Omar Sharif

The Man Who Rose from the Desert

Michel Shalhoub was born in Alexandria in 1932. He was not an actor by vocation but the son of a fine wood merchant who expected his heir to continue the family business. But the young man decided his destiny lay elsewhere.

He studied mathematics and physics at Cairo University. He worked for a while with his father to fulfill his obligations. Then Youssef Chahine suddenly appeared, the director who gave him his first break in 1954 with Struggle in the Valley.

He changed his name to Omar Sharif to marry Faten Hamama. She was the great star of Egyptian cinema at the time, and he was a handsome young man who spoke several languages with unusual ease.

The die was cast.

The Mirage of Worldwide Fame

David Lean was looking for a non-Western actor to play Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia. Sharif appeared in the arena, riding a camel and advancing from a black dot on the horizon until he filled the screen. That shot lasted two minutes and changed his life forever.

He won a Golden Globe and earned an Oscar nomination for that supporting role. Hollywood opened its doors wide to him. But the contract he signed with Columbia Pictures was abusive and forced him to accept projects he sometimes had no interest in.

He starred as the lead in Doctor Zhivago in 1965. He shot much of the film in Spain, specifically at the Canillas Studios in Madrid and in the fields of Soria. Those lands stood in for the Russian steppe during the revolution.

The cold was made of papier-mâché.

Cards, Horses and Gambling Debts

Sharif never hid that he preferred bridge to grueling film shoots. In 1968 he worked with Barbra Streisand on Funny Girl. The shoot was difficult because Egypt and the Jewish community were in the middle of armed conflict during the Six-Day War.

The Egyptian government came close to revoking his citizenship for kissing Streisand on screen. But he carried on as before. He spent fortunes in casinos and on racehorse stables. As a result, during the seventies and eighties he was forced to accept mediocre films just to pay off his debts.

He once lost a million dollars in a single night of gambling at a Paris casino.

In 1973 he published a book on bridge that was translated into several languages. He was a better card player than many of the actors he shared the bill with in B-movie productions. For him, cinema had become nothing more than an ATM.

Gambling addiction consumed his talent for decades.

The Return of the Old Lion

After years of forgettable projects and guest appearances on television, French cinema rescued him in 2003. He played a Muslim shopkeeper in Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran.

For this role he won the César Award for Best Actor. It was his last great performance before his memory began to noticeably fail him. In 2012 he filmed his final movie, Rock the Casbah.

In May 2015, her son Tarek revealed that the actor had Alzheimer's. He no longer remembered the details of his most famous films or understood why people stopped him on the street.

He died of a heart attack in a Cairo hospital on July 10, 2015. He was 83 years old and left an inheritance that barely covered his funeral costs. His horses and his card games had devoured all his money long before.