Dr. Zahi Hawass, Icon of Egyptology in the world and former Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs, mourned actress Nadia Lutfy who passed away today morning.
He depicted her as a great actress for her role in an internationalized film of “ The Mummy” which was screened in most of the states across the world decades earlier.
He added that the film directed by Shady Abdel Salam gave the deceased actress worldwide fame.
The Mummy was the only Egyptian film that took place among other internationalized masterpieces.
Hawass affirmed that Nadia Lutfy was his friend.
She talked to him on the phone when he was ill in the USA years ago.
Nadia was born in Cairo to an Egyptian Muslim family came from Suhag governorate in Upper Egypt.
Her father's name is Mohamed while her mother's name is Fatima.
She began acting as a hobby; when she was 10 years old.
She participated in a play at her school when she was a child and did very well then.
When she was 24-year-old, she was about to make her screen debut in 1958.
In the fifties of the 20th century, 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 ( I do not sleep) with Hamama appeared at that film as "Nadia Lutfy", a willful teen who destroys her father's marriage. Young Paula appropriated the name.
With her fresh new name, the young actress then was spotted by director Ramses Naguib and she took her first role in a modest, black & white drama, Sultan in 1958.
In 1963, she played a Frankish woman warrior of the Crusade era, donning full armor to go into battle against her Christian-Arab lover, in Naser Salah el Dine (occasionally shown on US TV as Saladin and the Great Crusades).
In Lil-Rigal Faqat ( For Men Only) (1964), Lutfy and co-star So'ad Husni played women geologists who, denied employment, respond by disguising themselves as men and going to work, where they find they have to suppress their romantic natures to sustain the disguise.
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 of Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, Children of Gebelawi( in Arabic: Welad Haratna).
She starred in several films with So’ad Hosni, like Al-Saba' Banat (The Seven Girls).
In the 1970s, her career wound down as Egypt's "Golden Age" for films came to a close. Having made close to 50 films in the first 11 years of her career, she only made three in the decade that followed and has not worked in film since 1981.
She returned to the spotlight again in 2006, when she appeared in a video directed by young Lebanese singer Nourhanne recreated a musical scene from one of her first films, Bain al Qasrayn ( Between the Two Palaces).
In 2014, the Cairo International Film Festival paid tribute to Nadia Lutfy by using her photo on the Festival's official poster.
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