to the spotlight when a video by young Lebanese singer dancer Nourhanne recreated a musical scene from one of her films El Sokkariyya,.^{[citation needed]}

In 2014, the Cairo International Film Festival paid tribute to Nadia Lutfi by using her photo on the Festival's official poster.^[7]

Death[]

On 4 February 2020, after being in intensive care for some time, Nadia Lutfi died in Maadi Hospital.^[11]

Selected Filmography[]

Footnotes[]

External links[]

• Cairo Station film review
• Profile

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