To Western film critics, he was a three-movie wonder with style and dash. But Omar Sharif effortlessly transcended cultural barriers in a way that few movie icons have been able to in the history of cinema. His unique entrance in Lawrence of Arabia , emerging like a noontime apparition through a desert mirage, gradually transforming from a speck into the Harith chieftain, Sherif Ali, is the stuff of cinema lore.
Sharif, like his co-star in the film, Peter O’Toole, owed his international success to director David Lean. A phalanx of continental and American actors, including Indian tragedy king Dilip Kumar, were considered for the role before Lean finally settled on Sharif. “It was pure luck,” Sharif would recount of his famed casting coup.
Born Michel Chalhoub, 22-year old Sharif set the Sahara on fire with his debut film Sira Fi al-Wadi ( The Blazing Sky ) directed by his friend, the eminent Egyptian director Youssef Chahine. His multilingualism and a wealthy, cosmopolitan upbringing held him in good stead in the Occident after the massive international success of Lawrence of Arabia . Coupled with a commanding screen presence, soulful, brown eyes that simultaneously radiated melancholia and cheer, and an exotic accent, this Easterner was destined to conquer Hollywood.
In his career as the ‘all-purpose foreigner’, Sharif played a Russian four times, a German twice, and an Austrian, a Spaniard, a Yugoslavian, a Jewish-American, all once. He owed his existence to the epic film genre. With the traditional Hollywood studio system set for a collapse in the 1960s, the sustenance of this genre was left to the work of directors like Lean and Anthony Mann and the towering figure of producer Sam Spiegel. Lean’s casting of Sharif in 1965’s Doctor Zhivago as the eponymous Russian poet/doctor, demolished with one stroke ethnic stereotypes in casting. His chemistry with British actress Julie Christie, who played the politicised nurse Larissa Antipova, cemented his stardom as a romantic leading man in an age where anti-heroes were coming into vogue.. After the film’s success, Sharif lived out of his suitcase in European hotels, and was seen in the company of some of the world’s greatest beauties, from Ava Gardner to Catherine Deneuve. “The greatest lure for female fans since Rudolph Valentino,” as a New York newspaper columnist summarised.
But what made his ‘lover of the Levant’ image so irresistible was that it was seasoned by debonair, aristocratic sophistication. With little heed to his stardom, he made off-handed, casually dismissive remarks about his movies. When asked about Behold a Pale Horse ’s failure, he simply said: “A bad movie by a good director.” Sharif gave what is arguably his finest performance in producer Sam Spiegel’s The Night of the Generals (1967), a bristling satire on the Nazi psyche. With the 1960s withering away, the shape of things to come was visible with films such as The Graduate (1966), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Medium Cool (1969). The age of the opulent epic was in its death throes. His next was a lush sleepwalk through 19th century Habsburg decadence in Mayerling (1968), in which Sharif languidly plays the doomed crown prince Rudolph, struggling against the authority of Franz Joseph (James Mason) — a portent of things to come for him professionally as the studio system gradually dissipated. As a staid Italian lawyer who turns into a jealous monster, Sharif gave a commendable performance in Sidney Lumet’s fascinating misfire The Appointment (1969). In his inimitable style, he later quipped: “It was neither quite Fellini, nor quite Antonioni, nor quite Lumet.” That same year, Sharif played a Mexican outlaw in Mackenna’s Gold , a notorious flop and a gargantuan dud in the US. Gregory Peck, who played the lead, called it “absolutely wretched.” But Indian audiences, with their penchant for uncomplicated scenarios and grand vistas, wildly embraced the film and to this day, this picture, and not David Lean’s classics, serves as a fond introduction to Sharif’s work.
In the 1970s, Sharif, living the life of a roué in the fleshpots of Paris, became an international bridge player, doing “trashy films” to maintain his sybaritic lifestyle. Yet there were bright spots in the form of The Tamarind Seed , and Richard Lester’s Juggernaut (1974). A long time later, in 2003, Sharif made a graceful comeback in Monsieur Ibrahim . Omar Sharif was like a modern day Al-Farabi. He swept like a zephyr across the Western world and disarmed it with his Levantine charm to become what some perceptively remark Egypt’s most famous cultural icon since King Tut.
