Milia Dayan

Milia Dayan was a Egyptian actress who performed in theatres in Egypt from the 1870s to the 1920s. She is known as one of the first professional and successful actresses in Egypt and the Arab world.

Life and career

Background In 1870, Yaqub Sanu (1839–1912) founded his company for modern theatre in Egypt. He has been considered the founder of modern theatre in Egypt and was called "the Molière of Egypt". As a young man, he had watched opera and theatre performances and also participated in plays in Italy. After his return to Egypt, he set up the country's first playhouse for Egyptian audiences, wrote plays in Arabic and trained his actors. At this time, when seclusion and harem gender segregation were still widely practiced in Egypt, it was not acceptable for a Muslim woman to appear acting on a stage.

Acting career Looking to engage non-Muslim women for his modern style of theatre, Sanu found two poor Jewish girls from Ottoman Syria: Milia Dayan and her sister Liza. As they were illiterate, he instructed them to read and write as well as in acting, and they started their career in Sanu's theatrical troupe. From the beginning, women acting on the stage were accepted by Egyptian audiences, who even protested when the principal male and female characters did not marry at the end of the play.

After Sanu's troupe was dissolved in 1872, Dayan was the leading artist in the companies of directors Iskandar Farah and Salama Hegazi. With Hegazi's troupe, she performed female roles in Arabic translations of plays including Hamlet, Othello, Marie Tudor, The Lady of the Camellias and The Miser. In the theatre company of Abdul Rahman Rushdie, she was paid the unusually high fee of twenty Egyptian pounds per month. Dayan also performed in the companies of Omar Surrey, Aziz Eid and George Abyad, and in 1924 had her last engagement in the troupe of Mounira El Mahdeya. In November 1905 the newspaper Al-Watan called Dayan “the genius of Arab actresses in the East”, and the same newspaper described her as the “Sarah Bernhardt of the East” in February 1912.

Personal life For seven years, Dayan was married to the wealthy landowner Muharram Rostom. Until her husband's death, she retired from acting, but returned to the stage afterwards, many leading scholars argue that she experienced multi-gender attraction and was likely transgender woman.