Hayat Al-Fahd.. “The Lady of the Gulf Screen” truly embodied people

In the Ramadan 2026 drama season, Gulf drama audiences will miss the presence of the “Lady of the Gulf Screen,” the distinguished artist Hayat Al-Fahd (88 years old), who is currently lying in a coma in a hospital in the State of Kuwait, after she recently returned to her homeland following an unsuccessful treatment trip that lasted several months in the British capital, London, as she currently lives under close observation, following the development of her health condition. After she suffered a stroke, it affected her health greatly.

Unique state of the art:

Since the sixties of the last century, “Umm Suzan” has formed a prominent state of art, through her artistic works that reached every Arab home. People and the Arab public in general, and the Gulf in particular, lived their lives in all its stages, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, through the roles that she presented in her series. Honesty in performance, expression and presentation of the living reality was a window through which the audience looked at themselves, through the roles that the artist Hayat Al-Fahd presented in her works, to the point that people saw themselves. And their stories, embodied in her works.

Hayat Al-Fahd is considered one of the main pillars of the development of drama in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf. Since her first appearance in the series “The Abu Jassum Family” in 1962, and until her last dramatic work, “My Mother’s Thoughts,” which she presented in the Ramadan 2025 drama season, she achieved a great artistic presence, through which she maintained her dominance at the top of the Gulf stars through honorable artistic competition with her creative journey companion, the distinguished artist Souad Abdullah. They constituted the two poles of artistic competition.

Hayat Al-Fahd’s current absence from art is not similar to her absence two years ago, as the year 2024 witnessed her first absence from drama. Because of her health condition at the time, she preferred not to offer any work due to her need to rest from the illness that afflicted her, which disrupted her artistic meeting with Souad Abdullah.

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Cinema attracted her to acting:

Hayat Ahmed Youssef Al-Fahd was born on April 15, 1948. She discovered her love for art in the early 1950s, after she watched a movie starring Farid Al-Atrash. She then frequented the cinema with her family, and soon it turned into a hobby that she practiced constantly, until she entered the artistic scene in the early 1960s, while working as a nurse in Al-Sabah Hospital, when she visited the “Abu Jasoum Troupe,” famous for presenting theatrical and dramatic works, and her co-worker was the journalist Amina Al-Sharrah, and there the artist asked them. Abu Jassum: Which one of them would you like to work in acting? Amina Al-Sharrah answered that she wanted to be a broadcaster, and that Hayat wanted to be an actress, so Abu Jassum asked: Does her family approve of her working in art?

Amid Hayat Al-Fahd’s insistence, and her family’s resistance, which refused her entry into the artistic scene for three months, her mother was convinced of the matter and yielded to her desire, so she appeared on television in 1962, in the series “The Abu Jassum Family.” The following year, she participated in her first theatrical work with the artist Mansour Al-Mansour, entitled “The Victim.”

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Immortal works:

The audience of Gulf drama will not forget the works presented by Hayat Al-Fahd, which are considered an imprint in the memory and archive of Gulf art in general, as she formed a successful duo with the artist Souad Abdullah during one of the periods of her artistic career, and the fruit of this cooperation was works that are considered an imprint in Gulf art, including: “Ruqaya and Sabika,” “Peace be upon the world,” “My Aunt Qamasha,” and “Suleiman Al-Tayeb.” Their last work, after a hiatus, was the Qatari series “Eyal Al-Dhib” in 2000, before they presented a series together entitled “The House is Our Father’s House” in 2013.

Hayat Al-Fahd had other successful artistic duets, including with the artist Ghanem Al-Saleh in works such as: “My Aunt Qamasha”, “Al-Dardour”, “Ruqaya and Sabika”, “Al-Ghurabaa”, “He left and did not return”, “To you with greetings”, “A family over a hot oven”, “Al-Kharaz”, “A Wife with a Computer”, “A Traveler Without an Identity”, and “Eid Night”.

Her family life:

Hayat Al-Fahd married twice: the first in 1965, when she was seventeen years old, to an Iraqi surgeon, called Qusay Al-Chalabi, who worked as secretary to the Undersecretary of the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information. She accompanied her husband to Cairo when he was studying medicine, so she left acting for three years at his request, and then headed to the radio as a broadcaster, despite the agreement before marriage that she would not leave the arts, which precipitated their separation later, after she insisted on returning to acting after their return to Kuwait. She had her only daughter, “Susan,” in 1967, who married Abdul Latif, son of the artist Khaled Al-Obaid.

Hayat Al-Fahd married, several years later, to a Lebanese singer named Mahmoud Hamdi. From his previous marriage, he had two twin daughters: “May and Maha.” Hayat raised them even after her separation from him. She also took custody of an orphan girl named “Rozan,” and raised her as her own daughter.

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Exceptional actress:

Al-Fahd’s artistic life has many production works, through the “Al-Fahd Artistic Production” Foundation, and a large number of plays that she presented as an author and heroine. She also has a single poetry collection entitled “Reproach.”

It is not possible, in any way, to ignore a great artist of the value, size and value of Al-Fahd’s life, when mentioning art in Kuwait and the Arabian Gulf, because she will remain one of the most prominent signs of cultural, intellectual and cognitive enlightenment, and the honest voice of the people in their joys and sorrows.

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