Khaled El Nabawy is regarded as one of the most prominent actors of his generation and among the most conscious of art as a cultural and human message that transcends local boundaries. In recognition of his distinguished career, the 46th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) is honoring him with the Faten Hamama Award, presented to leading figures who have made outstanding contributions to Egyptian and world cinema.
He joins several individuals who have contributed to enhancing the film scene and have been granted the award, such as Egyptian actors Maged El-Kedwany, Ahmed Helmy, Mona Zaki, Menna Shalaby, Ahmed Ezz, Karim Abdel Aziz, Hend Sabri, and directors Kamla Abouzekri and Sherif Arafa.
Khaled El Nabawy was born on 12 September 1966 in Mansoura, Egypt, and graduated from the Higher Institute for Dramatic Arts in Cairo in 1989, during a period when Egyptian cinema was flourishing both locally and internationally. Like many actors of his generation, he began his career in local theatre, an experience that nurtured the early seeds of what would become one of the industry’s leading talents. His growing presence was further solidified through appearances in television films and series produced by Egyptian Television.
El Nabawy’s big film breakthrough came in 1991, when he was cast by director Salah Abu Seif—the late leading figure of Egyptian cinema since the 1950s—in the sensitive political drama Al-Mwaten Masry (An Egyptian Citizen). El Nabawy plays a small role as the spoiled son of a village mayor who goes AWOL from military service ahead of the 1973 war with Israel. The corrupt and feudal mayor, played by star Omar Sharif, scams the system and convinces the son of a poor peasant to take his son’s place in the army.
A turning point in El Nabawy’s career was his work with Egypt’s leading filmmaker Youssef Chahine. In Chahine’s love letter to Cairo, the short Cairo as Seen (1991), he played a leftist-turned-radical Islamist student who attempts to recruit the film’s protagonist.
Chahine is known to have admired acting, which to him was “the art of changing words on paper to a real world,” as he said in Alexandria Again and Forever (1989). In his films, Chahine consistently celebrated the vitality of youth, both male and female. In Al-Mohager (The Emigrant, 1994), a story loosely based on the biblical Joseph narrative, El Nabawy played the lead role of Ram. The film sparked controversy upon its release but catapulted the young actor to prominence.
This led to what is perhaps his most celebrated collaboration with Chahine in Al-Masir (Destiny, 1997), a masterpiece depicting how religion can be exploited to control and destroy, aided by corrupt leaders and politicians, and how both impoverished and educated youth can fall prey to radicalization—a prophecy that resonated globally after 2001. For his role, El Nabawy received the Horus Award for Best Supporting Actor at the Cairo National Festival for Egyptian Cinema.
El Nabawy’s versatility enabled him not only to star in auteur-driven titles screened at Cannes but also to navigate popular commercial Egyptian cinema with equal ease. This transition gave him the opportunity to appear in one of the 1990s’ most successful musical comedies, Ismailia Rayeh Gaie (Ismailia: Back and Forth, 1997). Its story of a young man from a working-class district who rises to fame as a singer might have seemed like a cliché harking back to the days of Abdel Halim Hafez and Farid Al-Atrash, but the film’s blend of comedy, romance, music, and postwar drama made it a cultural phenomenon. It broke box office records, competing head-to-head with major films by industry heavyweights such as Adel Imam.
Alongside his film career, El Nabawy built strong recognition through television, a crucial pillar of Egyptian popular culture. In the historical drama Bawabet Al-Halawany (The Halawany Gate, 1992), he played Hamza Al-Halawany, a young man navigating Egypt’s social and political shifts during the Khedive Ismail era. In Hadith al-Sabah wal-Masa’ (Tales of Morning and Evening, 2001), adapted from Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, he portrayed Dawoud Pasha Ibn Yazid al-Masri, an ambitious man who rises from humble origins to the elite class before power corrodes his integrity.
The prophecy of radicalization and political violence that Chahine explored in Destiny gained renewed relevance after the 9/11 attacks, which profoundly altered Western perceptions of Muslim Arabs, particularly in the United States. El Nabawy examined these themes in several films between 2002 and 2012.
In the 2002 Egyptian film Lost in the USA, El Nabawy plays Sherif Al-Masry, an Egyptian man who arrives in the United States with no clear purpose and no connections, finding himself stranded in an unfamiliar world. He inadvertently assumes the identity of another Egyptian man, Adel, who is briefly detained upon arrival and later shot in a drive-by attack. Al-Masry lives Adel’s life until the latter awakens from a coma. El Nabawy’s performance in this light comedy is noteworthy; though many scenes are played for satire, his portrayal retains emotional depth, offering a subtle critique of the “American Dream” from a Middle Eastern perspective.
In 2005, he appeared in Ridley Scott’s Hollywood epic Kingdom of Heaven playing a mullah, the wise religious advisor to Saladin (portrayed by Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud). The film depicted Arab Muslim characters amid the Crusades as wise, calm, and fierce in battle, yet equally eager for peace and coexistence with Jews and Christians in Jerusalem.
In Fair Game (2010), directed by Doug Liman, he played Hamed, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who becomes a key figure in the investigation surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. His character represents a rarely shown side of the Arab world: the educated, apolitical Middle Eastern professional caught between Western intelligence agendas and personal moral conviction on the eve of the 2003 U.S. invasion.
In The Citizen (2012), directed by Sam Kadi, El Nabawy took on the leading role of Ibrahim Jarrah, a Lebanese man who wins the U.S. Green Card lottery and arrives in New York on the eve of the September 11 attacks. Facing xenophobia and injustice, Jarrah’s story becomes a lens through which the film explores the disillusionment of post-9/11 Arab immigrants.
From 2010 onward, El Nabawy established his reputation as a star in national film and television. In the massively popular yet underrated crime thriller El Dealer (The Dealer, 2010), he plays Ali Al-Halawani, a bold hustler who manipulates the system to immigrate to Europe and becomes a populist but corrupt politician in Ukraine.
El Nabawy’s elegant performance style and strong command of classical Arabic allowed him to excel in the historical television series Mamalik al-Nar (Kingdoms of Fire, 2019) and Risalat Al-Imam (The Imam’s Message, 2023). In the former, he plays Sultan Tuman Bay II, the last Mamluk ruler of Egypt before the Ottoman conquest in 1517, while in the latter he portrays Imam Muhammad al-Shafi‘i, a foundational Sunni jurist.
Khaled El Nabawy is one of the most versatile and internationally acclaimed of all Egyptian actors. His layered talent lies in his ability to build characters from within, through subtle psychological detail and a voice that balances strength with calm.
The Cairo International Film Festival will screen two of his most iconic films, Al-Mohager (The Emigrant, 1994) and The Citizen (2012).
