Ali Ben Ayed

Ali Ben Ayed

Ali Ben Ayed ( Arabic علي بن عياد, also Aly Ben Ayed, born August 15, 1930 in Tunis ; † February 14, 1972 in Paris ) was a Tunisian film and theater actor and director . He was one of the most important mimes in Tunisian theater.

Life

Even during his training at school and college, he showed himself to be talented. His fascination with the theater prompted him to go abroad, initially to France, which at that time exerted the greatest cultural attraction on his home country. At the Paris Conservatory he studied Dramatic Arts in the senior class of René Simon . In 1955 Ali Ben Ayed continued his studies in Cairo, and a year later he returned to Paris to perfect staging and lighting at the National People's Theater. In 1960 he finally went to the USA after completing his training.

Ali Ben Ayed was actively involved in the development of the Tunisian national theater, where he often directed and played important roles. The city theater of Tunis experienced its heyday under his leadership. Between 1958 and 1971, the repertoire of the theater actor and director Ali Ben Ayed was rich and varied: in these 14 years he and his company staged around 35 plays and played a role in 14 of them. He puts on a lot of international plays that have been translated into Tunisian dialect: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles (1958), Hamlet (1959), Othello (1964) and Maß für Maß (1964), all by Shakespeare, Albert Camus' Caligula (1961 ), The Miser (1964) and The Learned Women (1967) by Molière, Murad III. , Yerma , Ali Baba and others. Ali Ben Ayed received engagements in Czechoslovakia, Austria, France, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Lebanon.

With his willingness to work and his talent as an actor and director, Ali Ben Ayed had a significant impact on the Tunisian audience and gave impetus to the development of other national theaters in the country. Fascinated by working on the radio, he produced several radio programs, particularly in connection with the Bizerta crisis , and recorded theater performances on the radio. Ali Ben Ayed has starred in films since 1952. The internationally known artist brought the role of Sultan Muhammad I ar-Rashid in the French film Angélique and the Sultan by filmmaker Bernard Borderie to the screen in 1968 .

Early death

On February 9, 1972, Ali Ben Ayed came to Paris to perform the play about the Palestinian Revolution. Suddenly the artist felt unwell, three days later he was diagnosed with bleeding in the brain, on February 14th later he died at the age of only 41. His wife took her husband's body home in Tunis, where he was buried on February 17 in the Djellaz cemetery.

Ali Ben Ayed's life's work was presented by international dignitaries, for example in Morocco, where he was honored by King Hassan II for the play "Caligula". In June 1967 Ayed received a presidential award from the then Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba for his performance in the play The Learned Women .

In Tunis, a street was named after Ben Ali Ayed.

Web links

• Ali Ben Ayed in the Internet Movie Database (English)