عربي English Türkçe اردو فارسى
Logo
Latest News
Varieties

Egyptian Screen Legend Shadia Passes Away

Egypt’s Shadia acts with Abdul Halim Hafez. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Egypt’s Shadia acts with Abdul Halim Hafez. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
TT
TT

Egyptian Screen Legend Shadia Passes Away

Egypt’s Shadia acts with Abdul Halim Hafez. (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Egypt’s Shadia acts with Abdul Halim Hafez. (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Iconic Egyptian actress Shadia passed away on Tuesday at the age of 86 after a long battle with illness, leaving behind a glittering acting and singing career.

She passed away at a Cairo hospital after suffering a stroke and falling into a coma.

Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi and his wife paid a visit to the hospital upon hearing news of the actress’ deteriorating health.

She started her career of 117 movie roles in 1947 and ended it in 1984. She showed off her acting skills by taking on a wide range of diverse roles, from a desperate women who sells her daughter to feed her family, to an aspiring singer in a rags-to-riches story.

In the mid-1980s and at the height of her career, Shadia shocked her fans by announcing her retirement from singing and acting.

She said at the time that she did not want to play the role of the old woman after viewers had grown accustomed to seeing her as a young lady.

“I do not like people seeing the wrinkles in my face and comparing them to young lady that they used to know,” she remarked.

Despite her retirement however, she remained in the hearts of her fans and her films are constantly aired on television.

Shadia also performed in ten radio shows and the play “Rayya was Skeena”.

It was during that play’s run that she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The news did not deter her and she continued on acting in the show until the end of its run. She then traveled to France to receive treatment.

Soon after, she decided to retire and dedicated the rest of her life to religion and charitable work. Shadia donated her house to be transformed in a cancer research center. She shunned the media spotlight and refused all requests to sit for an interview.

Nobel laureate Najib Mahfouz described Shadia as a “very skilled actress who managed to bring the words of my novels to life.”

No one but her could have translated with such excellence words into cinematic art, he added.

Shadia’s brother Khaled Shaker told Asharq Al-Awsat that doctors did their best in treating the actress, but her health gradually deteriorated.

Most Viewed

 
 
Varieties

China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
TT
TT

China Says its Astronauts Complete Record-breaking Spacewalk

File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS
File Photo: Astronaut Liu Yang waves as she is out of a return capsule of the Shenzhou-14 spacecraft, following a six-month mission on China's space station, at the Dongfeng landing site in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China December 4, 2022. China Daily via REUTERS

Two Chinese astronauts this week completed a world-record spacewalk of more than nine hours, according to a statement from China's Manned Space Agency, marking another milestone for Beijing's rapidly expanding space program.

The spacewalk, carried out by Cai Xuzhe and Song Lingdong outside the Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit on Tuesday, was at least four minutes longer than the last record set by NASA astronauts James Voss and Susan Helms in 2001, according to Reuters.

The two astronauts of China's Shenzhou-19 mission donned their Feitian spacesuits to carry out an array of tasks on the station's exterior, including the installation of space-debris protection devices, China's space agency said.

"They successfully completed all the planned tasks and felt very excited about it," Wu Hao, a staffer from the China Astronaut Research and Training Center, told China Central Television, a state broadcaster.

The former Soviet Union in 1965 became the first nation to carry out a spacewalk. Since then, Russia and the United States have conducted hundreds of such missions, primarily outside the International Space Station for tasks ranging from solar panel installations to materials research.

The first spacewalk by a Chinese astronaut occurred in 2008.

China's spacewalking milestone this week comes amid a flurry of other recent cosmic achievements that have boosted Beijing's competitive footing with the United States.

China landed its first rover on Mars in 2021 and earlier this year became the first country to retrieve rock samples from the moon's treacherous far side in its Chang'e-6 mission.

Beijing is targeting 2030 to land its first astronauts on the moon to become the second country after the US to put humans there. Beijing has courted roughly a dozen countries for its International Lunar Research Station program, an effort to build a moon base on the moon's south pole.

That program rivals NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the moon for the first time since the final Apollo mission of 1972.