Biographies: Saad Abbas - Actor

Biographies

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An Iraqi actor, born in Baghdad in 1952. He grew up in one of Baghdad's old popular neighborhoods. He acted in school activities and events during the school years and decided to complete his study of theater at the Department of Theater, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Baghdad, where he studied under Iraqi theater giants and was greatly influenced by his teachers, Ibrahim Jalal, Ibrahim Al Khatib, Qasim Mohammad, and others. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1975, and in 1977, he joined the Modern Art Theater Troupe. In 1979, he received the Promising Actor Award from the Iraqi Theater Center for his role in Mark Twain's The Stranger. In 1980, he became a member of the Iraqi National Acting Troupe and participated in a number of plays. He also worked as a film director of documentaries about agriculture in Iraq but decided to leave Iraq in 1982 due to the conditions of the war that the country was experiencing and the increasing pressures by the former regime that Iraqi artists should belong to the ruling party. He traveled to Kuwait, and he was chosen by chance to play the character of the first puppet “Noman” in the program Open Sesame, the Arabic version of the American program Sesame Street. During the eight years he spent in Kuwait, he supervised theatrical activity at Kuwait University, directed many theatrical works, and founded the University's Music Club. He was the first to call for the celebration of World Theater Day at Kuwait University and at the level of universities in the Arabian Gulf states. With the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi forces in 1990, he was forced to leave Kuwait and moved to Amman to go to any European country to obtain political asylum. He was contracted by an international school to teach theater and specialized in children’s theater, benefiting from his practical experience in the Open Sesame program and the academic sciences he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. He worked as a classical guitarist in the Amman Orchestra in 1993 and became a teacher of drama at the Amman International Baccalaureate School.

• 2 November 2021
• Christina Aziz