Obituary: Mahmoud Mursi (1923 - 2004) By Hani Mustafa "Visit us and do not forget us, Mr Shaker." The line was said to Mahmoud Mursi in his first leading role. It is one of those lines that reverberates in the memory, encapsulating a singular moment in the history of Egyptian cinema. It still sends shivers down the spine. Mursi, an actor of towering physique, with thick eyebrows and intensely blue eyes, played Mr Shaker in Kamal El- Sheikh's 1963 film Al-Leila Al- Akhira (The Last Night). Here was a new kind of screen villain, a man determined to take advantage of his sister-in-law's memory loss to convince her that she is her deceased sister. Nor was it the only role to be given a chillingly sinister undertow by Mursi in the 1960s. His essentially serious features could easily shift into a scowl, a facility of which an increasing number of directors were willing to make use. Indeed, he became the quintessential villain of the early 1960s, a transformation that began as early as 1962, with Ana Al-Hareb (I, the Fugitive). Mursi's coolness on screen marked, in the 1960s, a break with the noisome, stagy screen presence of veterans such as Youssef Wahbi, Zaki Tolaimat and George Abiad. Perhaps his most celebrated incarnation as a screen villain was in Shai' min Al-Khouf (A Certain Fear) in which he played Atris, a godfather-like character believed by the censors at the time to have been based on Gamal Abdel-Nasser. The film was initially banned, its eventual release occurring only after Nasser himself agreed to the screenings in Egyptian cinemas. Mursi's exposure to cinema began as soon as he completed his secondary education, when he travelled to France to study at the Film Institute in Paris. Subsequently he worked for the French radio, a job from which he was fired following the announcement of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal. He then moved to London where, at the age of 33, he began working with the BBC Arabic Service. He also began to study theatre seriously. But three months later, at the outset of the Tripartite Aggression, Mursi, along with seven other Egyptians working at the BBC, tendered their resignations. The act was typical, a reflection of the sense of responsibility that Mursi would later bring to all his roles, particularly from the 1970s onwards. He retained, until the end of his career, a firm belief in the social role of art, especially film and television -- as such he was very much a product of his time, someone whose formation occurred at the high-tide of post-revolutionary optimism. This becomes clearest in Oghneya Ala Al- Mamarr (A Song on the Passageway), Ali Abdel- Khaleq's directorial debut, and the first production of the New Cinema Association. But if Mursi's initial impetus to participate was to underline the importance of resisting defeatism in the wake of the 1967 War, the actor's desire to contribute to a new wave of serious filmmaking provided added momentum. Mursi continued to make careful choices throughout his career and for long stretches of time was absent from both cinema and television screens. The scripts he had received simply failed to live up to his own sense of artistic responsibility. In his later work for television he found several outlets for that sense of social commitment, as in Abul- Ela El-Bishri (The Journey of Mr Abul-Ela El- Bishri), in which Mursi played a Don Quixotic-like figure fighting against social changes that had already happened. He was the policeman in Ahmed Khidr's drama The Man and the Horse who sympathises so much with the horse that he escapes with the animal, fearing it might be destroyed the moment it is unable to continue serving police purposes. He was also the patriarch in the 1990s drama Al-Aaelah (The Family) who attempts to protect his family and neighbours from falling prey to extremist thought. At the time of his death he was working on the filming of Wahag Al-Sayf (The Heat of Summer). Mahmoud Mursi, actor, born in Alexandria on 7 June 1923, died in Cairo on 24 April 2004
