Nadia Lutfi

Nadia was born in Cairo as Paula Mohamed Mostafa Shafiq to an Egyptian family, her father, Mohamed, and her mother, Fatma Khayri who named her daughter Paula after the name of a kind beautiful nun she met in the hospital.^[3][4][5][6] The family of Nadia Lutfi was Muslim.^[4][7]

Paula began acting as a hobby; when she was 10 years old she participated in a play at her school and did very well. When the 24-year-old was about to make her screen debut in 1958, Omar Sharif was the reigning king of Egyptian cinema, and his wife, Egyptian superstar Faten Hamama, its queen. The star couple had just had a smash hit with the film La Anam with Hamama as "Nadia Lotfy", a willful teen who destroys her father's marriage. Paula adopted the forename and a variation of the surname of the character as her own.^[8][9]

 

Under her newly changed name, the young actress was spotted by director Ramses Naguib. Her first film role was in a modest, black & white drama, Soultan in 1958.^[10] Her second picture was a smaller role in one of the film landmarks of its time, Cairo Station.

In 1963, she played a Frankish woman warrior of the Crusade era, donning full armor to go into battle against Isa Elawwam her Christian-Arab lover, (role was played by Egyptian Cinema's box-office mogul Salah Zulfikar), in El-Nasser Salah Ad-Din (occasionally shown on television in the United States as Saladin and the Great Crusades) (1963). In Lil-Rigal Faqat aka For Men Only (1964) by Mahmoud Zulfikar, Lutfi and co-star Soad Hosny played women geologists who, denied employment, respond by disguising themselves as men and going to work, where they find they must suppress their romantic instincts to sustain the disguise.^[11] In the mid-1960s, she starred in two films that were based on stories by Nobel-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, just a few years following the publication of his widely banned novel Awlad Haretna (اولاد حارتنا) which symbolize God and Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, Children of Gebelawi. Lutfi finished the decade starring in Abi foq al-Shagara aka My father Over The Tree (1969) as a nightclub dancer who beds a much younger man, then discovers that she once knew his father equally well.^[11] As well as El Momia aka The Night of Counting the Years (1969). She starred in several films with Soad Hosny, including Al-Saba' Banat aka The Seven Girls.^[12][13]

 

In the 1970s, her career wound down as Egypt's "Golden Age" for films drew to a close. Her most prominent films includes Regal Bila Malameh aka Featureless Men (1972), where she played a role of a night girl, the film was a commercial hit. She also starred in El-Okhwa El-A'daa aka Enemy Brothers (1974), and Badiaa Masabni aka Badi’a Masabny (1975) by Hassan El Imam. Having made close to 50 films in the first 11 years of her career, she only made three in the decade that followed, and did not work in films since 1981.

In 2014, the Cairo International Film Festival paid tribute to Nadia Lutfi by using her photo on the Festival's official poster for its 36th edition.^[10]

On 4 February 2020, after being in intensive care for some time, Nadia Lutfi died in Maadi Hospital, Cairo.^[14]

• Cairo Station film review
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