Obituary:

Vanya Exerjian (1960-2004)

---

Click to view caption

Vanya Exerjian

The unexpected and shocking death of Vanya Exerjian with her father at her Heliopolis flat brought dozens of friends and family to the entrance of the building on Tuesday afternoon. The funeral took place at the Armenian Church on Thursday, with a brief mass on Saturday.

A remarkably talented actress known across Egyptian households for a popular tissue paper advertisement -- "soft, strong and full of tenderness" ran the slogan -- Exerjian had played the lead in El-Warsha Theatre Company's production of Tawfik El-Hakim's Rosasa fil-Qalb (Bullet in the Heart) last year. Though a bad cold eventually prevented her from travelling with the troupe to France, where she was to participate in an upcoming production premiered there, she was as active as ever at Video 2000, the production company at which she was one of two partners, and to which she devoted most of her energy in the last few years. She was also reportedly to have a main role in an upcoming film by one of her oldest friends, "those serious filmmakers we grew up knowing", as she liked to describe them. After an extended period of uncertainty following personal troubles, Exerjian was back in shape -- excited, cheerful, energetic and effortlessly sociable. As an audience member who demonstrated the principle of audience participation to perfection, she often brought verve and humour to El-Warsha performances.

The only daughter of an Armenian-Egyptian couple from the town of Erzerum in Anatolia, Exerjian graduated from the American University in Cairo (AUC), where her passion for theatre found expression in numerous performances including Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author. She was a founding member of Zassy, a puppet theatre company that originated at AUC, and went on participating in its activities until the early 1990s, the time during which she made a string of brief if often outstanding appearances in films directed by Youssri Nasrallah, Zaki Abdel- Wahab and the late Radwan El-Kashef. Having led a more or less sheltered life within the Armenian community until she enrolled at AUC, Exerjian spoke of "a widening of horizons" brought about by her student life and subsequent involvement with the AUC theatre -- a process which joining El-Warsha in 1989 made all the more intense, bringing about contact with people from all walks of life and from every sector of Egyptian society: Upper Egyptians, street performers, Student Movement activists... Exerjian participated in all three of the company's full- scale performances: Dayren Dayer, Ghazir El- Leil (Tides of Night) and Ghazl El-A'mar (Spinning Lives). She played an Armenian resident of a Minya town as well as the Upper Egyptian incarnation of Khadra, the mother of the hero of the Beni Hilal epic. After finding herself embroiled in too many administrative tasks, Exerjian extracted herself from her commitment to the troupe, playing the lead in The Last Walk, a cycle of Alfred Farag plays directed by Dina Amin and performed at Wekalet Al-Ghouri, before Rosasa fil-Qalb.

She was a film and advertisement producer and child psychologist (the subject she studied at AUC) as well as an actress. Though she maintained excellent relations with many members of the Armenian community, the vast majority of her friends were Egyptian. Due to her devotion to theatre, her social life ranged far and wide, often bringing about a radical change of scenery, but wherever she went Exerjian took with her her dramatic voice, temperamental disposition and spectacular presence -- qualities that endeared not only her but the whole of the Armenian diaspora to people with whom she interacted. She was born in Cairo and grew up in Heliopolis, where she continued to live till the end of her life, visiting Armenia for the first time in 1978.