Originally commissioned by me and published in the Underline, the Iranian film critic Nima Hasani-Nasab has written about ten actresses who, in his view, helped shaping Iranian cinema before and after the revolution. — EK
Apart from sheer acting talent and the entertainment they have given to different generations of Iranians, every one of the actresses profiled here is also a representative of her gender, and of a particular acting style. They range from much loved popular stars to those appreciated by a small and discerning minority of film devotees; some have taken on a variety of screen roles, while others have gladly reprised a favourite part many times. Some hold records for film credits; others have appeared in only a handful of films.
Every one has put her own individual stamp on the world of cinema. To leave any one of them out would make any account of the key female performances in Iranian film incomplete. Still, it being necessary to include actresses from both before and after the 1979 Revolution, a number of prominent personalities who might otherwise have been included have had to be left out.
This overview is dedicated to the memory of Ruhangiz Saminezhad, the first actress in the history of Iranian cinema, who paid for her performance in The Lor Girl with bitterness and curses; misfortune and loneliness – all so that Iranian women could take their rightful place on the cinema screen, take over from men in women’s clothing.
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| Nadereh AKA Hamideh Kheir-Abadi |
Nadereh (1924-2010)
Both before the Revolution, when performing under her stage name Nadereh, and afterwards when acting under her birthname, Hamideh Kheir-Abadi, she was associated above all with motherhood. The image of her as the stereotypical Iranian mother is part of the collective memory of Iranian moviegoers. Nadereh was the most prominent character actor in Iran and boasted a legendary performance record – almost 150 films and fifty television series in her half-century in front of the camera. She stuck to this same maternal role on screen from the age of 30. Nadereh had a remarkable ability to play the same type of role repeatedly while each time giving her characters unique life, as if each role were both fresh and familiar. Never have the tone and mannerisms of a traditional Iranian woman and mother been portrayed on cinema and television screens so accurately and memorably.
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| Iren |
The Iranian-Armenian actress Iren began her career by chance, having been a substitute actress in Abdolhossein Noushin and Loreta Hairapedian Tabrizi’s theatre group. Along with a number of other theatre actors, she made the transition to cinema in the 1950s. Iren’s name is synonymous with fearlessness and the breaking of taboos relating to the presence of women in cinema. From her controversial appearance in The Messenger from Heaven in 1959, to her performance in the controversial film Mohallel in 1972, she made a lot of noise with the roles she created, experiencing success and making the news. With Moo Sorkheh and Speeding Naked Until Noon Iren became the embodiment of eroticism in Persian language cinema. She was the femme fatale of many Iranian crime films and melodramas. Her presence as an actor in both Iranian New Wave cinema and as a star of popular movies lasted for three decades but after the Revolution, with the banning of two films (The Reward and The Red Line) and the cutting of her scenes from the television series Hezar Dastan, Iren left the cinema forever. Her last appearance was alongside more than one hundred other actresses in Abbas Kiarostami’s 2008 film Shirin. Iren remained in Iran until her death.
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| Forouzan |
This peerless star of two decades of Iranian cinema started out in the 1960s as a dubbing artist, but quickly found a place of her own on the screen. After creating sixty successful roles in the space of fifteen years, Forouzan’s name, more than any other, became representative of the Iranian actresses of the pre-Revolutionary period. Early on in her career, she conquered the box office in 1965 in Qarun’s Treasure alongside Mohammad Ali Fardin; they became the best-loved couple in Iranian cinema, as well as two of the most prominent and profitable faces in the country’s entertainment industry. What is striking is the diversity of the roles Forouzan played, and yet much of the time her great range as an actor was ignored. She is without doubt the most important actress in Iranian popular cinema. Her credits include The Dragon Gorge, Dancer of the City, The Dagger, Baba Shamal and Mina’s Circle, demonstrating her great intelligence in the choice of roles she took on. Forouzan also remained in Iran until her death.
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| Banayi on the cover of Girls & Boys magazine |
Pouri Banayi grabbed the public’s attention with her first film The Runaway Bride in 1964 and by 1978 had acted in nearly sixty films. This prominent and beloved actress of Iranian melodrama represented the gold standard when it came to depicting female characters in mainstream narrative cinema during that period. Despite her outright refusal to perform in the musical scenes common at the time, Banayi was able to remain a high-profile and beloved figure. She also acted in director Samuel Khachikian’s crime dramas, but her fame stems from her appearance in melodramas, in which she would play the role of girls and women in love and invariably wronged – two of the most famous of these were also directed by Khachikian (Goodbye Tehran and I Also Cried). Alongside the enduring personas she created in famous films like Qeysar, Banayi also gave striking performances in alternative Iranian films such as The Little Cannon, The Mandrake and Ghazal. After the Revolution, Banayi was not able to act and her only cinematic performance in the last forty years was in Shirin.
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| Soosan Taslimi |
Despite a limited number of film appearances, the outstanding quality of her screen performances has meant that Soosan Taslimi has earned a reputation as one of the finest Iranian cinema actresses. A long artistic partnership with director Bahram Beyzai has meant that she has been able to carve out a space for the depiction of mythical and legendary characters, in a national cinema that is otherwise limited and lacking in variety. This stylish actress only had the opportunity to act for ten years in Iran, appearing in just six films and one television series. The difficulties women faced as actresses at the time led to her sudden emigration in 1987. Taslimi’s first two films were made just before the Revolution and were thus never screened in cinemas. Her performance in the screen adaptation of the play The Death of Yazdgerd is one of the pinnacles of the film actress’s art, while her performance in Bashu, the Little Stranger in which she speaks with a Gilaki accent, and her playing three parts in Perhaps Some Other Time are unrepeatable events in the history of women’s acting in Iran. Owing to her distinctive and unusual style, Taslimi was voted the best actress in the history of Iranian cinema in a Film Monthly critics’ poll in 2004. The fact that she has been absent from Iranian cinema for all these years has only confirmed her unique and irreplaceable status. Taslimi now lives in Sweden, where she has been active as an actress and filmmaker for many years.
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| Googoosh |
Googosh’s fame in the world of Iranian pop music has always meant that her skills as an actor have been left in the shade. Few know that she became a singer many years after she began acting, appearing in almost thirty films in less than twenty years. Googoosh was not yet 10 years old when she came to cinema, having already frequently appeared on stage with her father, appearing in the films The Fugitive Angel and Fear and Hope in 1960. Her early films, though, are not particularly notable or well regarded. As Googoosh became a music star, however, she started to take acting more seriously and reached the height of her abilities. She made her reputation with two films by Jalal Moghaddam, The Three Madmen and Window. In the 1970s, up until the Revolution, she was both a standout figure in pop music and a star of the screen. The fact that Googoosh broke the mould with her cinematic performances was all the more laudable because it came at a time when all of Iran looked to her for inspiration in its fashion choices. She was innovative and daring in her portrayal of the very different characters in Bita, Nazanin and The Night of the Strangers. And appearing alongside Behrouz Vosoughi in Mamal the American, Travel Companion and Honeymoon she made up one half of the star couple of these 1970s box-office hits. Googoosh broke all box office records with the film Throughout the Night a year before the Revolution. After two decades of silence in Iran, she finally emigrated in 2000.
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| Shohreh Aghdashloo |
A special case, a woman whose name can be added to the list of great Iranian actresses despite only appearing in three films – two of which were made on the eve of the Revolution. Shohreh Aghdashloo had the good fortune to appear in memorable roles in masterpieces by two of the great Iranian directors, Abbas Kiarostami’s The Report and Ali Hatami’s Sooteh-Delan – as well as in the rather different The Chess of the Wind. Aghdashloo took on these golden opportunities with vitality, becoming a lasting part of Iran’s cinematic memory. In The Report she depicted a middle class Iranian woman at a time of transition, in a way not surpassed since and which became a model for many actresses after her. After the Revolution, not finding a place for herself in Iranian cinema, Aghdashloo emigrated, becoming an internationally recognised actress, appearing in a number of Hollywood films and television series. She was nominated for an Oscar for her role in House of Sand and Fog and won an Emmy for her part in House of Saddam.
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| Fatemeh Motamed-Arya |
Beginning her artistic career at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults as a puppeteer, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya moved swiftly on to film acting in the 1980s. During that decade and into the 1990s she became a well-known screen performer, giving vivid life to a variety of female characters, creating famous roles for most of the notable directors of the day. Despite being selective in her choice of roles, Motamed-Arya has appeared in nearly fifty films over the course of nearly four decades, her performances making her an outstanding example of the regard in which the acting profession is held, as well as a record holder for nominations and awards at the Fajr Film Festival. Motamed-Arya has striven to maintain the quality of her work throughout her career, choosing to avoid appearing in low quality productions. As a result, she has become an exemplary personality in the Iranian cinema industry. Her appearances in a number of popular films and television series, meanwhile, have meant that she has received both critical acclaim and widespread popularity. In the 2004 Film Monthly critics’ poll, Motamed-Arya was selected as one of the top five actresses in the country. In recent years she has become well known as a political and social activist. Meanwhile, her appearance in a film is usually a signal of that film’s quality.
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| Hediyeh Tehrani |
The matchless cinema star of the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, Hediyeh Tehrani was supposed to appear in a number of important films like The Day of the Event, To Be or Not To Be and Leila but none of these roles materialised. She finally made her film debut in 1996 with Soltan and immediately became much talked about. During the political ferment following the election of Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997, cinema needed women who were cool, bold and active and it found all these characteristics in Tehrani. For that very reason she quickly became a favourite with audiences as well as with critics and awards juries. For a decade Tehrani was a major star and her appearance in a film guaranteed its success, for example in Red, Hemlock and Unruled Paper. In the 2004 Film Monthly critics’ poll she was also chosen as one of the five best actresses. After years of success, Tehrani decided to change course and become an actress of arthouse cinema. Whereas previously she had found fame with films like Abadan and A Little Kiss, Tehrani now tried to present a different image of herself with films like Half Moon in 2006, and worked with Abbas Kiarostami on Shirin, leaving behind her role as the beloved star of box office pleasing melodrama – albeit without similar success. Tehrani’s star seemed to be on the wane, until she once again enjoyed widespread acclaim with Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday.
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| Leila Hatami in A Separation |
As a child Leila Hatami first experienced life in front of the camera in her father’s film Kamal ol-Molk, produced in 1984, but it was almost another decade before she first became known as an actress, first of all in 1992’s The Love-Stricken and then with her memorable performance in Leila. By whatever criterion may be adopted, Hatami has been a standout actress of Iranian cinema over the past two decades. She has been the first choice for all Iranian filmmakers and has a long list of awards and honours to her name, received both at home and abroad. Given membership of the Légion d’Honneur of the French Republic, receiving the Best Actress award at the Berlin Film Festival, appearing at the Oscars ceremony for her role in A Separation, and having participated as a member of jury at Cannes, Hatami is now the most important Iranian female cinematic personality on the world stage. Although she has not appeared in any box office smash hits, Hatami’s personality, her scrupulous choice of roles and the quality of her work in recent years mean that she has enjoyed much recognition and raised the standard of acting in Iranian cinema.
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