Youssef Wahbi was born on 14/7/1900 to an aristocratic family. His father, Abdallah Pasha Wahbi, was an irrigation engineer. Youssef Wahbi travelled to Italy where he worked for some time and then to France with his colleagues Mokhtar Osman and Aziz Eid and joined their theatres. After his father's death, Wahbi returned to Cairo and used the great fortune he inherited to establish a theatrical troupe named "Ramses", the pharaonic name given to Youssef Wahbi during his stay in Europe. On May 10, 1923, the troupe premiered a play called "AI Magnon", (The Insane) which was acclaimed by both the audience and the critics.

Youssef Wahbi was the first artist to establish an artistic city, Ramses Complex in Zamalek. It consisted of a large cinema studio, an amphitheatre, an open air cinema, and a show theatre. In his plays, he described many of the old customs and attacked colonialism. He was the first to call for limiting agricultural land ownership, as in Man of the Moment.

At the social level, he was the first to call for the abolition of the mandatory requirement for a married woman to live, against her will, with her husband at the house he chooses, commonly called "House of obedience" and for the equality of man and woman in work and rights. Despite his ill-health, he continued to work for 50 years performing more than 302 plays and about 50 films starting with "Zeinab" in 1930 until The Slaughterhouse in 1982.

Wahbi died on October 17, 1982.