CAIRO – Hind Rostom, the legendary actress from the golden era of Egyptian cinema, has died in Cairo. She was 82. Rostom died on Monday night of a heart attack in a Cairo hospital, shortly after being admitted with chest pains. Her funeral was held on Wednesday at el-Sayyeda Zeinab Mosque in Cairo. Her father was from a high-class family, who opposed his marriage to Rostom's mother, because she was not rich like him, and tried hard to make the father divorce her. After the divorce, her mother got married to another man and took Rostom to live with them, according to the Kuwaiti news- paper Al-Qabas. Rostom lived for a while with her mother and stepfather, but he was a cruel man, so she left their home in Alexandria and travelled alone to Cairo, where her father lived. Her father had remarried another women, who didn't want Rostom to live with them. So she ended up spending all her time at school. During her school years, she loved joining in all the singing and dancing activities, as she began to nurture her dream of becoming a famous actress. One day she travelled to Alex to see her mother and discovered that she'd got divorced again. The mother asked her daughter to live with her in a poor district of Cairo and the girl accepted. Rostom was taken by cinema. She used to watch every movie. She then left school to embark on a life of acting. With her blond hair and good looks, Rostom often played the sultry seductress, quickly rising to stardom to become one of Egypt's best-known actresses. She won popular acclaim for her 1958 film Bab El Hadid (Railway Station), about the city's underclass and their struggle to survive. She starred in it alongside Youssef Chahine, one of Egypt's most lauded movie directors, and Farid Shawqi. The movie competed for the 1958 Berlin Film Festival's top prize. Rostom was born in Alexandria on November 11, 1929 to Turkish parents, start- ing her career at the age of 16 with the film Azhaar wa Ashwak (Flowers and Thorns), while her first true success was in 1955, when famous director Hassan Al-Imam offered her a role in Banat el-Lail (Women of the Night). Her other famous films include Salah Abu Seif's La Anam (Sleepless) with Faten Hamama, Omar Sharif and Rushdy Abaza in 1958, Sira' fi al-Nil (Struggle on the Nile) with Sharif and Abaza in 1959, and Chafika el-Koptia (Chafika the Coptic Girl) in 1963. Rostom was known as the queen of seduction in Egyptian cinema, and the ‘Marilyn Monroe of the East'. She decided to retire from acting in 1979, because she wanted the audience to remember her as a beautiful movie star. She once more turned down an offer of LE1 million for her biography in December 2002. The offer was made by an Egyptian satellite channel that wanted to portray her life as a drama series. Rostom was asked to submit a complete history of her past achievements, and work experiences with prominent actors of the past, such as Farid Shawki, Faten Hamama, Yousif Shahin, Shukri 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 her concern and no-one else's. She was married twice, to Hassan Reda, a film director, and Mohamed Fayad, a physician. She had one daughter.
