Roohangiz Saminejad (24 June 1916 – 3 April 1997) was an Iranian actress. She is famous in Iran for playing the heroine Golnar in ''

Lor Girl ''Lor Girl'' ( fa, دخترِ لُر; Romanized as ''Dokhtar-e Lor''), also known as ''The Iran of Yesterday and the Iran of Today'', was the first sound film ever to be produced in the Persian language. In 1932, it was produced by Ardeshir Ira ...

'' (1934), which was the first film made in the Persian language, making her the first

Iranian Iranian may refer to: * Iran, a sovereign state * Iranian peoples, the speakers of the Iranian languages. The term Iranic peoples is also used for this term to distinguish the pan ethnic term from Iranian, used for the people of Iran * Iranian lan ...

film star in a

talkie film A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...

. Roohangiz Saminejad was not a professional actress. She was the wife of an employee of the film company. She was discovered by

Abdolhossein Sepenta Abdolhossein Sepanta ( fa, عبدالحسین سپنتا, 4 June 1907 – 28 March 1969) was an Iranian film director and producer. He made the earliest sound films in the Persian language. He was also a writer and journalist and promoter of lib ...

, who had almost despaired of finding an actress with the right look for the film. Her strong

Kerman Kerman ( fa, كرمان, Kermân ; also romanization of Persian, romanized as Kermun and Karmana), known in ancient times as the satrapy of Carmania, is the capital city of Kerman Province, Iran. At the 2011 census, its population was 821,394, in ...

i accent required some changes to the script to account for it. She only made one more film, ''

Shirin and Farhad Khosrow and Shirin ( fa, خسرو و شیرین) is the title of a famous tragic romance by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi (1141–1209), who also wrote Layla and Majnun. It tells a highly elaborated fictional version of the story of the love ...

'', also produced by Sepenta. According to Hamid Reza Sadr, she suffered social ostracism in the conservative culture of the time for becoming an actress. She also experienced sexual harassment from men when she went out in public. She had to change her name and lived in anonymity and seclusion.Hamid Reza Sadr, ''Iranian Cinema: A Political History'', IB Tauris, 2006, p.28.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Saminejad, Roohangiz Iranian actresses 1916 births 1997 deaths Actresses from Tehran Iranian film actresses People from Kerman Province 20th-century Iranian actresses