Omar Sharif: an exquisite actor whose charisma baffled Hollywood

The Egyptian star Omar Sharif — the man who famously materialised like a mirage from the throbbing heat of a desert horizon in Lawrence of Arabia — was handsome, worldly, and wreathed in what might be called a cigar-smoke aura of the exotic: he was preeningly masculine, a true exquisite.

Sharif was not your regular corn-fed wasp dreamboat idol. His saturnine looks and foreign glamour made him to Hollywood of the 1960s what the French star Charles Boyer had been to an earlier generation. He had a touch of class, part of an aristocracy of international sophistication, at once raffish and rather conservative, a style that was becoming a little démodé even in that era that saw Sharif achieve his great celebrity. It is interesting that when the ageing Turkish actor and hotel-keeper in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film Winter Sleep in 2014 wants to impress people, he drones on about having once met Omar Sharif.

Sharif’s professional passion for contract bridge and the demi-monde of the casino — a vocation he pursued in parallel to the movies — gave him the allure of a gambler and man-about-town. If producers of the time took a more adventurous line in casting, Omar Sharif might have made a brilliant 007.

His great success was created by David Lean, who made him a star in two of the epics which were “sweeping” in a way only Lean could manage — Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965). Lean conferred upon Sharif a certain orientalist charisma, and he gave Sharif one of the greatest “entrances” in movie history.

In Lawrence, he is Sherif Ali, the Arab tribe leader who befriends Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence, appearing almost like a force of nature or a djinn, in the shimmering haze of the desert in a mysterious, fascinating, daringly drawn-out continuous camera shot. If Sharif had less dash and style, the rest of his performance in that film would have been an awful anti-climax. It wasn’t, though he was very much the subordinate player to that other sensational newcomer: O’Toole.

He was upgraded to leading-man status with Doctor Zhivago: unlike Lawrence, this movie had women in it, and Sharif’s Egyptian provenance was an approximation of Russianness. He was the soulful, romantic lover in the pre-revolutionary age, for the movie version of Pasternak’s 1958 novel whose forbidden status was still a hot-button topic in both the US and the USSR. Sharif and Julie Christie made a very handsome couple, although the movie’s alleged slushiness and its resemblance to a kind of Eastern Gone With The Wind meant it was not much liked by the critics and the film marked the beginning of the decline in Lean’s fortunes.

Three years later, Sharif starred in a movie which cemented his image of card-playing raffishness: Funny Girl, again providing the good-humoured ballast of experience to a newcomer: fledgling musical star Barbra Streisand. She is Ziegfeld Follies star Fanny Brice who is being romanced and married by Nicky Arnstein, an adorable ne’er-do-well and poker player — played of course by Sharif.

Sharif’s career is that of an extremely intelligent and capable actor who had built up a substantial following in Egyptian film world before breaking into a Hollywood English-language industry which perhaps didn’t know quite what to do with him: not sufficiently clean-cut to be a conventional romantic lead, too charismatic to be a second-string character-player, and maybe too engaging to be the bad guy. He had enormous style — a man born to be captured by a movie camera.