Soad Hosny

Her half-brother, Ezz Eddin Hosni (1927–2013), was a composer and taught Soad and Najat music and singing.

Another sibling, Sami Hosni, became a cello player, jewellery designer, and calligrapher.

Yet another brother, Farooq, was a painter and his daughter Samira was also an actress.

At the age of three, she began her career when she sang in the popular Egyptian children's TV program, Papa Sharo, hosted by prominent kids' shows presenter Mohamed Shaaban.

Her work included a wide range of genres, from light comedies and romances through to political satire.

Persistent rumors claim that her first marriage was to the actor and singer, Abdel Halim Hafez (1929–1977), popularly known as "Al Andaleeb al Asmar" [The Dark-skinned Nightingale], whom she is believed to have married in secret.

However, her family have denied the veracity of such rumors.

Soad Muhammad Kamal Hosny (سعاد حسنى, ; 26 January 1943 – 21 June 2001) was an Egyptian actress born in Cairo.

She was known as the "Cinderella of Egyptian cinema" and one of the most influential actresses in the Middle East and the Arab world.

She rose to stardom at the end of the 1950s, performing in more than 83 films between 1959 and 1991 with nine films in the greatest 100 films in the history of Egyptian cinema.

Her film debut was in Hassan and Nayima (1959).

She is credited with acting in films with the most notable Egyptian film stars such as Omar Sharif, Salah Zulfikar, Rushdy Abaza, and Shoukry Sarhan.

A majority of her films were shot in the 1960s and 1970s.

Other important film credits include her role in Hassan al-Imam's Money and Women (1960) opposite Salah Zulfikar, whom she was paired with for the second time in Appointment at the Tower (1962) directed by Ezz El-Dine Zulficar.

In 1964, she starred alongside Nadia Lutfi in Mahmoud Zulfikar's For Men Only, where she played a role of a girl disguised in a man's appearance to have the opportunity to work in an oil exploration project; the film was a box office hit.

Hosny starred in Too Young for Love (1966) opposite Rushdy Abaza.

Around 1968, she was married to cinematographer Salah Kurayyem; the marriage lasted for approximately one year.

In 1970, she starred alongside Salah Zulfikar and Rushdy Abaza in the political film Sunset and Sunrise (1970) by Kamal El Sheikh.

She worked in two films directed by Youssef Chahine during her career, the first one being The Choice (1970), and the second Those People of the Nile (1972) in which she was paired with Salah Zulfikar for the fourth time.

In 1970, Hosny was married to the Egyptian film director Ali Badrakhan; this marriage lasted for approximately eleven years.

Her most well-known role was that of a college student who fell in love with her professor in Hassan El Imam’s film Watch Out for Zouzou (1972).

In 1974, she starred in Kamal El Sheikh's Whom Should We Shoot? (1974) alongside Mahmoud Yassin.

Her next role was a student and political activist who was tortured in Karnak (1975), the film was based on the novel by Naguib Mahfouz.

In the films Shafika and Metwali (1979) with Ahmed Zaki and People on the Top (1981) with Nour El-Sherif, she transformed the musical numbers into scathing satires which gave voice to the oppressed.

For this and her other hard-hitting, politically relevant roles, she was seen as part of the intelligentsia.

During her lifetime, she was known as the "Cinderella of the Screen".

She starred in the films of every important Egyptian director during the 60s and 70s and played women in complex plots.

In her later career, she played women who had been abused or victimized.

She was then married to Zaki Fatin Abdel Wahab, son of Fateen Abdel Wahab and Leila Mourad in 1981.

This marriage lasted only five months.

Her final screen appearance was in the 1991 film,The Shepherd and the Women, directed by her ex-husband Ali Badrakhan.

Soad Muhammad Kamal Hosny was born in Bulaq district in Cairo, Egypt to Mohammad Hosni, a noted Kurdish -Egyptian from Damascus, and his second wife, an Egyptian woman called Gawhara Mohamed Hassan, whom Soad’s half-sister claimed that her family has origins in Homs, Syria, then claimed that their roots are originally from the Ashraf of Najd.

Her parents divorced and her mother married Abdul Monem Hafeez with whom she had six more children, thus giving Soad and her two sisters no fewer than 14 half-siblings.

Her father's household was known as "the artists' home" because leading artists from across the Arab world regularly visited Hosni's home in Cairo for tuition and social interaction with the master calligrapher.

Her father, whose artistic output included the production of frames for the silent movies and book covers, was well known across the artistic community.

A number of his children became performance artists.

Soad's half-sister, Nagat, was an actress and singer.

Due to illness and health issues, she retired from acting in 1991.

Hosny's final screen appearance was in The Shepherd and the Women (1991).

Soad Hosny was married four times.