Sabah

Sabah — Biography

Sabah, born Jeanette Georges Feghali on 10 November 1927 in the village of Bdadoun near Beirut, was a Lebanese vocalist and film performer who died in Beirut on 26 November 2014. After her talent was noticed at school in 1945, the Egyptian actress-director Assia Dagher brought her to Egypt, where she landed her first film role portraying a character called Sabah — a name chosen through public balloting and later kept as her own stage name. Active from the mid-1940s until the early 2000s, she broke into mainstream Arab cinema in 1958 opposite Abdel Halim Hafez. She is estimated to have recorded somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 songs, and to have appeared in close to 100 films and about 20 stage plays. She performed at the Paris Olympia, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Royal Albert Hall in London, and the Sydney Opera House, and is regarded, alongside Fairuz, as one of the great Arab voices of the twentieth century. She was made a Knight of the National Order of the Cedar and was known by nicknames including "Sabouha" and "Shahroura."