| Toqa Hesham |
A French actress, singer, and model, born in Courbevoie, Sienne, France, as Léonie Marie Julie Bathiat. She never married or had children. Her credits include Aloha, Le chant des lies (1937), Madame Sans-Gene (1941), and Children of Paradise (1945). She was born to a working-class family. When her father died, she left school and worked. She was a secretary in a factory, then a fashion model. She appeared for the first time in a music hall in 1918 and continued to appear in theaters and cabarets until the early thirties when she headed to film work and made her first film, The Sweetness of Loving (1930). She played secondary roles and rarely played starring roles. Despite her superiority over the rest of the actors in her films, especially popular classics such as Hotel du Nord (1938) and Le Jour Se Leve (1939), she always lit up the screen with an unusual combination of French working-class humor and romantic beauty. She left the cinema in 1936 and returned to the theater. However, she returned with her outstanding performance in the 1938 film Hotel du Nord. After the end of World War II, her professional life suffered due to her contact with a German officer during the Nazi occupation of France. She was arrested for 120 days, sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in a private prison, placed under house arrest for two years, and banned from working for 3 years. However, she returned to film work again and made her last film role in the film The Longest Day in History (1962). In 1963 she suffered an accident that left her almost blind, so she retired. She died in Paris, France on July 23, 1992.
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