Bahiga El Mahdy

An Egyptian actress, she was born in the city of Alexandria on August 8, 1911, to a Jewish family from the religiously strict Haredi sect. Her real name is Henriette Cohen. In 1927, the family decided to move from Alexandria to Cairo, so they lived in the Jewish neighborhood and her father became the leader of his sect. She joined Fatima Rushdi's theatrical troupe and became a member of it. During her work in the theater, she fell in love with the Egyptian Jewish millionaire Elie Deri, so she married him even though he was fifty years older than her. Three years after her marriage, her husband died, and she inherited his huge fortune. Egyptian-Jewish director Togo Mizrahi saw her on stage and convinced her to enter the cinema and be her discoverer. Thus, she presented her first cinematic work in 1935, which was the film “Shalom the Tarjuman,” directed by Mizrahi and starring Shalom. She formed a successful artistic duo with the comedian Ali Al-Kassar. Her last film was “One Thousand and One Nights” by Togo Mizrahi in 1941. After this film, she stopped acting and had no news of her until the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948, when it was later learned that she had immigrated to the United States because of her Jewish religion, and that she had turned there into a businesswoman and married for the second time to a Jewish man and had a child with him, before she decided to move to Israel to settle there and died at the end of the seventies.