Moroccan Music Icon Samira Saïd Opens Up About Life and Career in Rare Interview

At 63 years old, it is the first time that the diva of Moroccan music, Samira Saïd, has opened her heart. It was on the Egyptian channel DMC. The artist has made a beautiful testimony of love to her Egyptian public and her fans around the world by letting herself be discovered. She even talked about her first love. "I was 5 years old when I fell in love for the first time. His name was Othman Bennouna, he was my neighbor, he would take my hand and we would go to school together. I loved him very much but it was one-sided."

Samira recalled the memory of the late King Hassan II, who had a great love for art and who often surrounded himself with Moroccan artists including Samira Said. "He had an exceptional artistic sense. He was a great connoisseur of music, he played the accordion and personally conducted the famous Firqa Al Massiya orchestra. He was a maestro in the true sense of the word. I was afraid when I had to sing in front of him, I had to be up to par [...] he was very proud of me and had confidence in me, he was sure that I would become a star. He often said: Egypt has Abdelhalim Hafez, we have Samira," reports Hola Maroc.

On DMC, Samira Saïd also talked about her parents and her relationship with them. "We had a happy life. Life was simple at the time. My mother’s Bennani family were enlightened, cultured and open-minded people, the women were educated at the time, they were very chic and dressed in the Western style, in mini-skirts, they had the curiosity of knowledge and evolved with their time. In contrast, my father’s rbati family was much more conservative," the singer confides. She stressed that her father was very open-minded and letting her sing at only 9 years old was a great testament to that.

The singer is the mother of a son in his twenties and has been married twice. The first time was to the famous Egyptian musician Hani Mhana. This union lasted four years, before she remarried the businessman Mustapha Naboulsi. They separated in 1999. The couple lived at a distance between the USA where the father of her son resided, and Morocco where she lived at the time.