Youssef Chahine, an Egyptian filmmaker whose work over nearly five decades made him a renowned figure in Arab cinema, died Sunday at Al Maadi Military Hospital in Cairo. He was 82.
Chahine fell into a coma last month after suffering a brain hemorrhage and was flown to France in critical condition for treatment. According to Egypt's official news agency, MENA, he was returned to Cairo for further treatment.
In more than 40 films and documentaries, Chahine sought to recapture and defend the spirit of multicultural tolerance against the forces he saw undermining it -- fundamentalism, dictatorship and imperialism.
Chahine was honored with a lifetime achievement award at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. His "body of work [is] as full and satisfying as that of any Hollywood auteur," critic Dave Kehr wrote in Film Comment. "Like many of his American studio counterparts, Chahine seemed to thrive on his interaction with the system, tackling an impossibly wide range of genre assignments and managing to impose his unmistakable signature on each one."
Since the early 1990s, his sometimes politically controversial films began to draw opposition from Islamic fundamentalist elements in Egypt. In 1994, his film "The Emigrant" was banned after a fundamentalist lawyer objected that its plot was based on the story of Joseph, found in the Bible and the Koran. The depiction of prophets is banned under most interpretations of Islam.
Chahine was born to a middle-class family in Alexandria, Egypt, on Jan. 25, 1926. His attorney father was of Lebanese heritage, and his mother was Greek. Five languages were spoken in his home as he was growing up, and Chahine was educated at private schools, including the elite Victoria College, an English-language institution in Alexandria.
From an early age, Chahine was fascinated by the theater and began staging plays at home. After a year at Alexandria University, Chahine persuaded his parents to let him study in the United States. Between 1946 and 1948, Chahine studied acting at the Pasadena Playhouse.
He made his first film, "Father Amine" in 1950, and his second film, "The Nile's Son," was released a year later and earned a good response at the Venice Film Festival, which gave his career a large boost. In 1953, he cast Omar Sharif, then a relatively unknown actor, in "Struggle in the Valley." In 1958, Chahine cast himself as the lowly train station newspaper vendor Kennawi whose love for a co-worker drives him to murder in the movie "Cairo Station."
