Muna Wassef
| Muna Wassef منى واصف | |
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| Born |
Muna Mustafa Wassef Jelmran 1 February 1942 Damascus city, Syria |
| Notable work | Hind bint Utbah |
| Spouse(s) | Muhammad Shahin |
| Children | Ammar Abdulhamid |
| Awards | The Syrian Order of Merit-Excellent Degree. |
Muna Wassef (Mona Wassef, Mouna Wasef) (منى واصف) is a Syrian stage, film and television actress. She was born on 1 February 1942, as Muna Mustafa Wassef Jelmran. She is also a United Nations Goodwill ambassador. Wassef is an icon in the Arab world and the Middle East. Wassef had become the highest-paid actress in the Arab World since the end of the 1970s until the year 2000; now she is one of the highest-paid actresses. Wassef is the first Syrian woman to receive the Syrian Order of Merit-Excellent Degree in 2009.
Muna Wassef was born in 1942 in Damascus. Her parents were both Syrians. Her mother was Christian and her father was a kurd When she was 15 she worked as a cotton candy (Ghazl Al Banat) seller in the streets of Damascus. By the age of 16, she worked as a women's clothes saleswoman for one of Syria's most famous fashion designers at that time, and when she turned 17 she was already working as a fashion model for the same designer, at the same time becoming a popular folk dancer in a group called Omaya.
Although Wassef did not finish high school, she educated herself and learned to present the majority of her works in Standard Arabic. She studied masterpieces of world literature, Quranic Tajwid and Tartil, and reciting poetry.
She traveled to East Germany in 1973 where she took acting courses at the Brecht theater. Working with the Syrian Military Theater allowed her to develop her acting skills further.
In 1960, Wassef submitted herself for a contest in which they chose actresses for the Military theater, which was part of the Syrian Ministry of Defense. She worked and learned there for about 2 years. In 1963 she married the Army General Muhammad Shahin, who was a film director as well. She worked in the symposium of Art and Thought which was sponsored by Dr. (Rafeq Al Sabagh) in presenting Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice in 1963.
In 1964 she joined the Group for Dramatic Arts and starred in stage productions of the National Theater: productions such as Molière's Don Juan. This signaled the beginning of a very important stage in her career.
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