Baligh Hamdi's Life to Be Made Into TV Series

Egyptian music icon Baligh Hamdi's life story is to become the subject of a TV series. 

Journalist Ayman al-Hakim, who wrote a book on the music mogul “Baligh…Secrets of Last Days” in 2023, is penning a 30-episode drama on his life.

His life was full of details, and the series will reveal new aspects of Baligh's character that the audience will know for the first time, expressing his hopes that the project will see the light of day as soon as possible.

The music icon was born Baligh Abdel Hamid Hamdi Morsi in the Shubra district of Cairo on October 7, 1931. His father was a professor of physics at King Fuad I University (now Cairo University).

He was an Egyptian composer who created and composed many hit songs for several Arab singers, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Hamdi composed Warda's most famous songs and they got married for a long period.

He learned to play the violin at age nine, and the oud two or three years later. Hamdi took music lessons with a variety of teachers throughout childhood and teenage years. He became a professional musician in 1954 at age 22. Immediately prior to that, he had been a law student but chose not to complete the studies for the law degree.

He started his musician career as singer, but very soon he turned to composing, and his compositions got good acceptance in the mid-1950s.

In the late 1950s, the then-famous Umm Kulthum presented his composition "Hob Eih" and it was a hit. Some other of Baligh Hamdi's early compositional successes include "Why no", sung by Faydah Kamel, the song "Ma Tehbneesh Be El Shakl Da (Don't love me like that)" performed by Fayza Ahmed, and the song "Tkhounoh ([How do you] Betray [my heart])" by Abdel Halim Hafez.

For the next two decades, he was by far one of the most popular, successful, and productive composers not only in Egypt but within the entire region. His fame and legacy stay very strong in Egypt till this day.