Nadia Lutfi was born Poula Mohamed Shafiq in 1937 in Cairo to an Egyptian father and a Polish mother. Her father was an accountant. Acting started as a hobby, when she was 10 years old she participated in a play at her school and did very well.Her first roles in Egyptian cinema were in Soultan (1958) and Gare centrale (1958), both the same year. The latter brought filmmaker Youssef Chahine to international attention and acclaim when it was a competitor at the Berlin Film Festival. Her career progressed and she appeared in El saman wal karif (1967) (based on the book by Nobel-winning author Najeeb Mahfouz). She closed out the 1960s in Abi foq al-Shagara (1969) opposite Abdel Halim Hafez as a night club dancer who beds a much younger man.She married three times, first time before she was 20 years old. She had one child, a son, Ahmad.