The artist (Aziza Amira) Moufida Muhammad Ghanem – her real name – was born on December 17, 1901 in Tanta, to a poor family. She lived as an orphan since she came to life, as her father died 15 days after her birth.
After that, her family returned to Alexandria to spend her childhood there, then she moved to Cairo, specifically near the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood, and she attended school there, but she did not complete her school education.
Although she left school, she realized the importance of education and completed it through cognitive study by learning the principles of music because she wished to become a musician, and she also learned the French language.
Her cultural upbringing in the care of a politician
Despite her misfortune in formal education, he was her ally when one of the well-known political figures at the time took over her care, and it is said that he married her for a while, then they separated because of the large age difference and because of his first wife and children.
During the period that Aziza spent with this man, his experiences overburdened her innate intelligence and talent, and the man took care of her education and education, and he also took her with him on his travels to Europe to learn about her culture and art there.
During those travels, Aziza met the international director David Griffith, who established Hollywood cinema, and offered her to appear with him in one of his international films, but she was not lucky in that project.
This relationship helped her expand her perceptions and horizons of thinking, so she loved literature and art, and frequented theaters and cinema studios.
Her artistic beginnings are from the theatre
Upon her return to Egypt in 1952, Aziza Amir applied to a competition to select new faces for the theater through the Ramses Theater Company and its owner, Youssef Wahbi.
And she sent a request to Youssef Wehbe, asking him to give her an opportunity to work in his troupe, and Wehbe was impressed by her boldness and attributed to her her first theatrical role, “The Fake Jah.”
Thus, Aziza began her practice of art through Youssef Wehbe’s theater and his theater group, “Ramses,” and he also chose her artistic name.
Aziza did not continue with Wehbe’s troupe and worked with him for one theatrical season, because his Italian wife thought there was a love story between them and threatened to kill them if she did not move away from him.
After this stage, “Amir” moved between theatrical groups, such as the “Arab Acting Promotion Company” and Najeeb Al-Rihani, and then returned to her parent company with Youssef Wahbi.
First theatrical tournament
And “Amir” starred in the play “Awlad Al-Dawat”, which turned into a movie, in which she was nominated to play her role, but the role went to the actress Amina Rizk.
She played the main role in the play “People of the Cave” during the opening of the National Troupe in 1935, and was at the time the highest paid among the stars.
The owner of the first cinema company At the beginning of the year (1926 AD), the Turkish artist “Wadad Orfi” came to Cairo, whose name has always been associated with the history of the emergence of Egyptian cinema, although all his attempts in this field were just projects that he began to implement and then others completed.
And he was credited with persuading a number of Egyptian women to enter the field of production, such as Aziza Amir, Fatima Rushdi, and Asia Dagher.
Economics pioneer Talaat Harb described her as “succeeding where men failed,” when he attended the opening of her movie Laila in 1927, which is the first Egyptian feature film. Many stars of society attended its opening ceremony at the time, including the prince of poets Ahmed Shawky.
Aziza repeated her success by establishing the Heliopolis Studio Complex and producing her second film, Daughter of the Nile. Thus, she became the first female director in the Arab world, and she also has the credit for launching the first Egyptian film, but she was unsuccessful when she released the blasphemous film About Your Sin in 1933, which cost her heavy losses – being a silent film after the spread of speaking cinema – which prompted her to close her company.
She was dubbed the mother of Egyptian cinema, wrote 16 films, and edited the movie Laila herself, who is also the maker and discoverer of talents, as she discovered and presented many stars in her works, and produced, through her company that she founded with her husband, the artist Mahmoud Zulfiqar, approximately 25 films.
Aziza Amir was interested in presenting various issues. In her movie “The Daughter of the Nile,” she criticized the racial stereotypes of women as reactionary. She had the lead in presenting the play “Pygmalion” by George Bernard Shaw, which she transformed into cinema through the movie “The Apple Seller” that she starred in in 1939. It is the story that was presented later in cinema and theater, the most famous of which is the play “My Beautiful Lady”, through the apple seller, who is betting on her to turn her into an aristocratic society lady, and he succeeds in his experiment.
And in the movie “The Workshop” in 1940, Aziza Amir triumphed for the woman who decides to run the workshop of her husband, who everyone thinks is dead.
Aziza Amir’s cinematic work expanded, so she participated in a French film in 1939 entitled “The Tunisian Girl”, and the two Turkish films “The Egyptian Writer” and “The Streets of Istanbul” in 1932.
She did not achieve her dream of motherhood, but she always said that it is not true that I did not give birth, but rather I gave birth to one daughter called Egyptian Cinema.
Aziza Amir passed away on February 28, 1952, after an artistic career that spanned about a quarter of a century; and her last artistic work was the movie “I Believe in God”, in which she did not finish filming her role, but its makers were satisfied with putting a bouquet of roses instead of her as an expression of her status.
