Nadia was born in Cairo to an Egyptian Muslim family from Sohag, Mohamed and Fatma. Nadia began acting as a hobby; when she was 10 years old she participated in a play at her school and did very well. When the 24-year-old was about to make her screen debut in 1958, Omar Sharif was the reigning king of Egyptian cinema, and his wife, Egyptian superstar Faten Hamama, its queen. The star couple had just had a smash hit with the film La Anam with Hamama as "Nadia Lotfy", a willful teen who destroys her father's marriage. Young Paula appropriated the name.

With her fresh new name, the young actress was spotted by director Ramsis Naguib and she took her first role in a modest, black & white drama, Soultan in 1958.[4] Her second picture was a smaller role in one of the film landmarks of its time, Cairo Station. In 1963, she played a Frankish woman warrior of the Crusade era, donning full armor to go into battle against her Christian-Arab lover, in Naser Salah el Dine (occasionally shown on US TV as Saladin and the Great Crusades).

Lutfi and co-star Soad Hosny played women geologists who, denied employment, respond by disguising themselves as men and going to work, where they find they must suppress their romantic instincts to sustain the disguise. In the mid-1960s, she starred in two films that were based on stories by Nobel-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, just a few years following the publication of his widely banned novel of Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, Children of Gebelawi. Lutfi finished the decade starring in 1969's Abi foq al-Shagara, as a nightclub dancer who beds a much younger man, then discovers that she once knew his father equally well. She starred in several films with Soad Hosni, including Al-Saba' Banat (The Seven Girls).

In the 1970s, her career wound down as Egypt's "Golden Age" for films came to a close. Having made close to 50 films in the first 11 years of her career, she only made three in the decade that followed, and did not work in films since 1981. In 2006, she returned to the spotlight when a video by young Lebanese singer Nourhanne recreated a musical scene from one of her first films, Bain al Qasrayn.[citation needed]

In 2014, the Cairo International Film Festival paid tribute to Nadia Lutfi by using her photo on the Festival's official poster.

Source: Wikipedia