Obituary:
Marie Queenie
Little queen
By
Youssef Rakha
Marie Queenie
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LAST Thursday the funeral of Marie Queenie was held at the Maronite Church in Heliopolis in the absence of her son, filmmaker Nader Galal, who was away visiting his daughter in Canada. Galal presided over a service on Friday when he arrived back in Cairo. Marie Queenie died of a heart attack aged 90.
Born in the village of Tannourin, northern Lebanon, Marie Queenie was named after the British Queen Mary, wife of George IV -- a figure her landowner father, Boutros Unis, admired. The producer and actress was to explain the second part of her name, Queenie, as a reference to her imposing presence as a child -- something by which her family were quick to identify her. Unis died young, leaving Queenie and her younger sister Hind to the care of her mother, Mariam Dagher, whose sister, the well-known producer and actress Asia Dagher, had decided to settle in Egypt following an extended sojourn in the country. When Asia suggested that Mariam should follow suit, Mariam complied; and the family arrived in Cairo, where they were to live with a cousin of Mariam's, the author and Al-Ahram journalist Asaad Dagher, in 1922. The two girls attended the Saint Vincent de Paul School, which gave them a firm grounding in French.
Marie Queenie first became involved in the cinema on the advice of her aunt Asia, who appeared in the first Egyptian film, Laila, in 1927, starring and produced by Aziza Amir. The experience resulted in Asia in her turn producing and starring in Ghadat Al-Saharaa (Desert Maiden), another silent feature by the maker of Laila, Widad Urfi, when Marie Queenie was only 13. It was then that the young woman first set foot on a shooting location -- camping out on this occasion -- not only performing a small role but helping out at every stage of production; so much so that she operated the film theatre projector when the man responsible for this task was away. Following Wakhz Al-Dameer (Pangs of Conscience), her second film, opposite Ahmed Galal and Abdel-Salam El-Nabulsi, Asia founded Lotus Productions in collaboration with Galal, who acted and directed as well as producing. Marie Queenie grew up in tandem with Asia's rise to fame, finding herself at the very centre of the emergent Egyptian film industry.
Marie Queenie was to remember the company's early days: "I was still a school girl at this stage, spending the first part of the day at school then accompanying my aunt to the studio to help her out with one thing or another without any real knowledge of cinema. Perhaps very few people know that I actually started out as an editor; that was the first job I did regularly, anyhow. This was when we started working with Widad Urfi, who was doing his own editing. I would watch him connecting frames of film using a sort of pin; these would eventually be sent off to Cinema Olympia where they would be stitched together using a special adhesive. We learned to undertake the same process in a place above the Misr Press; we would buy the adhesive from Kodak... We eventually graduated to a manual editing machine, the earliest models. And even though it remained my job for a long time to come, I never enjoyed editing at all..."
Marie Queenie contributed to 10 Lotus productions as an actress before she finally played a lead in Fatah Mutamarreda (Rebellious Girl) -- opposite Anwar Wagdi and belly dancer Badi'a Masabni -- following her marriage to Galal (19 years her senior) in September 1940. Together husband and wife branched off, founding their own film production company, the famous Studio Galal. In the next two decades she starred in ten films, the last being Youssef Chahine's Nisaa bila Rijal (Women without men, 1953). According to her own testimony, it was her waning popularity as an actress that prompted Marie Queenie to retire from the screen in the mid-1950s, devoting her time wholly to her already buoyant career in production. As a producer she is credited with founding the first colour lab in Egypt and introducing the first modern sound system into the country. Among her many acclaimed productions are Chahine's Ibn Al- Nil (Son of the Nile) and the well-known series of films Asrar Al-Nass, which made the names of such prominent figures as Faten Hamama, Shadia and Magda.
Marie Queenie's career went downhill following the nationalisation of her most cherished possession, Studio Galal, which was incorporated into the state-owned Sudio Misr. This was the one event, as she remembered it, that broke her; but when she was offered the studio back during the reign of Sadat, she refused. It was, in a word, too late. Yet her initial contribution to the industry at the earliest stages of its development and the influence she continued to wield would not go unnoticed. Even present-day film stars like Suheir El-Murshedi, Youssef Shaaban, Nour El-Sherif and Salah El- Saadani testify to Marie Queenie's role in their lives, describing her not only as "a pioneer" and "one of the pillars on which cinema depended" but as "pioneer of sincerity and disinterested love" and "someone with whom I loved to deal". Implicit in such statements is the hope that her memory and example will rekindle the enthusiasm with which to extract Egyptian film from the crisis into which it has repeatedly fallen.
