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Movies & TV

In memoriam: Omar Sharif, 1932-2015

Where do you start with Omar Sharif?

You can describe him as the Egyptian-born, Lebanese-Syrian actor whose casting as Yuri Zhivago in David Lean’s 1965 epic Doctor Zhivago broke several unofficial racial barriers – but even that requires some unpacking. 

Before Lean cast Sharif in Zhivago, the English director had made him a star in Lawrence Of Arabia, giving the unknown actor the key role of Sherif Ali alongside Peter O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence. 

O’Toole got the title role, but it was Sharif who landed the film’s key image, emerging out of the Arabian Desert on horseback in a stunning long take. It was also a fine metaphor for Sharif’s arrival on the landscape of cinema: at first indiscernible, then massive.

Lawrence made Sharif a very desirable figure for certain epic-minded producers. He appeared in The Fall Of The Roman Empire and a terrible Marco Polo movie, Marco The Magnificent, and played the title roles in Genghis Khan and Che! 

He was fine or better in those films, but it’s in the movies that allowed him to unleash the full force of his charisma where he really excelled. When Lean paired Sharif with Julie Christie at her most radiant in Doctor Zhivago, their chemistry powers entire sections of the narrative. Cast as Nicky Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, Sharif’s barely maintained poise functions as a sly counterbalance to the exuberance of Streisand’s first screen performance.

The 70s weren’t as kind to Sharif, either because he aged out of leading-man status or because trends shifted away from big international productions and into a more nuanced style of performance. You can’t really picture Sharif turning up in something like The Godfather or Chinatown, somehow, not because of the colour of his skin, but because of the style of his performance. He was too big a presence for movies about whispered secrets. 

Instead, he turned up in things like The Mysterious Island and Juggernaut. When he played the heavy in the Chevy Chase/Benji vehicle Oh Heavenly Dog, he must have known pickings were slim. Fortunately, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker and David Zucker gave him a fun cameo in their Airplane! follow-up Top Secret!, sending up his suave pan-European presence by casting him as a luckless spy. Decades of jobbing work followed: Sharif appeared in everything from TV miniseries to actioners like The 13th Warrior and Hidalgo. He was always regal, always poised.

He sort of had to be. As the first Arab actor to break in the West, he functioned as a kind of ambassador for an entire culture. Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi’s memoir, No Land’s Man, opens with an account of Mandvi’s meeting Sharif while serving drinks at a party, and getting the chance to thank the man who’d made it possible for him to consider a career in entertainment:

… a man whose face looked like no other lead actor I had ever seen in an English-language film. This man was not playing a servant or a savage like in Tarzan movies. He wasn’t Gunga Din or Tonto or a Bedouin. This man was the epitome of a gentleman, albeit a brown gentleman, who spoke smoothly before kissing the beautiful, blonde, white Julie Christie.

To have done that at all was a remarkable accomplishment. To do it well, and with style? That was Omar Sharif.

Sharif died this morning in Cairo after suffering a heart attack. He was 83 years old.

normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner

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