Thousands of Egyptians, many sobbing openly, took part Thursday in the funeral for Soad Hosni, the "Cinderella" of the Arab screen, who died a week ago after falling from a London building.

"There is no god but God, and Soad Hosni is the beloved of God," family members, actors and ordinary Egyptians chanted in Arabic inside Mustafa Mahmud Mosque in central Cairo.

The coffin containing Hosni”s body lay before them, wrapped in a red-black-and-white Egyptian flag.

Hosni, in her mid-50s, died June 21 after falling from a friend”s sixth floor apartment in London. The circumstances surrounding her fall are unclear, but several reports in the Egyptian press suggested she committed suicide.

A London coroner said in an interim report after opening an inquest on Wednesday that the cause of death was "multiple injuries". A final verdict is expected on August 15.

The coffin carrying her body arrived here overnight Wednesday on a flight from London and was taken to Thursday”s funeral in an ambulance, escorted by security forces in two armoured vehicles.

The actress, whose memory has been kept alive in Egypt since her death through media tributes and daily re-runs of her films, was later buried in the family plot of a cemetery in Sixth of October City just outside Cairo.

She was one of Egypt”s best-loved actresses of the 1960s and ”70s.

"Soad Hosni was unique. There was only one and there will never be another," Egyptian actress Athar el-Hakim, who is about 40 years old, said at the funeral.

"She was the symbol of the golden age of Egyptian cinema," said Hakim, who only knew Hosni from her films, which also included co-productions with Iraqi, Lebanese and Soviet producers.

Hosni, who starred in 75 Egyptian films through a career spanning from 1959 to 1991, had lived in London for the last six years, where she was treated for a back problem which had caused her depression, a friend added.

The shapely actress with dark sparkling eyes began her career with the film "Hassan and Naima," an Egyptian version of Shakespeare”s "Romeo and Juliet", and soon became a star in the Arab world, gaining the nickname of "Egypt”s Cinderella."

She was courted by Egypt”s leading men, and married four of them.

The heart-throb brought to life a wide variety of comic and serious characters as diverse as the belly-dancer in "Don”t Trust Zouzou" and a student raped and tortured in Egyptian prisons in "Al-Karnak," an adaptation of a novel by Nobel laureate winner Naguib Mahfouz.

She first married film cameraman Salah Karim in the 1960s.

Linked by the press to Egypt”s most famous crooner of the 1960s, Abdel Halim Hafez, Hosni never married him but went on to wed film director Ali Badrakhan at the end of the decade.

She later divorced Badrakhan, who turned up for the arrival of her body at Cairo airport late Wednesday, and married Egyptian screenwriter Maher Awwad in the early 1990s.

She married Zaki Fattin Abdel Wahhab in 1981. She never had any children.

"Concerned about preserving her image, she withdrew from public life and would only attend dinners in London with those closest to her heart," one of the actress”s friends confided.