Members of the Egyptian movie industry paid their respects overnight on Wednesday as the body of film star Soad Hosni, the "Cinderella" of the Arab screen, was flown home to Cairo.
Her family, actors and film union representatives were on hand as Hosni's coffin, draped with a green cloth bearing verses of the Koran, was taken off the Egyptair flight, an AFP reporter said.
Hosni died at age 57 after falling from the sixth floor of a building in London. The circumstances surrounding her fall are unclear, but several reports in the Egyptian press suggested she committed suicide.
Hosni, who starred in 75 films through a career spanning from 1959 to 1991, had been lived in London for the last six years where she was having back treatment which had caused her depression, a friend told AFP.
Among those at the airport was the actor Hussein Fahmi who co-starred with Hosni in the movie "Don't Trust Zouzou", which ran for more than 50 weeks in the early 1970s.
The shapely actress with dark sparkling eyes began her career with the film "Hassan and Naima," an Egyptian version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and soon became a star in the Arab world, gaining the nickname of Egypt's "Cinderella."
The heart-throb brought to life a wide variety of comic and serious characters as diverse as the belly-dancer in "Don't Trust Zouzou" and a student raped and tortured in Egyptian prisons in "Al-Karnak," an adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize for Literature winner Naguib Mahfouz.
Linked by the press to Egypt's most famous crooner of the 1960s, Abdel Halim Hafez, Hosni never married him but went on to wed film director Ali Badrakhan at the end of the decade.
She later divorced Badrakhan after suffering from not having been able to bear children, people close to her said, and married Egyptian screenwriter Maher Awwad in the early 1990s.
"Concerned about preserving her image, she withdrew from pubic life and would only attend dinners in London with those closest to her heart," one of the actress's friends told AFP -- (AFP)
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