Nelly Karim Egyptian Actress Born 1974 in Alexandria

Nelly Karim is an Egyptian actress and former ballet dancer, born on 18 December 1974 in Alexandria. She moved from the ballet stage to television and film in the early 2000s, and her work includes socially focused films such as Cairo 678 and Clash as well as several widely watched television series.

Early life

Karim was born in Alexandria. She spent much of her childhood in Russia, returning to Alexandria for summer holidays, and she began dancing as a young child in the Soviet Union. There she joined a professional dance school and performed at the Odessa Opera House. Her family moved back to Egypt permanently in 1991, when she was sixteen. In Cairo she won a place at the Academy of Arts in the Cairo Ballet Institute and joined the Cairo Opera Ballet Company, and within a year she won the Cairo Ballet Competition.

Career

Karim was the prima ballerina at the Cairo Opera in 2000 when she appeared on Fawazeer Ramadan, a popular show with dance routines. The actress Faten Hamama saw her there and chose her to play her daughter in the television series Wageh El Amar, which won Best Series at the Egyptian Radio and Television Festival in 2001. Karim's first film role was in Youth on Air, with Hanan Turk, and the early works that followed placed her in prominent productions. In 2004 she played Rita Hayworth in Youssef Chahine's Alexandria... New York, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival. She also appeared that year as a ballerina in Khaled Youssef's Enta omry and starred with the singer Moustafa Amar in the musical drama Hobak Nar.

In 2009 she began a lasting collaboration with the director Kamla Abou Zekri and the writer Mariam Naoum on the film Wahed Sefr, a story set over a single day in Cairo that was made with an all-female crew. She continued dancing professionally during these years, and stopped ballet in earnest around 2012 to concentrate on acting.

In 2010 she starred in Mohamed Diab's first feature, Cairo 678, which follows three women of different social classes who respond to sexual harassment. The film was a commercial success in Egypt and was shown in more than 60 countries. She worked again with Abou Zekri and Naoum on the 2013 series Zat, an adaptation of a novel by Sonallah Ibrahim that follows a woman's life from 1952 to the 2011 uprising, and on Women's Prison in 2014, another all-female production. In 2015 she appeared in Under Control, a Ramadan series about drug addiction, and in 2016 in Free Fall, in which she played a woman accused of murder. For that role she spent two months at a psychiatric hospital to prepare.

Also in 2016, she reunited with Diab for Clash, set entirely inside a police truck during the unrest after the 2013 removal of President Mohammed Morsi. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that year and was Egypt's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In September 2016 she served on the jury of the Horizons section at the Venice Film Festival. She also appeared in The Blue Elephant (2014) and its sequel, The Blue Elephant 2 (2019). By 2019 she had acted in 17 Egyptian films and nine television series.

In 2020 she took a lead role opposite Asser Yassin in the series Meet Wesh. In January 2024 the comedy series Rose and Layla paired her with Yousra as detectives, and in March 2025 she starred in the Ramadan series My Sisters. In 2025 she also appeared in the drama Happy Birthday, Egypt's submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, and in Stories, directed by Abu Bakr Shawky, which premiered at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Her credits to 2026 include Wedding Rehearsal and Voy! Voy! Voy! (2023).

Recognition

Karim won Best Actress at the Cairo International Film Festival in 2004 for Enta omry, sharing the prize with Eszter Bagaméri. At the 2010 Cairo National Festival for Egyptian Cinema she received a Special Award for Wahed Sefr. With Nahed El Sebai and Bushra she shared the Jury Grand Prize at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for Cairo 678 in 2011, and she also took a Best Actress award for the film at the Arab Film Festival. In 2015 she was given an honorary award at the 37th Cairo International Film Festival.

Personal life

Karim has four children. She married the squash player Hisham Mohd Ashour in 2021, and the marriage ended in 2024.