In Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif first emerges as a speck in the distance in the shimmering desert sand. He draws closer, a black-robed figure on a trotting camel, until he finally dismounts, pulling aside his scarf to reveal his dark eyes and a disarming smile framed by his thin mustache.
The Egyptian-born actor’s Hollywood debut immediately enshrined him as a smoldering leading man of the 1960s, transcending nationality.
Sharif died of a heart attack in a Cairo hospital on Friday at the age of 83, London-based agent Steve Kenis and close friends said.
Photo: EPA
When director David Lean cast him in 1962’s Lawrence of Arabia, Sharif was already the biggest heartthrob in Egypt, where he played brooding, romantic heroes in multiple films in the 1950s — and was married to the nation’s reigning cinema beauty, but he was a virtual unknown elsewhere.
He was not Lean’s first choice to play Sherif Ali, the tribal leader with whom Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence teams up to help lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. Lean had hired another actor, but dropped him because his eyes were not the right color. Film producer Sam Spiegel found Sharif while searching for a replacement in Cairo. After a screen test proved he was fluent in English, he got the job.
The film brought a supporting-actor Oscar nomination.
His stardom was cemented three years later with Doctor Zhivago.
Though he had more than 100 films to his credit, Doctor Zhivago was considered his Hollywood classic. The Russian doctor-poet Zhivago makes his way through the upheaval of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, guided by his devotion to his art and to his doomed love for Lara, played by Julie Christie.
Still, Sharif never thought it was as good as it could have been.
“It is sentimental. Too much of that music,” he once said, referring to Maurice Jarre’s luscious Oscar-winning score.
Although Sharif never achieved that level of success again, he remained a sought-after actor for many years, able to play different nationalities.
He played the Jewish gambler Nick Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice in Funny Girl. The 1968 film was banned in Egypt because he played a Jew.
For most of the 1990s and 2000s, he was better known for the lifestyle of an international playboy, living in hotels and gambling prodigiously, reportedly once winning US$1 million at an Italian casino.
Yousra, Egypt’s biggest actress for much of the past 30 years and a close friend of Sharif, compared him to a “clean-cut” diamond.
“He was a phenomenon; a one of a kind. Everyone had a dream to be like Omar Sharif. No one will be like him,” she said on Friday.
Born Michael Shalhoub on April 10, 1932, in Egypt’s Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria, Sharif was the son of Christian Syrian-Lebanese parents.
After working three years at his father’s lumber company, he fulfilled his longtime ambition to become a movie actor. Taking the name Omar el-Sharif, he appeared in nearly two dozen Egyptian films. In the 1954 Struggle in the Valley, he plays a young man caught up in a power struggle in a Nile village and in love with the daughter of his rival, played by Egypt’s top movie queen, Faten Hamama.
A year later, Sharif converted to Islam and married Hamama. They were the glamor couple of Egyptian cinema, going on to star together in multiple films.
They had a son, Tarek, and divorced in 1974.
Sharif never remarried. In 2004, he said he had another son.
Tarek said in May that his father had Alzheimer’s.
In a 2003 interview, Sharif struck a wistful note about how Lawrence of Arabia vaulted him to fame.
It will always be a great film, he said, but “it separated me from my wife, from my family... That was it, the end of our wedding. I might have been happier having stayed an Egyptian film star.”
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