Fatima Rushdi

Fatima Rushdi was an Egyptian actress, film director, and producer who is known as one of the pioneers of Egyptian cinema.
Life.
Born in Alexandria, Fatima Rushdi moved to Cairo at 14 to become an actress. Without any formal training, and speaking only Arabic, she started her own theatrical troupe in 1926 and travelled throughout North Africa. Theater director `Aziz `Id fell in love with her and enabled her to learn to read and write. She became known as the "Bernhardt of the Orient" for reprising many of Sarah Bernhardt's famous roles.
Her first film appearance was in Ibrahim Lama's "Faji`a Fawq Al-Haram" in 1928. In 1933, she directed her first and only film, "al-Zarwaj", which premiered in Paris. No surviving copies are known, and in her 1970 memoir, she claimed to have burned the completed film. In the film, she starred as a woman pushed into an unhappy marriage by her father who dies tragically at the end. 
She acted in several films by Kamal Selim, including the realist film "al-`Azima" (1939), where she played a young working-class girl falling in love with the neighbour's son. Her last screen appearance was in 1955, in a secondary role in Ahmad Diya` al-Din's "Da`uni A`ish" / "Let Me Live".
In the 1960s, Rushdi hosted a salon for filmmakers and students at the Cairo Higher Institute for Drama Studies.