Iranian Influential Women: Rouhangiz Saminejad (1916-1997)

Rouhangiz (Sedigheh) Saminejad was the first Iranian woman to star in an Iranian film with sound. After appearing in the 1932 film, entitled “Lor Girl,” she starred in just one other film until public harassment and family pressure forced her to give up acting. She spent the last three decades of her life on her own, until she died at the age of 80.

Saminejad was born in June 1916 in the south-eastern city of Bam. Shortly after beginning high school, she married Reza Damavandi, who worked for the Imperial Film Company in Mumbai (then Bombay). Ardeshir Irani, a Zoroastrian from Iran, owned the company. She later moved to India with her husband.

In the early 1930s, Iranian poet, writer and journalist Abdolhossein Sepanta traveled to India to study the influence of ancient Iranian culture on the country. While in Mumbai, he and Ardeshir Irani teamed up to produce the first ever Persian-language movie with sound. At the time, Iran had no facilities with which to produce films.

Sepanta wrote both the screenplay for “Lor Girl” and played the leading role, while Ardeshir Irani directed it. The film required an actress who spoke Persian and, considering the cultural and religious restrictions on women at the time, finding such a person was not easy. But when Sepanta met Rouhangiz Saminejad, he quickly decided she was the right person for the role even though she was not a professional actress. 

The movie took seven months to produce and was screened in Iran in 1934. It was a hit and audiences quickly forgave the fact that Saminejad’s accent did not match that of an ethnic Lor girl from south-eastern Iran.

The film, which primarily belongs to the adventure genre, also had political undertones. Set in a chaotic and lawless post-WWI Iran, it implicitly supported Iran’s first Pahlavi king, Reza Shah, who at the time was trying to impose order in the country.

Saminejad's second film, “Shirin and Farhad,” produced by Sepanta, was based on a popular historical Iranian romance story. When she finished making that film, she and Reza Damavandi divorced. She later married Nosratollah Mohtasham, an actor who had also starred in the movie. However, the marriage did not last long. When Mohtasham came back to Iran from India in 1947, he divorced her in absentia.

After 18 years in India, Saminejad went back to Iran to continue pursuing acting. She was sexually harassed in public more than once, and religious zealots threw bottles and stones at her. She even had to change her name and live in anonymity and seclusion.

Bitter memories of this period never left Rouhangiz. “Because of the unpleasant things that I suffered during and after filming, both from my family and the people, I never agreed to act in any other movie,” she said in “Iranian Cinema from the Constitutional Revolution to Sepanta,” a 1970 documentary by Mohammad Tahaminejad. “Whenever we came out of the company’s door, I had to have three bodyguards, the driver and two others so they would not throw bottles at us. Whenever we went somewhere, I had to cover my head with something so that people would not recognize me.”

Such animosity forced her to change her career path. She ended up studying nursing before going on to work for the country’s Health Ministry. After this, she married a third time, but this mariage too ended in divorce. Rouhangiz Saminejad died on April 30, 1997.