Nadine Salameh


Nadine Salameh, sometimes credited as Nadeen Salameh, is a Palestinian actress well known in Syria, where she lived and worked for most of her life.

Family and childhood

Before going to Lebanon, her family was originally from Acre, Palestine. She also had a Syrian and Turkish ancestry.
Her father, Nabil Salameh was an activist with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Initially he was associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, and later he co-founded the more extreme Black September organization. During the 1982 Israeli intervention in Lebanon he went missing, with the presumption by family and friends he was captured by Israel. He has remained missing since this event, which occurred when Nadine was three years old.
The Lebanese Civil War caused her to go to Syria, with her mother and two sisters. In Damascus, she studied in the Department of Acting of the Higher Academy of Theatrical Arts. She also studied Law at the Damascus University and had a master's degree in Political Sciences. She was mentored by some of Syria’s best known actors, including Naila Al Atrash, and Jihad Sa’d.

Acting career

While a freshman in college, Nadine made her first TV series with the famous Syrian director Najdat Ismail Anzour called al-Kawasir. It was a 29-episode fantasy epic set in medieval Arabia about chivalry, war, love, and tribalism. In it, Nadine played the role of Zumuruda, a horse-riding, sword-flashing barbaric heroin. She has since made one play, two TV movies, one film for the cinema, and over ten television TV series.
Her most notable works are the movie Ru’aa Halima and the TV series al-Taghriba al-Filastiniyya. In Ru’aa Halima, she plays Jamila, a shy but revolutionary young girl in conservative Damascus during the 1970s who wants to explore the world, but is prohibited from doing so due to her restrictive father and the old-fashioned society she lives in. Her feminine awakening coincides with her national consciousness, and in despair from her surrounding, she escapes to Lebanon to join the PLO forces after the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982, seeing death, or "resistance", as the only solution to her suffering.
Al-Taghriba al-Filistiniyya, directed by Hatem Ali, is her other significant work, where Nadine stars with Syrian actor Jamal Suliman. The series, about twentieth century Palestinian history, recounts the Palestinian uprising of 1936 against the British Mandate and the Zionist immigrants coming from Europe. The movie is set in Haifa, Israel; and uses the Palestinian dialect of the Arabic language. Her other natable works include Faris Bani Marwan, Khalf al-Qudban, Ashwak Na'ima, and Ahl al-Gharam.

Personal life

She married a Lebanese businessman in 2011, with whom she had two daughters.

Filmography