Baya Bouzar, an actress and singer known as Biyouna whose guttural voice, sharp tongue and fierce independence — onscreen and off — incarnated, for generations of Algerians, their struggles in a country torn by civil war and repression, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Algiers. She was 73.
Her death from lung cancer was announced by President Abdelmadjid Tebboune of Algeria, who said she “left behind a legacy of sincerity and spontaneity in acting and successful cinematic works, earning her widespread appreciation.”
Official recognition came to her from the seat of Algeria’s autocratic power, but there were also hundreds of fans at her funeral. Ms. Bouzar, with her instantly recognizable physiognomy — prominent nose, black eyes and jet-black hair — was a hero in the working-class Algiers neighborhoods from which she had sprung.
Such fervent public mourning was due as much to her caustic free spirit in dozens of television and film roles as for her widely acknowledged courage during what Algerians call the “Black Decade” of civil war in the 1990s. Artists, writers, actors and journalists fled the country; some were killed, mostly by Islamist insurgents who had taken up arms against the military government that seized power in a 1992 coup.
Biyouna stayed. But from 1994 to 1996, she ceased singing and acting, under the threats of Islamists who took a harsh view of women in nontraditional roles outside the home.
“When the threats became too much, I went to Oran to stay with my mother-in-law,” she recalled to Le Monde. “I lasted two months. I prefer the terrorists.”
In other interviews, she liked to revel in her reputation for bothering “highly placed people” among the civilian authorities and mocking her dubious standing among “the religious ones.”
The actress explained that she did not want to “abandon” her neighbors and her admirers. “Oh sure, I went into the areas threatened by the GIA,” using the French initials for the fundamentalist Armed Islamic Group, anti-government insurgents, she said in a 2012 interview with the France Culture radio station. “But I wasn’t the only one. And I overcame my fear.”
“I would go out to do the marketing with my children, and people would say, ‘Biyouna, you’re not leaving, are you?’” Ms. Bouzar told the French radio station France Inter in 2018.
Ms. Bouzar had become a star on both sides of the Mediterranean largely thanks to the films of the Franco-Algerian director Nadir Moknèche. Of “Le Harem de Mme Osmane” (2000), about a group of women bursting out of traditional roles in Algiers just as the civil war commences, she later said she was “the only one of the actresses to have lived the story from the inside.”
In “Viva Laldjérie” (2004), she played an ex-cabaret dancer fighting alongside other women against Islamist strictures near the end of the Black Decade.
In her 2011 appearance on the French television series “Aïcha,” about the struggles of immigrant families in the suburbs, she was immortalized for many French viewers when she yelled “pouffiasse” (tart) at the character played by the actress Isabelle Adjani. “I’m more of an Algerian woman than you!” Ms. Bouzar screamed at the younger woman. For her fans, there was nobody more Algerian than she.
That status was consecrated in the early 1970s when at barely 20, she was given a prominent role as Fatma, a tough, enduring Algerian woman in a 12-part series on the nascent national television station.
It had been little over a decade since the French had been kicked out of Algeria, after a bloody uprising that lasted nearly a decade; the series, “The Fire” (Al Hariq), an adaptation of a 1950s nationalist trilogy by the novelist Mohammed Dib, became a cult hit in a country that saw itself at the vanguard of post-colonial revolution. “The Fire” captured, in a kind of socialist-realism style, the sufferings of a hungry people struggling under French rule in the late 1930s.
“I was in the role of a shrew, completely untamed,” Ms. Bouzar told France Culture in 2012. “A pain in the ass for all the neighbors. And everybody saw themselves in me.”
Because of “The Fire,” Ms. Bouzar became “THE ‘Fatma’ of the little people of Algiers, the most atypical and yet credible of anybody on the country’s single television channel,” the Franco-Algerian journalist Tewfik Hakem wrote of her in 2002.
At that point, “Biyouna was her countrymen’s longtime accomplice,” Mr. Hakem wrote, “a little crazy but always getting it right as the shrewish big sister or the indignant mother.”
Baya Bouzar was born in Algiers on Sept. 13, 1952, in Belcourt (now Belouizdad), a working-class neighborhood that had also once been home to the Nobel laureate Albert Camus. Her mother was a cashier at a movie theater showing Egyptian movies, and Ms. Bouzar attributed her love of acting to sneaking into her mother’s place of work.
“I had barely emerged from the weeds, and I was already dancing in the living room, causing a scandal,” she said of her childhood in a 2018 interview with the French radio station France Inter. “My grandmother said I had a genie in my soul.”
As a teenager, she danced with Fadhéla Dziria, a pioneer of the working-class Hawzi style of singing and who also led a women’s orchestra. Ms. Bouzar was not yet 20 when the Algerian director Mustapha Badie spotted her, giving her the role in “The Fire” that launched her career.
According to Le Monde, devastating flooding in the Bab el-Oued neighborhood of Algiers forced Ms. Bouzar and her four children to evacuate their apartment, and a subsequent suicide attempt was reported by tabloid newspapers. “Me and the shrinks, I don’t go to ‘em too much. If I go to the shrink, he’ll wind up on the couch,” she told France Inter in 2018.
After her recovery, she brought her one-woman shows to theaters in Paris and released an album “Blonde dans la Casbah.”
Ms. Bouzar’s survivors were not immediately available.
“You brought joy where it was lacking, and light to an environment that you called sad and hypocritical,” the Algerian director Bachir Derraïs said in a tribute to Ms. Bouzar this week.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans and is now a writer on the Obituaries desk.
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