Fakhri Khorvash

Fakhri Khorvash (, 31 May 1929 – 10 June 2023) was an Iranian stage and film actress and director.

Khorvash was born on 31 May 1929.

She attended university intending to train as a doctor.

However, she became a teacher in Tehran, at which point she began performing in theatre.

In 1948, her role in the play Dirty Hands (by Jean-Paul Sartre) was acclaimed and she was encouraged to also look at the cinema.

Although she performed in the theatre and in cinema in parallel, she was not keen to switch to the silver screen completely in her earlier years.

In 1958, she acted in her first film, Bohloul.

Although women were already becoming prominent in Iranian dramatics, her decision to take to the stage estranged her from her parents for several years.

However, she received support from her husband and was able to pursue her acting career.

She received the best actress award at the Sepas Film Festival in 1971 for her performance in the film Mr. Naive.

In 1971, her film Mr. Naive won a Jury award at the Moscow International Film Festival, and was a hit in Iran.

She won a best actress award at the Sepas festival that year.

By 1972, the Iranian Ministry of Cultural Affairs had imposed strict guidelines in the depiction of nudity and sexual relations.

A genre of popular film called filmfarsi constantly pushed against the boundaries.

Inspired by, and competing in the popular space with, sexually overt European cinema, filmfarsi attempted to sell the erotic to the masses.

In the advertisements for the 1973 film Chaos, Khorvash's photograph appeared in which she posed on her knees in underwear.

Her role was one of several wives of the protagonist, a middle-aged man, who despite being unattractive somehow managed to find women to have sex with.

Khorvash's performance in Prince Ehtejab (1974) as the hapless maid forced by the eponymous prince to pretend to be his wife was well-received.

In 1976, Khorvash starred in Mohammad Reza Aslani's Chess of the Wind (Shatranj-e Baad).

Criticising the royal government and featuring understated homosexuality as well a strong female protagonist, it was suppressed after only two screenings.

She had never acted in a television series before 1979, though she had directed episodes of the long-running serial Qamar Khanoum's House (1967–1971), but she appeared in several TV series in the post-revolutionary years, including the TV series Amir Kabir (1985) in which she played Mahd-e Olia, the mother of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar.

Her last film, A Little Kiss was released in 2005.

In 2010, Khorvash moved to the United States to be closer to her children.

She was honored for her lifetime achievements at the Iranian Film Festival in San Francisco that year.

Khorvash died on 10 June 2023, at the age of 94.

The reels were feared lost and resurfaced only in 2014.

Khorvash played a paraplegic woman who is hounded by various relatives to give up her fortune.

Khorvash's reputation and ability made her one of the few actors in Iranian cinema to continue her career in cinema in the period after the Iranian revolution.