Siti Hasmah Mohamad Ali

On 12 July 2026 she turned 100. In August 2026 she and Mahathir were reported as among the world's oldest living married couples and as record holders for the oldest married couple ever recorded, according to contemporaneous coverage.

She died on the morning of 28 September 2026 at the National Heart Institute (Institut Jantung Negara, IJN) in Kuala Lumpur, aged 100. Her son Tan Sri Mokhzani Mahathir confirmed the death to Bernama. The cause of death was not publicly disclosed. News organisations including The Star and The Rakyat Post reported that further funeral arrangements were expected from the family. She was survived by her husband, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, their seven children, and an extended family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Tributes emphasised her dual identity as pioneering physician and Ibu Negara, and her century of steadiness beside Malaysian public life.

Hasmah binti Mohamad Ali was born on 12 July 1926 in Klang, Selangor, in what was then the Federated Malay States. She was the sixth of ten siblings in a Malay family of Minangkabau descent linked to Negeri Sembilan. Her father, Haji Mohd Ali (also recorded as Mohd Ali bin Mohd Taib), worked as a government officer; her mother, Hajah Siti Khatijah binti Ahmad, was a housewife.

The household produced several national figures. Elder brother Ismail Mohamed Ali became the second Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia (1962 to 1980) and the first chairman of Permodalan Nasional Berhad. Another brother, General (Rtd) Mohamed Hashim Mohd Ali, later served as Chief of the Defence Forces. Ahmad Razali Mohd Ali became Menteri Besar of Selangor, and sister Saleha Mohd Ali was active in the founding years of UMNO and in medicine.

Growing up between Klang and Kuala Lumpur, she received an English-medium education that was still uncommon for many Malay girls of her generation. That schooling, and a family that valued public service, set the path toward medicine at a time when few Malay women entered the profession.

She attended Methodist Girls' School in Kuala Lumpur, then St Mary's School (SMK St. Mary) and Pudu English School, where she obtained her School Certificate. After the Second World War she enrolled on scholarship at the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore, becoming one of the first Malay women in the medical course and, in her batch, the only Malay female student.

There in 1947 she met Mahathir Mohamad, a fellow medical student from Kedah. She later wrote that he helped her through Physics and Chemistry and called him her "hero" and her "boy from the Paddy Fields State." She graduated as a medical doctor in 1955 from the Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, then located in Singapore (the lineage of today's Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine / National University of Singapore).

In 1966, already deep into maternal and child health work, she attended a public health certificate programme at the School of Public Health, University of Michigan. Decades later, Singapore's National University of Singapore honoured her with a Distinguished Alumni Service Award (2018), and many Malaysian and overseas universities conferred honorary doctorates in medicine, public health, education and related fields.

After housemanship at Kuala Lumpur General Hospital she joined the government health service. Following her 1956 marriage she moved to Alor Setar and served as a medical officer at Alor Setar General Hospital and in rural Kedah. She later described public health as her happiest professional chapter.

In 1965 she became the first woman in Malaysia to serve as a medical officer in the Maternal and Child Health Department and worked as principal of the Rural Health Training School in Jitra. There she trained midwives, promoted clean delivery with UNICEF-supported sterilised birth kits, and confronted deep fear of hospitals in rural communities. She recalled that many families believed that going to hospital meant you would die, and that changing that mindset required patience, respect and presence in the villages.

In 1974 she became the first woman appointed State Maternal and Child Health Officer in Kedah, and also served as Maternal and Child Health Officer at the Institute for Public Health in Bangsar. Under programmes she helped lead, infant mortality in her sphere of work fell from about 75 per 1,000 births to around 6 or 7 per 1,000. She published articles on family medicine and the socioeconomic factors linked to pregnancy and childbearing in Malaysia, and later lectured at the University of Malaya Faculty of Dentistry. She retired from government service in 1979.

When Mahathir became prime minister on 16 July 1981, she became spouse of the prime minister, a role she held until 30 October 2003, and again from 10 May 2018 to 24 February 2020 (with a brief interim period into early March 2020). She had earlier been spouse of the deputy prime minister from 1976 to 1981.

She used the platform to advocate for women's health, family planning, drug-abuse control, adult literacy and mental health. As president of BAKTI she focused on youth and drugs; in 1985 she accepted Nancy Reagan's invitation to the First Ladies' Conference on Drug Abuse in Washington, D.C., and in 1987 represented Malaysia at the International Conference on Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking in Vienna. With Queen Fabiola of Belgium and others she helped launch work on the economic advancement of rural women, later chairing and then serving as president of the Asia-Pacific regional steering committee.

In September 1995 she led Malaysia's delegation to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing and delivered "Equality, Development and Peace: A Caring World." In March 2000 she led a five-day Malaysian goodwill visit to Iraq to assess sanctions' impact on women and children, meeting Tariq Aziz and, in a meeting kept secret even from her security detail until it happened, Saddam Hussein. In October 2003 she chaired the First Ladies Dialogue on Women, Peace and Development during the 10th OIC Summit.

From 20 June 1997 to 20 June 2012 she served as the first chancellor of Multimedia University. During the 2018 to 2020 return to Putrajaya she stayed largely in the couple's own home rather than relocating again, launched BookXcess Cyberjaya as Malaysia's first 24-hour bookstore, and remained a warm public presence beside Mahathir on official travel.

She married Mahathir Mohamad on 5 August 1956 in Kuala Lumpur, after a long student courtship that began in Singapore. They had seven children: Marina, Mirzan, Melinda, Mokhzani, Mukhriz, Maizura and Mazhar. The family later grew to include many grandchildren. Mukhriz twice served as Menteri Besar of Kedah; Marina became a well-known writer, commentator and activist on social issues including HIV/AIDS.

She loved cats and music. She began violin at 16, stopped for decades, then returned to the instrument in later life, performing for charity and, in 2018, seeing a violin auctioned for RM35,000 to support a Pakatan Harapan campaign. She also learned the erhu and, in her seventies, French, later adding Japanese study. She travelled widely with Mahathir (she once said Afghanistan was the only country she had not visited with him) and named Japan a favourite holiday destination.

Unlike many Malaysian Muslim women of her generation in public life, she usually did not wear the tudung, a choice she linked in interviews to her husband's views as well as her own. In March 2019 she had surgery to remove a small left-breast lump and later spoke at a breast-cancer awareness event about early screening. In August 2019 she was briefly hospitalised with mild food poisoning. On 27 October 2024 she told the Coffee with Ryan podcast that her original name did not include "Siti" and asked to be called Hasmah.

Trained as a clinician, she believed public health succeeded only when professionals met rural people with empathy. In a UNICEF Wisdom Project interview with granddaughter Serena Melia Mukhriz she described changing mental attitudes so that families would accept hospital care, and she praised immunisation, midwife training and UNICEF birth kits as practical tools that cut infant deaths.

She was a consistent vaccine advocate in later years, warning against anti-vaccination misinformation and calling vaccination an act of love. She supported family planning and women's education even when cultural resistance was strong, arguing for patience and mutual respect rather than force. On mental health she accepted Rosalynn Carter's invitation to contribute through the World Federation for Mental Health. She also backed literacy, Girl Guiding and the inclusion of people with disabilities and special needs.

Politically she was associated over time with UMNO and later Bersatu through her husband's parties, but her public voice more often stressed care, unity and women's welfare than partisan combat. Her memoir and interviews present marriage as a partnership of mutual support, and ageing as a reason to keep learning rather than withdraw.

Four themes defined her advocacy. First, maternal and child health: immunisation, clean midwifery, rural clinics and education against unsafe postnatal practices. Second, women's advancement: family planning associations, PPSEAWA keynote addresses in Tokyo, Bangkok and Tonga, hosting the 1997 triennial conference in Kuala Lumpur, and the Beijing conference speech. Third, drug-abuse prevention among youth through BAKTI and international first ladies' networks. Fourth, mental health, through collaboration with Rosalynn Carter's World Federation for Mental Health committee.

She also patronised the Malaysian Paediatric Association, the Malaysian Association of Maternal Health and Neonate, the Badminton Association of Malaysia, and organisations for the rehabilitation of handicapped children. The Malaysian AIDS Foundation established a Dr Siti Hasmah Award in 1996 for HIV/AIDS awareness work. She served as honorary adviser to the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, reflecting a late-life concern with war's effects on civilians, a theme of her 2021 book Speaking of Mass Destruction.

Her legacy is often told in two registers. Professionally, she helped normalise modern maternal and child health for rural Malay communities and modelled a Malay woman doctor's career when almost none existed. Nationally, she redefined the spouse-of-the-prime-minister role as substantive public-health and social advocacy rather than ceremony alone, earning the popular honour Ibu Negara from ASLI in 2019.

Institutions remembered her with honorary doctorates, the Kazue McLaren Award in public health, NUS's Distinguished Alumni Service Award, orchid hybrids named for her, and theatre and film portrayals. For ordinary Malaysians the memory is warmer: the doctor who still played violin, the wife who held a prime minister's hand for seventy years, and the elder who asked to be called by her real name. Her death at 100 closed a life that spanned colonial Malaya, independence, industrialisation and a second Mahathir premiership.

Federal and state honours included Officer of the Order of the Defender of the Realm (KMN, 1975); Companion and later Knight Grand Companion of Kedah orders (SMK 1971; SSDK 1983); Grand Commander of the Order of Loyalty to the Crown of Malaysia (SSM), carrying the title Tun, conferred on 31 October 2003 (the first time a prime minister's wife received Tun-ship with her husband on his retirement); and high state awards from Sabah, Sarawak, Penang and Melaka. Selangor knighthoods conferred in 1983 and 1994 were returned in 2017 with her husband's returned awards.

Notable civilian recognitions include the Kazue McLaren Award (Asia Pacific Consortium for Public Health, 1988); honorary doctorates from UKM, the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, Indiana University, the University of Victoria, Universiti Malaya, Unimas, IIUM and others; the Malaysian Paediatric Association's Distinguished Paediatrics and Child Health Merit Award (1996); Olympic Council of Malaysia Women and Sport Award (2004); Kiwanis Hixson Fellowship (2006); NUS Distinguished Alumni Service Award (2018); Tokoh Srikandi Negara (2018); Asia HRD Lifetime Achievement Award (2019); ASLI's Ibu Negara award (2019); and Nona Superwoman Award (2020). Singapore named an orchid hybrid Dendrobium Mahathir Siti Hasmah in their honour in 2018.

She published My Name is Hasmah (Karangkraf, 2016) and Speaking of Mass Destruction (2021). She has been portrayed on stage by Erra Fazira in Mahathir the Musical (2010) and by Sofia Jane and Lisa Surihani in Teater Tun Siti Hasmah (2012) at Istana Budaya. On screen she was played by Fadhilah Mansor in Kapsul (2015) and by Fauziah Latiff in Mahathir: The Journey. She and Mahathir appeared in an episode of the children's series Upin & Ipin in 2018.

Viral later-life moments included asking Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan if she could hold his hand (2018), weekend drives with Mahathir, and violin performances, including accompanying Siti Nurhaliza at a Sounds of Malaysia event at Multimedia University in 2025. Long interviews, including NST exclusives and Coffee with Ryan, shaped public understanding of her name, marriage and medical memories.