In 1940, Allied forces took her father and other Italian men from their quarter to the Fayed prison camp in the desert near Cairo. When Pietro was released in 1944, he returned home as a completely different person, so violent that Iolanda and other children in the neighbourhood were scared of him. She later recalled, “I hated him when he beat me, I hated him especially when he beat my mom and brothers. I wanted him to die, and he did.” Iolanda was twelve when Pietro died of a brain abscess in 1945.

In her teen years, Iolanda developed an interest in acting due to her uncle’s job as a projectionist for a local cinema, and often participated in school performances at the end of the semester. She graduated in 1951 and began working as a copy typist in a pharmaceutical company the same year. While required to work to financially help her family, Iolanda still had acting ambitions.

Shortly thereafter, her best friend Miranda encouraged her to compete in Miss Ondine, a minor Cairo beauty pageant which she entered on the assurance that it was just for fun and that her mother would not find out. When Iolanda unexpectedly won second prize and Miranda won second runner-up, they were photographed and published in newspapers Le journal d’Égypte and Le progrès égyptien. The next day when her mother found out, she forcibly cut Iolanda’s hair short. Eventually, her mother relented and Iolanda left her job to start modelling for Donna, a Cairo-based fashion house.

Three Egyptian film directors placed Iolanda in their productions; Marco de Gastyne cast her in The Mask of Tutankhamun (1954) and Niazi Mostafa cast her for a supporting role in A Glass and a Cigarette (1954), on which posters she appears with her newly adopted stage name Dalila.

On 25 December 1954, Dalila left Egypt for Paris. Her first residence was a room in an apartment of Gastyne’s friend, the impresario Vidal

She met with a number of directors, auditioned for movie roles, but failed each time. Vidal relocated her to a smaller apartment where her first neighbor was Alain Delon (then still unknown to the wider public), with whom she had a brief relationship.

Dalila’s difficulty in finding acting work throughout 1955, led her to try singing. Vidal introduced her to Roland Berger, a friend and professor who agreed to give her singing lessons seven days per week at a low price. He was strict and used to yell, with Dalila responding even more loudly. Their lessons sometimes ended with her slamming the door, but she always returned the next day. Seeing her progress, Berger arranged for her to perform in the cabaret Le Drap d’Or on Champs-Élysées, where she was spotted by Jacques Paoli, the director of another cabaret, La Villa d’Este. Paoli engaged her for a series of performances that proved popular, and Dalila received her first attention of the public in France among which was Bruno Coquatrix, the director of Olympia, who invited her to perform at his singing contest Les Numéros 1 de demain. In future years, Coquatrix said: ”Her voice is full of color and volume, and has all that men love: gentleness, sensuality and eroticism.”

Dalila was also spotted by author and screenwriter Alfred Marchand, who advised to change her name to Dalida: “Your pseudonym resembles too much the movie Samson and Delilah and it won’t help to boost your popularity. Why don’t you replace the second ‘l’ with a ‘d’, like God the father?” She immediately accepted the change.