Youssef Abdallah Wahbi Qotb (Arabic: يوسف عبد الله هديب وهبي قطب) (14 July 1898 – 17 October 1982) was an Egyptian stage, film actor and director, a leading star of the 1930s and 1940s and one of the most prominent Egyptian stage actors of all time, who also served on the jury of the Cannes Film Festival in 1946.
He was born to a high state official in Egypt but renounced his family's wealth and traveled to Rome in the 1919 to study theatre, married with Elena Lunda.
Besides his stage work, he acted in around 50 films in Egyptian cinema, starting with Awlad al-Zawat (Sons of Aristocrats, 1932) to "Iskanderiya...
[1][2] He was named after the place where he was born, Bahr Yussef and his father worked as an inspector in the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation.
[5] Wahbi started acting in the golden age of the Egyptian Cinema in 1932,[6] he has also starred in several plays which he translated into many languages due to his fluency in English, French, and Italian, along with his native Arabic tongue.