28 June - 4 July 2001
Issue No.540
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 June - 4 July 2001 Issue No.540 |
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Plain Talk
She was nicknamed the Cinderella of Egyptian cinema. Yet Soad Hosni never found her Prince Charming. She might have attended the ball and danced in her glass slippers but in the end she died, lonely and disheartened, in a foreign land, far away from family and friends.
She was called Cinderella because she was able to make her way to the pinnacle of Egyptian cinema from an unpromising start, born to a family of 17 brothers and sisters and extremely modest means. Yet Soad Hosni managed to act, sing, and dance her way to fame.
I cannot think of another Egyptian star as accomplished, as multi- talented as Soad Hosni. She was, perhaps, the most rounded actress of her generation, appearing with equal success in a great variety of films, from comedy to melodrama, from musicals to films with an overtly political message. She excelled over a great range playing, at different points in her career, the adolescent too young to love, the dancer and singer, the aristocrat, the naive yet cunning peasant and the unfortunate woman forced into prostitution. She was able to assimilate all those roles and give them real credibility. There is, indeed, a story that used to go the rounds concerning a member of the audience of one of Hosni's films crying out loud and then fainting in the cinema during a particularly harrowing scene.
The actress Samira Ahmed recalls another incident that illustrates the extent to which audiences were able to identify with the star and the roles she played. In A Woman's Affairs (1960) Ahmed was acting alongside Hosni, and was required, at one point in the plot, to beat her up. The scene provoked an extraordinary response, and often, as she went about her daily business, Ahmed would find herself being stared at in the street by people whose expressions she could only describe as malicious. For several months she had to run this barrage of hostile looks.
Soad Hosni began her career at the age of three, singing in a well-known children's radio programme with Baba Sharo (Mohamed Mahmoud Shaaban). In fact she later confessed that she had always wanted to be a singer, and numbers were included in many of her films, including Too Young for Love (1966) and Watch out for Zouzou (1972), to showcase this talent. Later in her career she produced video clips of three songs written by Salah Jahine and set to music by Kamal El-Tawil and Sayed Mekkawi.
Soad's film debut was in 1959 when she was discovered by Abdel-Rahman El-Khamisi. He produced the screenplay for the love story Hassan and Na'ima and, in the face of strong opposition from the director, Barakat, insisted on Soad Hosni being cast in the leading role. At that time she was still a minor and her mother had to sign the contract for her. Over the next 30 years Soad Hosni appeared in 83 films, though it was in the late 1960s that she became a major box-office draw.
On screen Soad Hosni could appear the most carefree of characters, a happy woman who exuded an infectious joy of life. This sense of joy, and of optimism, endeared her to audiences of all age groups. She became the idol of many young women and, undoubtedly, the dream girl of as many young men. Her features became a modern icon. Indeed, when the magazine Look wanted to portray an Egyptian beauty their photographer chose Soad from among dozens of film stars. The leading magazine, which had a circulation of six million, devoted four full pages to the Cinderella of Egyptian cinema.
But illness, and time, wreaked their usual havoc. It must have been agonising for this thoroughly Egyptian icon to find herself waning in a corner far away from home and from love. Such, tragically, seems to be the fate of several of our leading stars -- Abdel-Halim Hafez died in London and my own brother, Baligh Hamdi, died in Paris. And now Cinderella herself has died in London. They all yearned to come home to be among those whom they loved and who loved them. They have, but, alas, not as they or we would have wanted.
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