On the anniversary of her birth – January 26, 1943
It is not easy to write about Soad Hosny, and it is even harder to write to her without falling into the trap of nostalgia or elegy.
But the book “The Era of Soad,” which was gifted to me by my dear friend Khaled Montasser, does not do that. Instead, it goes to a truer place: the place of the human being around and behind the image.
This is not a conventional book, nor an attempt to settle scores with a harsh era. It is direct and symbolic at the same time.
It is an act of love, and an acknowledgment that some faces are unforgettable because they wound us—sometimes more than we can bear.
Soad Hosny was not just an actress. She was the girl from the neighborhood, the university friend, the lover who was fulfilled and unfulfilled at the same time. She was the smile that hid uncertainty, and the strength that passed through the doorway of fragility.
When we see her today, we do not remember her films alone; we remember ourselves—our simple dreams, our first disappointments, and our innocence, which we only noticed at the moment we lost it.
What distinguishes this book is that its author did not treat Soad as a case, a mystery, or a journalistic subject. He wrote her as someone saying:
“I know you… and perhaps I did not save you, but I will not allow you to be distorted.”
He wrote her with the mind of a physician who understands pain, the heart of an intellectual who recognizes society’s cruelty toward those who are different, and the conscience of a friend who refuses to reduce an entire life to a tragic ending.
Soad in Our Imagination… Not in Accident Archives
The most beautiful thing about the book is that it restores Soad to her natural place: living memory, not newspaper pages.
Here, Soad is not merely a victim, but a woman who paid the price for heightened sensitivity in a brutal world, and an artist who was ahead of her time in expressing womanhood, freedom, and human anxiety.
I salute Dr. Khaled Montasser for this honest book, and I salute in it the courage to write against the current, against banality, and against easy cruelty.
And I salute Soad Hosny—not as a sad memory, but as a permanent presence, as a smile that still inhabits our collective consciousness, reminding us that some people leave in body, but remain a whole life within us.
Thank you, my friend Khaled Montasser.
