Hind Rostom

November 11, 1929

Hind Rostom was an Egyptian actress and is considered one of the icons in Egyptian cinema. She was born in the neighborhood of Moharram Bek, Alexandria on November 12, 1929, to a middle-class Turkish father and an Egyptian mother. She started her career at the age of 16 with the film Azhaar wa Ashwak (Flowers and Thorns). Her breakthrough was in 1955 when the famous director Hassan Al Imam offered her a role in Banat el Lail (Women of the Night). Her known films include Ibn Hamido (1957), Youssef Chahine's Cairo Station (1958) with Farid Shawqi, Salah Abu Seif's Sleepless (1958) with Faten Hamama, Omar Sharif, and Rushdy Abaza, Struggle in the Nile (1959) with Omar Sharif and Rushdy Abaza, and Chafika el Koptia (Chafika the Coptic Girl) in 1963. Rostom was known as the queen of seduction in Egyptian cinema, dubbed "Marilyn Monroe of the East". She starred in more than 80 movies in her career. She retired from acting in 1979 because she wanted the audience to remember her at her best. Rostom would later turn down an offer of one million Egyptian pounds for her biography in December 2002. This offer was made by an Egyptian satellite channel that wanted to portray her life story as a drama series. She was asked to submit a complete history of her past achievements, and work experiences with prominent actors and filmmakers of the past, such as Farid Shawqi, Youssef Chahine, Shoukry Sarhan, and Shadia. The actress stated that she refused to sell her life as a means of entertainment and felt that her personal life was of her concern and no one else. In 2004, she refused to accept Egypt's State Merit Award in Arts, "The award came too late, I'm not placed on the shelf for them to pick me whenever they want, there's only one Hind Rostom in the Middle East, and let's consider that the number of my generation star actresses isn't that big enough to ignore us, and also it's not appropriate to honor me after years of honoring people who are less than me, another point is that I also refuse for them to honor me before Shadia, she deserved it and she was a star for a long time before me", Rostom commented. On August 8, 2011, Rostom died in a hospital in Al-Mohandeseen, Giza due to a heart attack, at the age of 81.