Mehdi Forough

A native of Esfahan, Mehdi Forough attended Danesh Sara-ye Aali in Tehran and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, London.

In the late nineteen seventies he was the president of Bonyad-e-Shahnameh, an institution devoted to the preservation of the authenticity of Ferdowsi's epic poem.

Amongst his many translations of plays are Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie and August Strindberg's The Father both of which he staged and directed.

He is the composer of a song cycle in which he set well-known Persian poems of Hafez, Saadi, and others to music.

Mehdi Forough was married to Fakhri Dowlatabadi, one of the Iranian women pioneers in playing and teaching of western classical music and the daughter of Haji Mirza Yahya Dowlatabadi, who was the son of Subh-i-Azal and a prominent Constitutionalist of the 1906 Revolution and one of the founders of the modern school systems in Iran.