Omar Sharif: star of ‘Doctor Zhivago’, dies at 83

The smouldering Egyptian actor who rose to fame in Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago dies at the age of 83.

This November, 1965 file photo from Metro Goldwyn-Mayer shows actor Omar Sharif, in the movie based on Boris Pasternak' s Doctor Zhivago.

Many would say that Omar Sharif owed his international film career to the British director David Lean. While preparing his epic biography Lawrence of Arabia, Lean was alerted to a handsome young actor little known outside Arab cinema and cast him as the chieftain, Sherif Ali, who befriends Lawrence in the desert. Yet there was another figure who arguably played a more crucial role in Sharif’s success: his mother.

“She was determined that I would be the most handsome and most successful man in the world,” he said. “At 11, I was becoming incredibly fat, so she thought, ‘Where is the worst food in the world?’ and she sent me to an English boarding school. After a year I was skinny and I spoke perfect English — without which my career would never have taken off.”

Despite competition from his fellow supporting actors — Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins and Claude Rains — Sharif’s engaging performance alongside Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia was widely noticed and earned him an Oscar nomination. With one, comparatively modest, part a new career was launched and Sharif was suddenly in demand, playing everybody from Ingrid Bergman’s lover in The Yellow Rolls-Royce to the Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan.

Lean re-emerged in 1965 to offer Sharif the title role in Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. The actor’s daily routine, as he played a physician caught up in the violence of the Russian Revolution, consisted of hair-straightening and skin-waxing to disguise his Middle Eastern heritage.

Despite being a big, and largely unexpected, commercial success, the film failed to impress the critics, who were particularly underwhelmed by what they saw as Sharif’s dull and wooden performance. Even he agreed with them. “I found the part diabolically hard and I thought I was no good. I was on set every day, with a tight elastic band around my head to make my eyes look less Arabic. I remember phoning Lean in the middle of the night and saying, ‘you’ve made a mistake’. Even now, I hate that melodramatic performance, with my big, wet, cows’ eyes.”

Such carping failed to damage Sharif’s career and he continued to be in demand for Hollywood and international films for another 20 years, winning three Golden Globes. His striking presence and dashing looks — his sleek black hair, thick moustache and gleaming teeth — could not disguise his limitations as a performer, however, and for one French magazine his appearance in the 1969 film The Appointment confirmed him as “the worst actor in the entire history of the cinema”.

He was by no means that, though there were too many forgettable performances in undistinguished films. Interviewed on the set of Mayerling, in which he played the troubled Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, he said: “If a director wants Omar Sharif to play a part he gets Omar Sharif, not some nutty prince. I play Rudolf like I play all my parts. Prince Rudolf is me. I don’t give a damn how his mind works. All I care about is getting to the studio on time and remembering my lines.”

Away from the screen Sharif became almost as well-known as one of the world’s leading bridge players. He was a familiar figure at tournaments and ensured that his film contracts gave him time off to take part in them. He wrote books on the game, contributed bridge columns to the Sunday Express and Observer newspapers, and found a mentor in The Sunday Times bridge correspondent Boris Schapiro, whom he first met at the Hamilton Club in London. They became close acquaintances and always found time for a game whenever the actor was visiting. In his later years Sharif enjoyed explaining the fundamentals to his grandson, mischievously telling him that playing bridge was like making love: “You need a good partner or a good hand.”

Sharif, whose real name was Michael Demitri Chalhoub, was born in 1932 in Alexandria into a family of Lebanese and Syrian descent. His father was a wealthy timber merchant and cosmopolitan enough to bring up his son as a French speaker. Only when he went into films did Sharif learn Arabic. He was sent to Victoria College, an English-style boarding school in Alexandria that was modelled on Eton, and earned a degree in mathematics and physics from Cairo University. After working briefly as a timber salesman in his father’s business, he decided to focus on acting and applied to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) in London.

He made his first film, The Blazing Sun, in 1954, by which time he had changed his name to Omar El-Cherif. He later claimed — though he liked to tease interviewers — that the “Omar” came from the American general Omar Bradley, and the Cherif/Sharif from the sheriff in western films. Peter O’Toole, who became a fast friend, considered the name ridiculous and insisted on calling him “Fred” when they were on the set of Lawrence of Arabia.

Sharif’s co-star in The Blazing Sun was Faten Hamama, one of Egypt’s leading actresses, and they fell in love. He converted from Catholicism to Islam in order to marry her in 1955.

There followed a busy apprenticeship in Egyptian films, of which he made more than 20 in five years, and he also appeared in a couple of French co-productions. Only the latter were seen in Europe and he seemed destined to remain a star of the Arab cinema until Lean discovered him for Lawrence of Arabia. The first time he set foot in Hollywood was for the film’s opening. “There was a party afterwards and people like Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner came to shake my hand. I was completely starstruck.”

Of his films post-Lean, Funny Girl, where he played the husband of Barbra Streisand’s showgirl Fanny Brice, was one of the better ones and reports of a real affair between Sharif and his co-star caused a stir. It was not the first time, or the last, that Sharif was to be linked romantically to his leading ladies, who included Catherine Deneuve, Anouk Aimee and Sophia Loren. Undoubtedly he enjoyed the company of beautiful women, but he insisted he was “the stud of nothing"- “I wish I’d lived the life that they say I did”.

If his love life, real or imagined, occupied many of the column inches devoted to him once his film career was no longer able to excite, much of the rest was devoted to his gambling habits. His mother had been a famous gambler, in the company of the former Egyptian king, Farouk. Sharif said he made so many bad films because he needed the money to pay off his debts. In 1991 he lost pounds 750,000 at roulette in one evening; two years later, with film work drying up, he claimed he was broke and could no longer afford an opulent lifestyle.

In between films Sharif made forays into television and the theatre. In 1984 he appeared in The Far Pavilions, an ITV miniseries based on MM Kaye’s novel of India under the British Raj, and in 1996 he was the sorcerer in Gulliver’s Travels for Channel 4.

His marriage to Faten Hamama (obituary, February 7, 2015), produced a son, Tarek, but their filming commitments meant they spent months apart. In 1974 they divorced. Tarek, now a restaurant proprietor, dabbled in acting when he was younger and even appeared in Zhivago playing an eight-year-old version of Sharif’s character.

Despite periodic reports to the contrary, Sharif did not remarry. He said he married only once because he loved only once, though he claimed that at the height of his popularity he received 3,000 proposals a week. He also had an illegitimate son, Ruben, from a brief relationship with Paola de Luca, an Italian journalist. The boy grew up in Rome and his father rarely saw him.

For decades he chose to live in hotels rather than a permanent home, and had most recently been staying in the tourist resort of El Gouna. He remained an avid supporter of Hull City football club having been introduced to the Tigers by Sir Tom Courtenay. “On a Saturday afternoon, if I was in the desert and could not reach a television, I would telephone the club and say: ‘Can you tell me the score, please?’”

Earlier this year he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

A perennial gentleman, he accepted life with a good grace.

“Sometimes you make mistakes, but I never feel regret because that would make me unhappy. Given the circumstances, I’d probably do exactly the same things again.”

Omar Sharif, actor and bridge player, was born on April 10, 1932. He died of a heart attack on July 10, 2015 aged 83

The Times