TIRANA, Nov. 23 – Hueyda El Saied, one of Albania’s best known television personalities, has died in Luxembourg at the age of 46, friends of the family have confirmed for local media.
El Saied’s career took to different fields — painting to ballet, from television to theater, from journalism to human rights.
A rare woman of color on Albanian television, El Saied is widely recognized for unique and versatile style in a myriad of television shows from the early 1990s into the 2000s.
Born in Tirana in 1975 to a father from Sudan and mother from Albania, in recent years she had lived in Luxembourg, where she is survived by a husband and a young son.
Active with her art and family on social media until recently, El Saied had kept her battle with cancer secret from the fans, who poured on messages of grief on social media after hearing the news of her passing.
They included a message from Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama who published a photo of El Saied on social media with the message: “Farewell my young friend.”
Elidor Mehilli, an Albanian American university professor, highlighted El Saied’s unique family history on Twitter.
“Her great-grandfather was a fisherman from Khartoum who ended up in Albania and married a Turkish woman. Her grandmother married Hysen, a Shkodër boy. There’s more: Her mother then got to know a Sudanese man in the 1970s — envoy from the Sudanese Communists. Her father,” Mehilli wrote. “Born in the mid-70s, Hueyda was separated from her father shortly thereafter. He was allowed to leave Albania, but she and her mother were not.”
He kept waiting for them outside of Albania. She has described this as her tragedy. Was only able to meet him at 16.
“She was beloved from my generation, even though her life was far from easy under a cruel regime supposedly all about freedom and solidarity. A fascinating Sudanese-Albanian story across generations, too,” Mehilli noted.
