Mahmoud Abdel Aziz might just have been Egypt’s most renowned television and film actor. The legendry actor’s funeral will be held today in a mosque in a suburb of Cairo. He passed away Saturday evening at age 90 after a long struggle with illness in a hospital in Cairo.
Born in 1946 in Alexandria, Abdel Aziz starred in over 90 films by Egypt’s most celebrated directors. He was married to Egyptian actress Poussy Chalabi and had two sons, Mohamed and Karim Abdel Aziz.
In the 1980s, this iconic actor took a controversial role in “Raafat El Hagan,” a 3 season television drama series about the life of an Egyptian spy in Israel. This role earned him many admirers for his patriotism. This series was based on a true story about a man called Refaat Al Gammal (they changed the name in the show to Raafat El Hagan) who went by the name of Jack Beton and spent 17 years performing clandestine operations in Israel as a spy for the Egyptian government.
Abdel Aziz was most known for his role in the 1991 film “Al Kit-Kat”. He played the role of a peculiar blind man who dreams of riding a motorcycle. Even though the film is a comedy, the film, which is directed by Egyptian filmmaker Daoud Abdel Sayed, was critically commended for its intense social commentary.
In 2001, Aziz played a single father who falls in love with his next-door neighbor, whose husband recently abandoned her and their son in the film called “El Saher.” For this role, one of his nicknames that he was widely known for is El Saher, Arabic for the magician.