About me
Samah Anwar is one of Egypt's most enduring and versatile screen presences, an actress, director, and producer whose career spans more than four decades of Arabic cinema, television, and theatre. She grew up surrounded by the arts: her father was the acclaimed writer Anwar Abdullah, and her mother the beloved actress Souad Hussein. Art was never a choice for Samah Anwar; it was an inheritance.
Before the camera found her, sport did first. Samah Anwar won the Egyptian national swimming championship at El Zamalek Sports Club, an athletic foundation that would later prove indispensable when she became the rare Egyptian actress cast in demanding physical action roles. She pursued French Literature at the Faculty of Arts, Cairo University, and later deepened her craft through theatre training at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and the Hollywood Film Institute.
Her screen debut came with the 1981 film Secret Visit (الزيارة السرية). Over the following decade she built an unmistakable body of work in Egyptian action cinema, most memorably in Haalat Talaboss (حالة تلبس, 1988), Emraa Waheda La Takfi (امرأة واحدة لا تكفي, 1990), Al-Sajeenataan (السجينتان), and Bint Mushaghiba Jiddan (بنت مشاغبة جداً). At a time when Egyptian cinema rarely cast women in high-octane roles, Samah Anwar leapt through glass on motorcycles and commanded the screen with the ease of someone who had spent years in the water.
On television, she became a household name across the Arab world through landmark series including Raafat Al Haggan (رأفت الهجان, 1990–1992), Ze'ab Al-Gabal / Wolves of the Mountain (ذئاب الجبل, 1993), El Hesab (الحساب), Sonbol Baad Al Million (سنبل بعد المليون), and Zizinia (زيزينيا, 1997). On stage, she was equally commanding, notably in Rakesa Qetaa Aam (راقصة قطاع عام, 1985).
A severe car accident brought an extended pause, one she navigated with the same resilience that defined her work on screen. She returned in 2002 through the satellite programme My Experience (تجربتي), and gradually reclaimed not only her presence as a performer but expanded it to direction and production. Her directorial credits include the Nagwa Karam video clip Atchana (عطشانة), the TV film Piano, and the 2011 Kuwaiti drama Baqaya Gurooh.
Her most recent chapter has been nothing short of a full reinvention. She delivered one of the most talked-about performances in the 2022 series Al Layla Wa Elly Feeha (الليلة وإللي فيها). She then starred in the Egyptian Netflix original Catalog (كتالوج, 2025), a family dramedy that topped Netflix and Google Trends across the Arab world upon its July 2025 premiere. In Ramadan 2026, she appeared on two fronts simultaneously: Aard W Talab (عرض وطلب) and Hekayet Narges (حكاية نرجس).
Beyond the screen, Samah Anwar is Founder and CEO of TellAVision.io, an AI-powered content creation platform for MENA creators, and hosts the Arabic-language AI podcast "AI بالعربي." She is a committed advocate for making artificial intelligence accessible to Arabic-speaking audiences.
