Omar Sharif

The man the world knew as Omar Sharif was born Michel Dimitri Chalhoub on April 10, 1932, in Alexandria, Egypt, into a prosperous Melkite Greek Catholic family of Lebanese descent ^[1]. His father ran a successful timber business, and the household moved in comfortable circles; his mother was a keen card player whose gatherings reportedly drew figures from Cairo society ^[2].

He was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, an English-language school that produced several notable graduates of his generation, and he grew up speaking Arabic, English, and French with ease ^[1]. He went on to study mathematics and physics at Cairo University before spending a period in the family lumber trade, work that held little appeal for a young man already drawn to performance ^[3].

Accounts of his youth describe a boy who was overweight and shy until his school years, when acting in student productions gave him a new confidence. That early taste of the stage shaped the direction of his life, and by his early twenties he was determined to work in film rather than commerce ^[2].

Sharif's screen career began in 1954 when the director Youssef Chahine cast him in Siraa Fil-Wadi, released in English as The Blazing Sun, opposite the celebrated actress Faten Hamama ^[1]. Any account of who Omar Sharif was has to begin here: the film made him a star in Egypt almost overnight, and the pairing with Hamama proved decisive both professionally and personally. He adopted the screen name Omar Sharif around this time ^[3].

Hamama was then the most admired actress in Egyptian cinema, and the two married in 1955 after Sharif converted to Islam ^[1]. Through the rest of the 1950s they appeared together in a string of popular Egyptian films, and Sharif established himself as a romantic leading man in one of the busiest film industries outside Hollywood ^[4]. Their son, Tarek, was born in 1957 ^[2].

By the start of the 1960s Sharif had roughly two dozen Egyptian pictures behind him. He was successful, fluent in several languages, and, as it turned out, exactly the kind of actor an English director was searching for to fill a demanding supporting role in a desert epic ^[3].

David Lean cast Sharif as Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and the actor's entrance, emerging slowly from a shimmering mirage on the horizon, became one of the most discussed shots in film history ^[2]. The performance brought him an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor and two Golden Globe Awards, and it turned an Egyptian matinee idol into an international name almost overnight ^[1]. Among Omar Sharif achievements, this role remains the foundation on which everything else rested.

Lean called on him again for the title role in Doctor Zhivago (1965), the adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel about a physician and poet swept up in the Russian Revolution. The film was a massive commercial success, and Sharif won the Golden Globe for best actor in a drama ^[1]. He worked steadily through the decade in large international productions, playing the Mongol conqueror in Genghis Khan (1965), a German officer in The Night of the Generals (1967), Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling (1968), and the revolutionary Che Guevara in Che! (1969) ^[3].

His role as the gambler Nicky Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) added another major hit but carried a cost at home. Streisand's public support for Israel, at a moment shortly after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, made the casting controversial in Egypt, and Sharif faced sharp criticism in the Egyptian press for appearing with her ^[2]. He continued working internationally regardless, a choice that defined the cosmopolitan, borderless character of his career ^[4].

Few film stars have had a second public identity as substantial as Sharif's life in contract bridge. He became one of the game's most famous players, led the touring Omar Sharif Bridge Circus in the late 1960s and 1970s, and represented Egypt in international competition ^[5]. For decades a syndicated bridge column carried his name in newspapers around the world, and he co-wrote books on the game; he once suggested that bridge, not acting, was his true passion ^[3].

His marriage to Faten Hamama did not survive the demands of an international career that kept him away from Egypt for years at a time. The couple separated in the mid 1960s and divorced in 1974, and Sharif never remarried ^[1]. In interviews across his later life he repeatedly described Hamama, who died in January 2015, as the one great love of his life ^[2].

Sharif lived for long stretches in European hotels, particularly in Paris and London, and was candid about the fortunes he lost at casinos and racetracks. Gambling debts, by his own account, pushed him to accept roles in many forgettable films during the 1970s and 1980s ^[4]. In 1977 he published an autobiography, The Eternal Male, written with Marie-Thérèse Guinchard, which recounted his career and his restless private life with disarming frankness ^[6].

After two decades of mostly minor parts, Sharif found a late role worthy of his gifts. In the French film Monsieur Ibrahim (2003) he played an elderly Muslim shopkeeper in Paris who befriends a Jewish boy, and the performance won him the César Award for best actor, France's highest film honor ^[1]. He said at the time that he had grown tired of appearing in poor films and had waited years for a script that moved him ^[2].

Recognition accumulated in his final decade. The Venice Film Festival honored him with a career award in 2003, and he continued to take occasional roles in international productions, including the racehorse drama Hidalgo (2004) ^[3]. Among lesser-known Omar Sharif facts, his grandson, the actor and advocate Omar Sharif Jr., publicly confirmed in 2015 that his grandfather had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease ^[2].

Sharif died of a heart attack on July 10, 2015, at the Behman Hospital in Cairo, at the age of 83, only months after the death of Faten Hamama ^[1]. Obituaries around the world recalled the desert entrance in Lawrence of Arabia and mourned the loss of a performer who had bridged Arab and Western cinema like no one before him ^[4].

Any Omar Sharif biography returns to a simple point: he opened a door that had barely existed. In an era when Hollywood routinely cast Western actors in Middle Eastern roles, Sharif reached genuine international stardom while remaining identifiably Egyptian, and generations of actors from the region have cited his example ^[4]. His range, from Egyptian melodrama to Russian epic to French character study, demonstrated that an Arab actor could carry stories from any culture ^[2].

In Egypt he is remembered both for his Hollywood fame and for the early films with Faten Hamama that remain staples of Arabic-language television. His willingness to work across political and cultural lines sometimes brought him criticism at home, yet it also made him a rare shared reference point between Arab and Western audiences ^[3]. The dark eyes, the gap-toothed smile, and the unhurried charm became shorthand for a certain idea of old-fashioned screen glamour ^[1].

Beyond cinema, his name endures at the bridge table, in the columns and books he left behind, and in the charitable and advocacy work carried on by his family ^[5]. Sixty years after his first film, the mirage shot from Lawrence of Arabia is still studied, imitated, and celebrated, a fitting monument for an actor who arrived from an unexpected direction and stayed in view for half a century ^[2].