Hiyam Abbas

Hiyam Abbas — Biography

Hiam Abbass, also spelled Hiyam Abbas, was born on 30 November 1960 in Nazareth to a Palestinian family, raised in the village of Deir Hanna, and has lived in Paris since the late 1980s, holding French citizenship. While filming Steven Spielberg's Munich, she shared a hotel for three months with Israeli and Palestinian cast members, later saying their conversations helped both sides grow closer.

She won Best Actress at the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Lemon Tree, played humanitarian Hind al-Husseini in Julian Schnabel's Miral, served on the main-competition jury at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, and made her feature directing debut that year with Inheritance. She played Freysa, leader of the replicant freedom movement, in Blade Runner 2049, and earned a Primetime Emmy nomination for playing Marcia Roy in Succession, going on to appear in Ramy and The Old Man. In 2023 she starred in the documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, directed by her daughter Lina Soualem about her own path to acting, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.