PARIS -- As night falls on Paris, Omar Sharif is getting breakfast: a stiff whisky and water, bowls of salted almonds and juicy black olives, a plate of finger food.

'I can't drink on an empty tummy,' says the Egyptian actor, nibbling smoked salmon off a coin-sized wafer.

Once one of Hollywood's most dashing leading men, with bedroom eyes and a silky accent that melted hearts, the star of Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia is today settled in life's slow lane. At 70, his riotous days, his ruinous passion for gambling, his 100 smokes-a-day habit are things of the past, he says.

This year is Sharif's 50th in movies. But in an hour-long interview, it is the more mundane pursuits in his life that catch attention: reading the newspapers during long leisurely afternoon baths in the deluxe Paris hotel he calls home; evenings watching his horses race; his whisky tipple; nights wining and dining in restaurants.

In sum, he appears as a man with the luxury of being able to do exactly as he pleases.

'I have no plans for tomorrow and I don't have memories of yesterday. I live now,' he said. 'At my age you can die any moment. It's not likely but possible and therefore I want to do what I feel like doing.'

Physically, he looks good. His big brown eyes still have the watery shine he used to such effect as the tortured poet in Doctor Zhivago. His once wavy dark hair is still thick but has gone a downy gray-white. He's tanned from vacationing in Egypt. A dulcet Arab lilt softens his slow, carefully enunciated English.

To his surprise, he says, he is recently been getting 'a huge amount of scripts,' but he's being picky -- trying to avoid the roles that saw him plunge from Golden Globe-winning highs (Doctor Zhivago, Lawrence) to horrid lows (Oh, Heavenly Dog! and Ashanti, among others.)

Sharif has appeared in more than 70 movies since his debut in Egyptian film in 1953, but since his heyday, many have been supporting roles, cameos or made-for-TV.

'I didn't have any pleasure for the last 25 years because I was doing rubbish -- that's all. I was just doing it to make a living,' he said. Now, 'I will work if I'm moved by something, by a script, something I find challenging.'

He will appear on French screens this August as an old Muslim who adopts a Jewish boy in Mr Ibrahim And The Flowers Of The Quran, directed by Francois Dupeyron.

'I loved the part,' the actor said. 'Even though it's not political it is a statement of some kind ... of friendship and love.'

He made the movie in French, which he speaks fluently along with Arabic, English, Spanish and Italian.

Sharif also will appear with Viggo Mortensen in Disney's horse-race adventure, Hidalgo, this autumn. He plays an Arab sheik, but he seems more passionate about the paycheck than the role.

'I got very well paid,' he said. With the funds, 'I have a little for a couple of years, I don't have to worry. That's how I live. As long as I have a couple of years ahead, money for a couple of years, I'm OK.'

Born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1932, he attended college in Cairo and worked in the family lumber business before turning to film. As an actor, he met his wife, actress Faten Hamama, and became Egypt's most popular star. Then he caught director David Lean's eye for the part of Sheik Sherif Ali Ibn el Kharish in Lawrence, the 1962 Best Picture Oscar winner.

Forty years later, Sharif talks with pride about the movie -- 'It's a great film and will remain a great film forever,' he says -- but he wonders whether he might have been better off without the fame it brought.

'It separated me from my wife, from my family ... We didn't see each other anymore and that was it, the end of our wedding,' he said. 'I might have been happier having stayed an Egyptian film star.'

They had one son, Tarek, who played Yuri Zhivago as a boy in Lean's 1965 epic.

Sharif peaked in his role as the older Zhivago, but it's not a film he loves. 'It's sentimental. Too much of that music,' he said of Maurice Jarre's Oscar-winning score.

He is also remembered for Funny Girl in 1968, opposite Barbra Streisand, who won a Best Actress Oscar for the musical.

But gradually, after a string of subsequent flops, his star dimmed and he became known instead as a world-class bridge player. He has written a book and newspaper column about the game -- but says he rarely plays now.

'I had become addicted,' he said. 'I used to go to bed and dream about the cards, the way I should have played them.'

Advancing age, he says, has also stopped him from gambling -- a habit born in the rootlessness of going from one movie shoot to another.

'Casinos are a place you go to when you arrive in a town where you know nobody,' he said. 'The reason that I stopped gambling about 10 years ago is that I'm not sure anymore than I can earn all the money that I want ... It's an age where you have to be careful.'

His routine is regal. 'I get up at midday, and then I have a very long bath and read all the papers in the bath and then I have an hour of exercise, keep fit," he says. He eats just once a day, at night, so 'this is my breakfast,' he says of his pre-dinner whisky and nibbles in the hotel's posh lobby.

'A hotel is very convenient,' he says. 'I don't imagine being a bachelor and living anywhere else -- an old bachelor, not a young one, because young bachelors can have lots of girlfriends.'

Which, since you're probably wondering, is something Sharif insists he's never had. When told that the Columbia World of Quotations once cited him as saying, 'Making love? It's a communion with a woman. The bed is the holy table,' Sharif laughs.

'Very few can claim to have been my girlfriend ... I never lived with anyone after my wife. Not even one week, not even a weekend, not even a day,' he says. 'Living alone and traveling all the time, I had the odd one-night stand. That's about all.' -- AP

Likes To Cry At The Movies

Omar Sharif

Bartcop Entertainment, February 14, 2002

One film legend will not be among the crowds thronging cinemas to judge this week's Oscar nominees for themselves.

Egyptian actor Omar Sharif goes to the movies only rarely, and when he does, his first criterion is not whether or not something has won an award. The smoldering sex symbol, still charismatic at 70, likes films that bring him to tears.

Among the few films he's seen in recent years, Sharif said only Amadeus, E.T., and Billy Elliott stood out, mentioning nothing on the short list for this year's Academy Awards.

Sharif is known as icon of exotic male good looks and even a world expert on bridge, but he will always be remembered for the role that won him his Oscar nomination -- the young Arab tribesman who appeared like a desert mirage in the 1962 blockbuster "Lawrence of Arabia," co-starring Peter O'Toole.

The only Arab to become a Hollywood superstar, Sharif's fame has far outlasted his days in the sun.

Sharif, who converted to Islam from Christianity to marry Egyptian film diva Faten Hamama in 1955, says he embraces people of all faiths and origins. He says he has become a hybrid between East and the West.

"If I had to do it over again, perhaps it would have been better not to do Lawrence of Arabia," he said.

I have divided the money that I have between the eight years that I will live
by Mª Eugenia Yagüe, El Mundo, 2002

Click here for original article in Spanish

P. Almost 70 years old and you live a golden retirement between Paris, Cairo, and Deauville in summer... You move between the sun and horse racing like a character in a novel.

R.My emotions are very Eastern, very melodramatic; I adore feeling the affection and the warmth of people, the friends who say to you hello and give a hug to you. That I find in Egypt, where people adore me, but I have also lived in western culture and, after a few months in Egypt, I miss the opera, the theater, the discussions, the debate that get to the heart of things. In my country the men only speak of soccer and the bodies of women. Then I pack my suitcases and I return to France. In Paris people are cold, nobody pays attention to me, nobody greets me. When I feel my heart freeze, I return to Cairo.

P. But you lived many years in exile. When did you decided to return?

r. I left when the military dictatorship of Nasser took control -- it was difficult to enter and to leave freely then -- and I returned when it was dissolved. I liked neither the military nor the dictatorships and they did in turn did not like that I had relations with producers and Jewish actors, so I went to Europe and I took my family. I was scared by them.

P. Your mother settled in Madrid and, although she already has passed away, you continue coming this way often.

r. The fact is that I am charmed by this country. In Spain I played the good parts of Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia. When I left Egypt I brought my family to Madrid. My sister married a Spanish businessman in Cairo and now my son has opened a store of shirts and clothes made of Egyptian cotton that, in case you do not know it, is the best in the world. Here I have many friends and memories, like the passion of my mother for Real Madrid and the fear that I had of which she gave an infarct him in front of the television set if the equipment lost a party.... They seem to him few reasons to return?

P. Although you come from a good Catholic family of Alexandria, one day you decided to become Muslim. Is it possible to change religions like a shirt?

R. Shirts I change several times a day, but I only changed religion once. I fell in love very young with Faten Hamama, the most important actress of Egypt. She was Muslim and I could only marry her if I converted to Islam. I was not particularly a believer and it did not matter to me. However, my parents raised the roof, but they adored my wife and everything was turned out fine. Now my son is atheist like me. I have educated him so that he is tolerant of the whole world. I do not believe that to be Egyptian, white or black is a reason for confrontation. It is absurd that people kill by the flags or national anthems.

P. What is it like to live with the Islamic fanaticism that had already overtaken the Arab countries before the crash into the skyscrapers of New York?

R. That is not truly our inheritance. 50 years ago there was no fundamentalism or extremism. All this comes from the increasingly large differences between the rich countries and the Third World. Besides, we are Egyptian, not Arab; we are a special town with an ancient history and, mainly peaceful.

P. Did you know Bin Laden?

R. No, but one of his brothers studied at my school. He was a bit arrogant.

P. Your image as a seducer of women is legendary. Yet, you live alone, always in hotels. What a way to ruin one’s reputation!

R. The fact is that I have never had a great love. At 21, I married the mother of my son and spent 16 happy years with her. When we had to leave Egypt, Faten missed the cinema and decided to return. It was the life that separated us. Since then I have lived in hotels, I have not had the occasion to fall in love. When one remains single five or six years, it is difficult to coexist with somebody later.

P. And those spectacular women with whom you have worked, the ones you still meet in cities like Paris or Deauville?

R. I have never had a lover, never have I live with another woman. I have had small adventures that have lasted a month or two, never longer. Inviting a lady to have supper does not mean anything. I would like to live up to that reputation that you refer to, but no.

P. Then you do not deny it!

R. The fact is I like women very much, but it is impossible for me to go to bed with one immediately, without knowing her, without having spoken with her, without having anything in common, exchanging opinions, chatting...

P. Conservative in the sentimental matters, foreign to any religion, nonconformist and Bohemian in your form of life. You are a sea of contradictions.

R. I live in the hotel Royal Monceau of Paris because the proprietor is a Syrian friend of mine who invited me and is enchanted that I am his guest. Ira de Fürstenberg does not charge me either. I believe that he always gives me the same room and I do not know if it overlooks the patio or the street. I have never opened the curtains to see what there is outside. I have already seen all the possible landscapes, now people interest me. In the room I do not have anything personal, only my Armani suits. I wear a few each year and then I donate them to Father Pierre, an extraordinary priest who helps the poor men of what he calls the Fourth World, the most miserable. In my room there is neither a book nor a photo. In Deauville, the same. And in Cairo I have a small apartment with some memories, the minimum. If they give an award to me, I accept it, I am grateful for it and I leave it in the hotel. I do not have a car, I do not have possessions. Good, yes, five horses in Paris, that win a few races.

P. Then, what is the driving passion of your life? What gives meaning to it?

R. I never open my eyes before midday and I get up already thinking with whom I will have dinner, where we will go and what we are going to eat. It makes illusion reunite with my friends, to speak with people. I adore my son, my grandsons... My life is full of affection.

P. You no longer feels the necessity of acting in films roles?

R. For 15 years I have not been offered anything good and ultimately I did nothing but garbage. I do not want to continue making filth, to feel unworthy. So I have calculated that I have money to live seven either eight years more. I am going to turn 70 in April and 78 years is more or less the average life of a man. With 285,480, a year (47,500,000 pesetas) I have enough for the time that I have calculated that I will live.

P. And if you are wrong and continue in full form?

R. That’s why I like it that my son is in businesses, so if I live longer, he will support me.

P. Would you reject a good film?

R. I would only accept a role again if the project excited me. This time I would not make any thing to get out of trouble. I would want to work on something interesting and enlightening, not routine. Anyway, I do not feel the slightest nostalgia for the cinema, so it does not matter to me.

P. I do not know if it bothers you to speak of the period when you were an inveterate gambler, when amanecía in the casinos and you were known in all the roulettes of the world.

R. It does not concern me, I no longer play. For that reason I have divided the money that I have between the eight years that I calculate that I have left. One day I was not well and everything ended when I had heart surgery. I said to myself: That’s the end, I can no longer play any more. Also I stopped smoking the four packs of cigarettes that I had been consuming.

P. What emotions does gambling produce?

R. None . I have left it without any sorrow. The truth is that I have never liked it. I went to the casino due to boredom. You arrive at a city where you do not know anybody, to an empty hotel room. Nearby, there is casino full of light, of beautiful women... What do you do? So I went there.

P. Were you good player?

R. It depended on the situation. If I did not have money, I was very good. I am quite intelligent in calculating the plays and very observant. However, when I had money I did not usually play well, because it did not matter to me, although I always played to win and, often, by necessity.

P. Did you manage to lose as much as people say?

R. Everything . I lost my flat in Paris in one night. For that reason I accepted roles that were trash. Sometimes I gambled away what they were going to pay me for the next film. Some nights I called my agent and said to him: Find me something, any thing, I need to begin to work tomorrow so although the roles were monumental filth I accepted it.

P. How much have you lost in the casinos? A million dollars?

R. What you say! Perhaps it was lost in a single night. It was everything I had in my checking account.

P. And what is the sensation at the moment of losing: sadness, repentance?

R. No, no. I felt nothing. While I was healthy and I felt strong I was not scared. I thought that, although I did not have a film for the following day, I would go out on the street and find a job. When I began to feel less well I thought that things could get complicated. And it already has, so I left it.

P. And bridge? You had become a world champion.

R. There there is no money. I began to play because, while shooting a film, a book on bridge fell into my hands and, as I was bored, I read the whole thing. That is another thing.

P. And what now occupies the time that you once dedicated to playing?

R. I go out with my friends. I like to do three or four hours of socializing after dinner, to discuss policy, present day things. Although to you I seem apathetic, my life has been full of passion. I was excited by the cinema. I was carried away by my wife, and I still am by my son, by my grandsons. Life is worth the trouble, although I only want to live the present. Now what worries me and interests me are the poor, the social inequalities. It saddens me much that people go on oblivious to that which happens around them: there is an extraordinary selfishness in our society.

P. Will you write your memoirs?

R. Never. It seems to me to be very egotistical to speak about the people in your life. I do not want to speak about my father, about my mother or about my ex-wife. What right do I have to do? It seems to me to be indecent to gain money for speaking about the people whom you have met. It is an idea that unbearable meeting. I never read what they write of me, I am not interested.

P. You have another son who you have not wanted to recognize.

R. It is possible that I takes thousand sons as the world. Who can know it? If whenever I have been with a woman she says that she has had one of my sons since this way it will be.

P. The children belong to the man and the woman 50 %.

R. If I meet a woman one night at the end of the year in a hotel in Rome, who says to me that she is alone and I spend five minutes with her, drunk, and feel that they have trapped me, I do not feel responsible for this son. The parenthood is a question of feelings. I have had a son with the woman who I loved and have loved the children of other women whom I loved. The rest does not concern me.interested in those that force him to verify it. My sperm is not important, he makes sure, Do they import the feelings. Till now he has been

Omar Sharif admits that in Italy there is a boy who looks very much like him. It is usual for the young man to visit him in his hotel in Rome, but the relation does not go beyond that. The actor claims that more than 20 years ago a woman seduced him with the intention of becoming pregnant. Sharif neither denies that the boy is his son, nor is he interest in those that force him to verify it. My sperm is not important, he claims; they do not import feelings. Until now he has been spared any blackmailing.

Pyramid Scheme Omar Sharif makes a movie about Egypt

By ELLEN TUMPOSKY

New York Daily News, October 27, 2001

Omar Sharif avoids the spotlight these days but he returned to the screen out of a sense of patriotism.

Sharif plays an old man teaching his granddaughter about the pyramids and the pharaohs in "The Mysteries of Egypt," a National Geographic film at the Loew's IMAX at Lincoln Square. "It was something for my country, to show it in a good light and to make an attractive film about our ancient history," he says.

Sharif has emotional ties to Egypt and strong views about the terrorism crisis.

The truth is, I don't think it's a war between the East and the West, really. I think the whole thing is a problem between the rich and the poor," he says. "If people don't have food and they have weapons, they fight. If people have food, you have a chance that they don't fight."

Sharif also worries about the growth of religious fundamentalism in the Muslim world.

"Women never wore a head scarf when I grew up," he says. "Now, religion is taking hold more and more. Religion takes hold of poor people more easily than rich people. The rich people live in their paradise on Earth, they don't worry about it."

Sharif became a matinee idol in his 20s but his life was transformed when he was offered the role of an Arab chieftain in "Lawrence of Arabia," for which he won a 1962 Oscar nomination as best supporting actor.

In retrospect, he sees fame and success as a bittersweet blessing.

"Before I got the very good fortune to be chosen to do 'Lawrence of Arabia,' I was married, I had my son already, I had a lovely apartment in Egypt, I was planning to have a large family, lots of kids," he says. "Suddenly, I found myself in Hollywood, in another world." He saw less and less of his wife, he says, and they divorced. "Sometimes I wonder: Would I have been a happier man had I not become famous?"

He laughs off the old stories of his prowess with women. "I wish I'd had 10% of the affairs that are attributed to me."Take the purported affair with Barbra Streisand, his co-star in "Funny Girl." Production photos of the couple kissing caused an uproar in Egypt shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967. "They said this man is a traitor, he's kissing this Jewish girl," Sharif recalls. Streisand handled it with a joke. "She said, ‘You think the Egypt-ians are angry, you should see the letter I got from my Aunt Rose.'"

Making movies and playing big-stakes bridge left his friendships and relationships transient, he says. "Every film was in a different country. I moved into a hotel, I unpacked. I met people for a brief time that it took to make a film," he says."Lawrence" star Peter O'Toole remained a friend. "We were out in the desert a long time, you know, [and] there were no girls around. All we had was our friendship. We had our little drink of whisky and a chat. I had just come from Cairo. He told me all about the theater, the actors and directors. It was like school for me."Still dapper at nearly 70, he lives a solitary life in a Paris hotel, but spends time in the Cairo apartment he shares with his son, daughter-in-law and grandson. "I get a lot of warmth and love and affection when I'm there. I like that, but after three months I get tired of it, because I've become half-Occidental. I get tired of people hugging me and touching me and I go back to Paris where no one talks to me at all. They're very rude and selfish. I like that," he says.

Sharif had 'ogling eyes' for Barbra
by Ruthe Stein
31 August 2001

Omar Sharif stood me up twice this week. But when he finally picked up the phone at his Paris hotel -- after the receptionist combed the bar for him -- Sharif was so charming, I had to forgive him. His natural charm made him the perfect choice to play Nicky Arnstein, Fanny Brice's ne'er-do-well husband in "Funny Girl," whom she forgave all manner of sins.

The 1968 musical, for which Barbra Streisand won an Oscar, opens today at the Castro. "The first time I saw Barbra, I called my agent and said, 'This girl isn't so beautiful. How can she be the leading lady of a romance?' " Sharif recalled.

"But the more time I spent with her, the more I saw her beauty. I became infatuated with her. Nothing happened, unfortunately, because she wasn't really interested. She was married, and she had her baby with her, so I didn't try anything. I just had these ogling eyes."

The last time Sharif saw Streisand was in 1982 when she was editing "Yentl." He wasn't surprised that she had become a director because she "interfered with everything" on the "Funny Girl" set, "but, you know, only out of sheer enthusiasm." They had a long chat at a restaurant, and he asked if she was happy. "Barbra said she was working hard. I was very glad when she married. She always needed to find someone really right for her, and I think she did, at least I hope."

When Omar really got the hump
MCENTEE
25 July 2001
The Express

I wonder if Omar Sharif spent one too many nights in the desert whilst shooting the classic movie Lawrence of Arabia. For Sharif, 69, has been waxing lyrical about the camel on which he made his legendary entrance in the 1962 film. To this day his dromedary co-star, left, retains a very special place in his heart. "I loved that camel - she was called Aliyah - but she was no good for me, " sighed Sharif at a recent backgammon tournament in aid of the One-to-One children's charity at London restaurant, The Avenue. "I spent about four months with her letting her into my tent at night. It was a very lonely shoot. But they are ungrateful animals, " adds Sharif, who went on to star in Dr Zhivago. "They spit and when you are trying to do your dialogue they make loud and stupid noises.

No, it was not to be." Thank goodness for that.

Omar Sharif, 69 years old, actor and gambler, occupies his time with bridge and horseracing.

Play kills the boredom

By CHRISTOPHE AYAD, 03/08/2001

Click here for original article in French

Every day, every morning. Open one’s eyes, guess the hour as the light pierces, plunge back into the apnea of sleep, bury the head in the sand. Ten hours, eleven hours... “I never get up before noon.” To gain a little time while in his bath. “My bath, this is sacred.” But it is necessary to go out. “And then begins the anguish of a new day. All this time to occupy and nothing to fill it. Then I played, by boredom to furnish boredom.” Neither the movies, nor fame, nor the most beautiful women distracted him from the gravity of time passing. Bridge, derby, poker, roulette, etc., Omar Sharif tried them all. But a roll of the dice never abolished his anguish.

It has now been several years since Omar Sharif stopped playing for money. "I didn't have the health anymore." He didn't have money anymore. "It is the same for cigarettes, I stopped like that, overnight. It was at midnight on May 28, 1992, in Budapest." The former prince of Lawrence of Arabia makes again while turning the pages of Bilto and Derby Magazine. Il traîne son parfum un peu rance d'ex-playboy international dans les tournois de bridge et les palaces qui le logent à l'œil: une vie de SDF de luxe. At 69, Omar Sharif doesn't possess anything, except an apartment in Cairo where he hardly sets foot. "I bought it in 1998 when my son decided to relocate to Egypt. I lived there to see the World with my Egyptian buddies. They supported Brazil or Italy. Me, I knew that France was going to win." A bet that he could have won. "Anyway, I prefer the hotel. I don't want to be the father-in-law who annoys his daughter-in-law."

He spends the winters in Cairo, at the Sheraton preferably. June to September to Paris, to the Royal Monceau, always. Always it is the same room. “Facing the courtyard, I believe. I never open the curtains, even to see what time of day it is. Why bother? I have seen all the landscapes. What I want to see are faces, pleasant faces.” In August, he goes to Deauville, to the Royal Barrier of course. “The young descended there, when I was young. My age does not change me.”

The days are just as unchangeable. Get up at noon, bridge in the afternoon. The bar is his headquarters: seated there for hours, reading the newspaper ( “As the Arabs, from the back.”), receiving friends, offering counsel ( “Next time, you should play only the under quoted horses. I know an Australian who made a fortune doing that.”), eyeing a beautiful passerby, slipping into gallant politeness for a rich American one. It is a routine, but he is a pro: “I force my accent a little, and the people like it. It corresponds to the image that they have of me.” In the evenings he goes up to his room and the fear of the désœuvrement also. This is why he discovered bridge: “I was bored on a film shoot, I began reading a book on bridge. C'est comme les échecs, les mots croisés ou les puzzles. I have a brain like that, I like to solve logical problems.” The races are different: his father took him there when he was small, and he kept his love of horseracing.

“I never had a passion for the game. I played because I was alone evenings in my room. In the casinos, there is light, beautiful women, the excitement of the small ball that turns. Will it stop on a good number? Will I break the bank tonight? Here, this is as simple as that. All the rest, it is pseudo-psychoanalysis.” All the rest, that is the problem. The rest is an inability to enter into the tumult of life: “From time to time, I do the other things. But doing the other things all the time bores me: one finishes by no longer knowing where one is. I like the world of bridge or the one of the races very much because these are worlds which one can enter and go out, well defined, not vague. They see me all over the world but they speak only of one thing, of that. No one bothers to ask if you are well, or what is happening outside. It is more specific, more cozy.” A world where I am the game.

One evening, he lost to the casino the apartment that he owned in Paris. “The next day, I telephoned my agent. I said to him: "Find me any trash. I need money. " And this is how it was that I did a lot of trash.” “It never bothered me to play in the worst stinkers. What I cannot stand is when a good director offers me a mediocre role.” He sent Chabrol, Chahine walking... “Chahine, that made him crazy,” imitating him to perfection as he tells it. “He, this is what he likes -- to take an actor and become his Pygmalion, live through him. But that did not work with me because I did not submit. So then, he found me lazy and he couldn’t stand that.”

The lucky breaks in his life may have made him too spoiled so that he is unwilling to twist his neck as often. “Everything came to me easily enough. I never had to wait for things.” It was luck that he met Youssef Chahine in a tea parlor cairote. His first role in Blazing Sky made him a star. During shooting, he was lucky again to meet Faten Hamama, the small fiancée of Egypt : a few weeks later, the one that was then called Michel Shalhoub , Christian of Alexandria, converted to Islam and became Omar Sharif to be able to marry her. It was luck again that he met David Lean who was looking for an Arabic actor who spoke English: “If I speak English ,it is because my mother, who wanted me to be the most beautiful, thought that I was too big when I was a child. Then, she sent me to an English boarding school, because one ate poorly there.” A short time after Lawrence of Arabia, Omar Sharif signed with Columbia. He became the first - and only - international Arabian star.

Since then, he has had time to wonder if it was luck. “When I left Egypt for an international career, I had a beautiful apartment, a beautiful wife, a child whom I adored. Since then, I have lived alone with a suitcase, going from hotel to hotel. But I do not know regret. All that happens is in the order of the things.” It is the same for his wife: “When I arrived in Hollywood, I was, let us say, very solicited. I felt that I was going to meet someone. Then I said to Faten: "Let us separate before I cheat on you." Since that day, I have never loved another woman. Even though I have kissed a lot.” By mutual agreement, she took their son abroad ( “After 1956 , the iron curtain fell. Egypt had become unbreathable.”) but let him grow up alone in boarding school. A few years ago, the Egyptian press discovered that Omar Sharif had a natural son in Israël, fruit of a brief encounter with an Italian journalist of Jewish origin. “What do you want me to do abou it? Just because it’s my sperm does not make him my child.” Today, he spends as much time as possible with his son (legitimate) and its two grandsons.

Luck made him the first young egypt nassérienne. There again, it caught up with him: during the Six Days War, it turned Funny Girl in which he played the role of a Jew of diaspora supporting Israël. Result: he was not able to step foot in his country until 1977. “Culturally, I do not know anymore where I am from, even though emotionally, I remain Egyptian.” He likes to kiss his friends but hates all the strangers that want to shake his hand. Le secouer comme un cocktail doux et acide à la fois. “If I had not been actor, I would have liked to work as barman.” In the end, he spends his nights channel surfing in front of the TV until dawn, when boredom yields at last to sleep.

Omar Sherif

Cairo Times -- 05 March 1998

Omar Sherif was born Michel Dimitri Shalhoub in 1931 to a wealthy Alexandrian family of Christian Lebanese origin. He was discovered in Egypt by director Yousef Chahine in 1953, then nine years later discovered again by David Lean. His introduction to the Western audiences that were to adore him was a scene in Lawrence of Arabia when he appears out of the shimmering desert horizon galloping on a camel. How do you follow that? He did, once, with Dr Zhivago. After that his reputationas a drinker, gambler and womanizer loomed larger than his acting career. His presence in public consciousness well outlasted his shelf-life on screen. He gradually drifted back to Egypt, starting in the late seventies. After heart surgery in 1993, he decided to quit Paris. But still his life has the air of someone of no fixed abode.

The Omar Sherif Interview

"I've nothing to say about women because I've no women."

by Andrew Hammond

In the 70s, an obsessed Australian journalist chased supergroup Abba for the big interview in Abba: The Movie. Now the Spice Girls appear impervious to the machinations of evil hacks and their photographers in Spiceworld. Here in Egypt a magazine called Alive once did an interview with megafamous actor Omar Sherif that reads as an extended, and very amusing, spat between interviewer and interviewee over the role of interviewer and interviewee. They were, he told them, lousy interviewers come with lousy questions based on lousy perceptions of how the star interviewee is meant to behave. Sherif, it seemed, was either cleverly turning the media experience on its head, or giving us a glimpse of a rather bitter and bad-tempered star in his twilight years. But maybe they had the last laugh. They published the thing verbatim.

Last week I met him. He wasn’t in a very good mood then, either. It reminded me of physics, the theory that everything we think we know about science we can’t be sure we really know because we had to be there to observe it, and through the very act of being there, we affect the results. Omar Sherif is like this. Take away the journalist and the smile returns to his face. Even when I spoke to him on the phone, he sounded happy. After I met him, he padded on down to the Egyptian Cinema Awards, Egypt's Oscar ceremony where a prize for lifetime achievement was waiting for him. He smiled. He told funny stories from the past with the arts crowd. I saw the pictures, I read the accounts -- in the press. In between these two events -- phone call announcing my arrival at the lobby and cinema club get-together -- Omar rarely smiled. I counted. Once to the photographer when he realized he spoke French. Once in conversation when he recalled that because he "spoke English with an appropriate accent" director David Lean had given him the part of Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia. And once when I uttered some Arabic to him on the way out.

Here ’s when he got ratty. When, after the phone rang and he discovered "the minister" expected him to turn up for his award that night, I asked him what minister, although it was entirely obvious what minister. "What?! What?! Why do you want to know" he spluttered. It had been an attempt to come across as chummy and inside-the-beltway -- uncovered. When I asked him about the endless tales one reads in the media about his romantic exploits, some that are supposed to have occurred within minutes of meeting the woman, he looked sideways for a second. Silence. Then he turned and rasped viciously, finger wagging, "You know what you are talking about, that I have an illegitimate son somewhere in Italy. Don’t you try to be clever with me because I can assure you I can be more clever." And when I asked him about the cosmopolitan Alexandrian dreamworld that he came from but that no longer exists, the Alexandria of the romantic era, he snarled derisively, "Are you trying to make some connection between my romances and Alexandria?"

But I guess it’s Omar you want to read about. Well, despite his best efforts, he is everything he is said to be in interview. He displays the modesty and the fatalism others have noted before, betrays the tinge of sadness and sense of a lost soul that probably goes a long way to explaining why so many women fell in love with him. But none of them stayed, not even the one he married, Faten Hamama -- by his own admission the only woman he ever really loved. They divorced. Only twice does he perhaps dissemble. He maintains his film with director Yousef Chahine in 1953 was his first ever outing on celluloid -- though directors say he had done bit parts before. He denies he ever sanctioned a book about himself -- but he once related his life story to a French journalist and it’s been translated into Arabic.

The modesty? Scene: I ask him why he chose the name Omar Sherif. "I thought to have a name that the Occidentals would have no trouble remembering. Because I always imagined I would become, wrongly or rightly but it turned out to be rightly, I thought I was going to be known in the world," he says, avoiding the word "famous." "It was my ambition, anyway."

When Lawrence came out in 1962, he became a superstar overnight. He was the only Arab to do so. Hollywood accepted him and he accepted Hollywood. He was the face of the Arab for Westerners -- at least, the good face -- for the best part of 20 years. His ability to adapt probably had something to do with his wealthy upbringing, mixing with foreigners, speaking foreign languages. He says it was just luck.

"It was very good luck and I had a very wonderful part. I mean, anybody who would have played this part would have succeeded, with this costume and this entrance. And I was striking looking, I must admit, now that I look back on it. I was quite striking as a person when I was at that particular age. And I was nominated for an Academy award immediately and all -- everything was right... Lawrence was a huge success. It was nominated for 10 or 11 Oscars, I was nominated. I got three Golden Globe awards. It was a very big thing. Peter O’Toole became a star also. It was not your ordinary success. The premise of a film four hours long being successful with only unknown people -- they weren’t movie stars -- going around the desert on camels, I mean, it was something extraordinary. But it worked out."

The fatalism? Sherif is almost as famous for his gambling as for his dashing screen persona. You might say he’s done for Bridge what Sheikh Sharawi has done for the Quran. His face endorses card game products all over the world. On the Internet you can interact with him any-which-way-you-want on the intricacies of Bridge, even if you’re a beginner. "It’s a wonderful way to pass the time, it’s a beautiful game, a very very clever game, and you get a passion for it once you start."

But the Bridge master says that on several occasions he gambled away all the money he possessed and told his agent the next day to take the first film that came to him. "I made so many of those [films], it’s countless. I made 30 or 40 films which were just because I had to quickly make some money."

"My mother’s a big gambler. She encouraged me to gamble because she wanted people to say I’m like her, not like my Dad. God knows why she wanted that. So when you start gambling you have no respect for money, it’s just chips. I got it at an early age and couldn’t get rid of it."

"I never invest my money in anything, I spend all my money, I don’t have money. I’ve earned a lot of money in my life, but spent it all. The only thing I invest in is horses or something stupid [like that]. I’m not an investor. I have no relation with money, I don’t comprehend [money]."

It’s five years since he last acted. That was in Ayyoub, the last of four Arabic films he made after returning to Egypt in 1984. By his own admission, though, his acting career started to go downhill in the West from the early seventies when he played so many roles in films beneath his status as a truly talented actor. Now he says he can’t find anything that suits him. "I’m looking. I’ve been looking for something for the last three or four years. I get scripts every day, but I haven’t found something that I really like."

He was offered the part of Caliph in Chahine’s Al Masir, but turned it down. "The script was very bad. Mind you, I have done many horrible films with bad scripts, but I hate to do a bad film with a good director. I don’t mind doing things for money with bad directors, but if I have an opportunity to work with a good director I prefer it to be good."

And the tinge of sadness, the sense of a lost soul? "I haven’t achieved anything really." You really think so? "No, I have done very little that was reasonably good, and lots of it was terribly bad." What more is there to do, then? "There’s always something to do. You can’t live by the idea that there’s nothing left for me to do. Whatever your job is. Already I’m lucky to be an actor, to find a job now. If I were to think that way, what would a person who works in a factory think? He should commit suicide. No, that’s not a concept that crosses my mind."

Must be strange though, being Omar Sherif. He was a star in Egyptian cinema for a decade, but people said he spoke with a khawaga accent. When he married actress Faten Hamama, he became a Muslim, but rumors persist to this day that his mother, like Gadaffi’s, was Jewish. He became world famous when Nasser was in power, when Arab unity was going to roll back the wrongs of Western imperial meddling, when his president was the personification of the evil Arab in the West. "It was Nasser, it was like Saddam Hussein and America [today]." He was filming Funny Girl with Barbra Streisland when the Six-Day War happened, and had to hire a public relations officer. "I wasn’t allowed to answer on my own feet. They were afraid I would make the wrong noise." He didn’t. "I wasn’t fanatical about Nasser anyway." Meanwhile, back home, his countrymen began to whisper he’d taken an Israeli passport.

Today "he represents Egypt really well abroad" is the usual refrain you hear from the man in the street. But since he recently suggested that the Cairo Film Festival might better be held in a place like Taba so that Jewish film directors will feel inclinded to attend, some of the press has soured towards him. "Did I really say that?" he asks. For a while it looked like he might be appointed head of the Film Festival. "They talked to me about it and I told them I would have nothing to do with it as long as it is in Cairo," he says. "I don’t even go to the Cairo Film Festival, I don’t approve of it. It’s a business venture, not a film festival."

Not surprisingly, he became obsessed with how the world views his country. When Sadat made his trip to Jerusalem, Sherif was ecstatic. "I thought it was wonderful, I thought it was a brilliant thing, I was very much for it. I had stayed 13 years away from Egypt, I came back for Sadat. I stayed from ’64 ’til ’77 away from Egypt." But, he adds, "At the end of Sadat’s presidency money became too important." If he refused to be an apologist for Nasser in the 60s, he’s happy to make himself an apologist for the regime today. "With Nasser the Arabs loved us and the Occidentals hated us. With Sadat it was the other way round. With Mubarak we’re popular with both more or less." The Toshki land reclamation project is a fine idea, he says; the peace process is the only way. His dinner dates last week included Sadat’s wife Gihan and Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.

I like Omar Sherif. I liked him before I met him. His honesty is disarming, his quick temper not quite a good enough cover for the warm and rather vulnerable character underneath. He doesn’t like journalists. But he likes to talk. He likes to reminisce. I don’t think he knows how to say no to people. I don’t think he ever did.

Who the real Omar Sherif is I don’t really know. I don’t think he does either. He will remain in my mind a disturbing figure and an enormous talent whose face I’ve seen a thousand times before abroad and keep seeing to this day here, and who I once met in a faceless flat in a towerblock of Cairo.

Bridge Commander

The most famous Egyptian since Tutankhamun, Omar Sharif talks to Amazon.co.uk about bridge, his life as an actor and whether he always tells the truth in interviews.

Amazon.co.uk: How did you first become interested in bridge?

Omar Sharif: Making my first film in Egypt in 1954, I found myself with a lot of spare time waiting for the cameras to be ready. I found a dusty old book and read it. It happened to be about bridge. Had it been about fishing or gardening, I would have been a healthier, outdoor, tanned old man.

Amazon.co.uk: Which do you have the greater passion for, bridge or acting? Has this changed over time?

Omar Sharif: Acting of course. But it is easier to find good bridge partners than good scripts and directors.

Amazon.co.uk: What do you think your greatest achievement to date has been?

Omar Sharif: Still to come.

Amazon.co.uk: Do you find there are any common grounds between bridge and acting?

Omar Sharif: Both need concentration.

Amazon.co.uk: Are there any skills you have gained in one that have benefited the other?

Omar Sharif: Concentration.

Amazon.co.uk: Tell us about your favourite bridge hand?

Omar Sharif: This was the final of the World Championship USA/Italy South was the great Benito Garozzo. North led a small club (encouraging). Declare played the Queen, then Spade Ace, Diamond Ace and Spade Queen. Garozzo took his king and after long deliberation, played the only card to beat the contract; a diamond. I will leave you to see why.

Amazon.co.uk: What is your preferred system?

Omar Sharif: Natural--Five card majors.

Amazon.co.uk: What qualities would you consider important for a bridge player?

Omar Sharif: Natural cards--sense and respect for partner

Amazon.co.uk: Do you play bridge online or would you ever consider playing bridge on the Internet?

Omar Sharif: I am of a generation that is very stupid about pressing buttons.

Amazon.co.uk: Is there anything you think bridge could do to improve its public image?

Omar Sharif: Introduce it more and more in schools and colleges.

Amazon.co.uk: Obviously you've appeared in some hugely popular films including Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and Funny Girl, but what was your favourite film to work on and why?

Omar Sharif: Funny Girl because there was not too much cold or heat and I got to wear normal clothes.

Amazon.co.uk: Over the years you seem to have played a number of historical roles such as Ghengis Khan, Che Guevara, and Sherif Ali. Was this because you have a particular passion for history or was it simply the types of roles that you were presented with?

Omar Sharif: That was what I was offered.

Amazon.co.uk: You were in the debating team at school, do you still enjoy a heated debate?

Omar Sharif: Yes. Except now I become overheated. That's age.

Amazon.co.uk: If you could have acted opposite any leading lady in history, old or new, who would that be?

Omar Sharif: Lucille Ball.

Amazon.co.uk: A recent readers poll by Empire magazine voted Lawrence of Arabia in the top 50 movies of all time. What would get your vote as the number one movie of all time?

Omar Sharif: Objectively Citizen Kane --but I love ET.

Amazon.co.uk: You once pointed out in an interview with the Daily Telegraph the absurdity of conducting interviews, saying "it is a stupid thing to tell the truth to perfect strangers". Have you told the truth in this interview?

Omar Sharif: Yes, because no questions were too personal or intimate

July-December 1998 -- European Bridge

As a start, please tell us something about your family.

I was born in Cairo, where I have now returned to live and have recently bought a flat. My father was a timber merchant. My mother, who is still alive, now lives in Spain, and I visited her last week. I have a younger sister who lives in America. My son Tarek used to live in Montreal but he has also come to live in Cairo, so I see more of him now. He has been married three times, to a Jew, a Roman Catholic, and now a Muslim! I have a grandson from his first marriage, who lives with his mother in Montreal, and I went to his Bar Mitzvah last year.

I know from your bridge that you have a good brain. Did this show at school?

Yes. I went to an English public school in Cairo, Victoria College, and did well academically, particularly at maths, physics and French. I was so good at maths that the headmaster told my parents I was a genius! I was President of the Debating Society, head boy and, of course, acted in the school plays from the age of 12.

I know you also did well at sport.

At school I was captain of both football and cricket, but after school I concentrated on football. I won one cap for Egypt, playing right back in the 1952 national team against The Wanderers.

Did you work in your father's firm?

No! I did not want to do that, and I started in film work at the age of 21, which soon took over from football as my main interest, particularly as I was smoking, drinking, and womanizing, which was not good for my football.

How did you start in bridge?

I was filming in Alexandria, and there was much time wasted sitting around, and I happened to pick up a dusty old book - was it Goren's? - and read it. I was fascinated at once by the game. There were no bridge players at the film set, but when I got back to Cairo I contacted the main bridge club. I started with rubber bridge, but soon played in the duplicate. It was a very good standard club. By the time I did Lawrence of Arabia in 1961, I was a competent player, and when I visited London used to play rubber bridge at the Hamilton Club. I lost money at first, but enjoyed it, and was soon able to do alright.

All bridge players find it difficult to concentrate if people are taking photographs and the like. This must be a big problem for you?

It is not so much the photographers. They affect my opponents more than me. What I dislike and find very difficult is that I have no moment to relax between rounds or sessions. Everyone wants autographs, interviews, to make arrangements for this and that. I feel an obligation to do it, as that is often why I have been invited; but all I want to do is to relax for a time and discuss the hands like the other bridge players.

If you had a magic wand and could change something about bridge you don't like, what would it be?

I wish some players did not take everything so personally! It is a wonderful game, and everyone makes mistakes. I certainly want a competitive partner, but one who is gentle towards me. Many of our opponents seem quite unnecessarily aggressive towards their partner. They would do far better if they were more relaxed, and we would all enjoy it more.

In conclusion, please tell us what you enjoy outside of bridge.

I have finished with casinos, but I still enjoy watching horseracing very much. I like music and opera, and good meals, but I am very happy during the meals if we are discussing bridge hands at the same time!

A Land of Mysteries
Plenty of Questions are Still Without Answers in Egypt

By Omar Sharif, Columnist

" I had a special kind of life because I was perhaps the only actor in international cinema who didn’t work out of his home. My home was Egypt, but I was making films all over the world and living out of hotels.

Politics at home were getting more and more tense back then, and I was working with many Jewish people in the film industry. In the Nasser days, you needed an exit visa to leave the country, and I was afraid one day I would come home and find myself barred from leaving again. So I stayed away from Egypt for about 15 years.

But at some point, I lost my identity. I had a mixed culture: somehow Oriental, somehow Occidental — and the two were impossibly intertwined. I speak many languages, but I don’t have a mother tongue. I don’t speak any language without an accent, even Arabic. For Egyptians who watch my old Arabic films, my voice makes me unique. That different lilt and cadence added to my characters’ romance made them no less exotic than the parts I played in Lawrence of Arabia or Dr. Zhivago.

Living abroad, I acquired an Occidental culture. But my character never changed — and my roots, my heart, and my temperament remained Oriental. Then one day, President Gerald Ford introduced me to President Anwar Sadat in the White House, and it was that great peacemaker who convinced me to come back to Egypt. When I returned, it was as if I had never left. I found my roots and I found my real self again.

I identified with the people, and I fell in love with the warmth and the tendency towards melodrama that is so Egyptian. Hugging, touching, kissing — when you live abroad for a long time, you forget what it’s like to be close to everyone around you. In the Orient, you’re in love all the time — with your friends, with your parents, your brothers and sisters. In Egypt, you feel that you love nearly everyone you talk to, even if you forget about them afterwards.

I love Egypt. I think it’s the most fascinating country to visit, and I never get tired of it. I recently went on a trip to Luxor and Aswan with my son and his wife and my grandchildren. We Egyptians are very proud of our pharaonic identity and this great civilization. It is a history that is so ancient, it boggles the mind. Imagine: 4,500 years ago, Egyptians were building the pyramids without our modern construction tools. The pyramids are works of such magnitude and enormity that they can’t really be appreciated unless you’re physically standing under them and looking up at those vast blocks receding to a distant point in the sky. I never get tired of the temples, the monuments, and the tombs. They are, quite simply, fantastic.

I have been all over the world, and I have never really seen anything quite like what I see in Egypt. And we are just beginning to discover things. I think we haven’t discovered one thousandth of what Egypt holds, and in the next 20 years we’re going to learn more than what we have learned in all the rest of the history of Egyptology. That’s why Egypt Revealed is so important — because it is keeping time with the new discoveries.

In the past five years alone, we have learned so much about the way the ancient Egyptians lived and the social structures of the non-royal classes. When Dr. Zahi Hawass (a world famous expert in Egyptology) started excavating the tombs of the workers who built the pyramids, he revealed a whole new link in our past. We learned that these workers weren’t just slaves: They were Egyptians working on a national project. They had a social structure, religious beliefs, and funerary rituals that followed those of the nobility and royals.

In spite of the clues that archaeology is giving us about ancient Egypt, there are still so many questions left unanswered. And people are offering a thousand different theories to fill the gaps of our knowledge. Some believe the pyramids were built by aliens or colonists from the lost city of Atlantis. I don’t believe in these theories, but they are part of this whole mystery that keeps all of us enthralled — from archaeologists to mystics and everyone in between.

The great thing about ancient Egyptian history is that you can’t be sure about it. We have a good idea about dates, dynasties, kings, and queens. But you don’t quite know. There are lots of things one doesn’t quite know about Egypt. We still don’t know how they built the pyramids. We have a theory, but we’re just not sure. We’re not sure of anything.

We’re only just starting to discover and appreciate the relationship the ancient Egyptians had with astronomy. There appears to have been an incredible relationship with astronomy, which shows that architectural feats and mathematical knowledge and state-building were not the only accomplishments of this great civilization.

There is so much there just waiting to be discovered. When people formulate ideas about aliens and Atlantis, it’s because Egypt is mysterious. People love mysteries, and I, for one, would like to see them kept alive. Fortunately, there are still a few mysteries yet to be solved. "

Relationship of the week - Profile - Omar Sharif
By Chrissy Iley, 26 January 1997, The Sunday Times

I've always been interested in the point at which sex becomes too much trouble, where the electricity short-circuits, the body becomes heavy and the mind numb. What happens in a passionless state? Some kind of transference? An addiction to work, alcohol or gambling?

John Aspinall, the zoo keeper and casino owner, told me that only men and postmenopausal women gamble, because casinos are the emotional equivalent of the hormonal highs and lows of a sexual relationship. Omar Sharif likees the gambling table and apparently likes horseflesh more than womanflesh these days, or perhaps he always has. He used to rather bask in the image of the Don Juan, the man who could seduce anything, who lived in his bachelor pad, true love eluding him, or he avoiding it. But last week he announced that he has stopped pursuing women completely. He's not interested, he says, he only wants to chat with friends.

He is 64, but I feel his age has nothing to do with shutting up shop. I have seen sexual desire close down in men and women of all ages. Who can say if the process is reversible or temporary? Donna Summer was in her early thirties when she sang Enough is Enough, and it's a tune that I've heard many of my girlfriends hum along to, particularly those who have endured the drudgery of serial monogamy. One relationship turning ugly is trouble enough. But one after another is wearing to the core.

Perhaps there is something biological about it. Although we were not designed to be with one partner for ever, if you do serial monogamy heart and soul, there just isn't any of you left to give, and not enough shelf space to house more baggage. Referring to her sex life, the veteran actress Debbie Reynolds said last week: "The store is now closed." Does that mean it's a negotiation, a buying and selling process?

So did Sharif shut up shop or did the shop shut him up? I think it must be harder for a man such as him, being known for his looks - the dark, liquid eyes that held such beautiful women in their thrall, and that always seemed to burn with truth. They used to say he could have anyone that he wanted, and for a time he did. Then the axis shifts. If you can have anyone, who do you want and why would they want you?

There are many fabulous stories about him: his affairs with Barbra Streisand, Anouk Aimee and Catherine Deneuve, stories about him brimming with promises never fulfilled. One woman wrote about how she had been summoned on a double date. Sharif had lined up her prettier friend while she'd been set up for Tom Courtenay. They went back to his hotel suite, all four of them, and she sat clumsily in one room with Courtenay. When she went to the bathroom, Sharif sprang out, a prancing macho thing with a towel wrapped around his waist and pencil and paper in hand, saying he had been trying to attract her attention all night. Could he have her phone number?

They dated for a while, while he was in London. Then he announced that he wanted to spend his last night in London at the White City greyhound track, his favourite place for his favourite girl. He stood her up. At a casting session a decade later, she met several other girls who had also been promised a last night at White City dogs. They had all fallen for it. Besides, at the time he had the perfect excuse for such desertion. He was married. He was with Faten Hamama, the Egyptian actress, his first, and only, wife, for 10 years. It was one of those organised, harmonious but not terribly passionate arrangements.

At that time, during the 1970s, he boasted about his total understanding of all women. "I can satisfy all their desires," he said. In his autobiography he described making love as communion with a woman, and the bed as the holy table. Never trust a man who promises you religious sex.

There are two ways of looking at this; that women believed in his eyes and in his lies, and that his sexual performance was so searing that anything less, anything slightly under par that he could offer now - especially after a heart bypass - wouldn't live up to the past. Or that there was no past. He has admitted that he tells half-truths in interviews and, in a dedication he wrote in a copy of his autobiography to the interviewer Victor Davis, he put: "Don't believe a word you read in this. Best wishes, Omar Sharif". Sure, he was a lothario, but the kind who basked in loneliness, always searching for something he could never find.

He seems totally confused by, and at odds with, the whole process of a relationship. He says he's attracted to a woman who likes to fight and argue, yet when Streisand starred in Funny Girl with him, he appeared to be emasculated by her drive and her opinionated spirit. He said: "A woman mustn't contradict me openly." He also said: "A woman must give an impression that she needs a man."

He is an intelligent and deep-thinking man, but he can't really cope with intelligence and deep thinking in a woman. Yet, without it, an affair would be bland and boring for him. He said he admired Anouk Aimee because she had femininity and dignity at the same time. Of course, the extremely feminine has very little dignity, and real passion has no dignity. It is as if he kept going to bed with women to avoid any real confrontation, a kind of instant candy comfort that made him feel bad as soon as he had eaten it. There could be no pleasing him. He also said it was wonderful of Aimee to have given up her career several times to follow men around the world. Then he contradicts this by explaining that the reason he has never had a long-term relationship in 30 years is because he has had to travel all over the globe and "a woman who packs suitcases and follows you would be a very boring person". It is as if he disrespects anything he can seduce.

All these contradictions must have tired him. Certainly, people who have met him recently talk of his tarnished charm, his lacklustre air and heaviness of spirit - the kind of heaviness that comes from being strangely empty and sucked down by the remnants of the past. For a long time he tortured himself - and many women - with the idea that it was possible for him to really fall in love. He used to say: "I'd give all of myself," and this was his seductive trick. But seduction and devotion and fulfilment are all quite different things, and often a long way apart. Now he seems to feel he is worth very little, so he can give nothing. He gets bored by the bad parts he has to play to pay for bad gambling debts. He doesn't know who he is any more. He told one journalist: "No. I hope not to know myself. I don't like to think too much. I don't hear my voice and I don't see by my own eyes." How chillingly unseductive.

Of course, it could all be his mother's fault. Like all men who are great seducers, he has a great matriarch waiting back at home. Right from the day he smashed his sister's piggy bank to take five girls out to dinner and his mother defended him, you know that he has a strong sense of entitlement - one that she helped create - and that it was always going to do him over in the end. The fact that he had a mother who condoned this behaviour meant that no woman could compete with her. "I know this will sound very Freudian, but my mother is still living," he says. "And perhaps if she weren't, I would have a different life." Never trust a man with a mother obsession.

OMAR SHARIF: AT HOME IN EGYPT HE SAYS HE FEELS FAMILIAR WARMTH IN CAIRO AFTER YEARS OF LIVING ABROAD
Eleanor Mills London Observer Service, 1 May 1996, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

`WHERE are you going?" asked the driver of my battered taxi as he negotiated the anarchic Cairo traffic between the pyramids and the center of town.

"To meet Omar Sharif," I said.

"Mr. Sharif? Mr. Omar Sharif?" he said, swerving alarmingly toward a bus in excitement. "But Mr. Sharif is the most famous Egyptian since Cleopatra."

He is also the most famous bridge player in the world, although it is films rather than cards that give him his status in Egypt. Before he was discovered by David Lean and found international fame in "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago," Sharif had already made 25 Egyptian films and married the country's most famous starlet. His popularity has not waned.

On the short journey between the Sheraton Hotel, where he lives, and his new half-built flat in smart Mohandesseen, everyone we meet nods, smiles, double-takes and shakes his hand. At dinner later, stiff-looking businessmen ask shiftily to take his photo while other diners find an excuse to troop past our table for a glimpse. And everyone from unused porters to loitering taxi drivers seems to expect a tip.

Sharif carries a separate pocket full of crisp new Egyptian notes to pay his way - his public expects it. He revels in the attention, joking in Arabic with the driver of his Mercedes, giggling in French with his son, Tarek, and housekeeper Pepita and flirting outrageously with every woman in sight.

Sharif has not always been so welcome in his home town. Under the Nasser regime he left, taking his family with him - fearful of reprisals for working with Jews in Hollywood. However, after 30 years of living in five star hotels (and their casinos), he has decided to settle permanently in Egypt.

He could have chosen Paris - where he rented a flat for several years close to his racehorses and his favorite bridge tournaments - but instead has opted for the chaos of modern Cairo.

Back at his suite he tells me why.

"I belong here in Egypt. I feel warmth. For many years, I felt I had lost my identity. I was a foreigner everywhere. When I came back to Cairo and saw childhood friends, it made me realize that I want to spend my last years here, I want an old man's routine, to sit and chat about the past with people who remember."

Sharif says he has always had the kind of logical mind essential for bridge: "It is a taste I have for working out puzzles - cards, bridge, maths. It is the same thing. Bridge like math is all about logic, but with bridge every two or three minutes, every time you deal the cards, you have a new puzzle."

Sharif first began to play on location for an Egyptian movie when he was about 22. He was no stranger to cards or the tempting glamour of casino life.

Sharif's mother, bankrolled by her rich timber merchant husband, played cards with King Farouk of Egypt and his set throughout Omar's childhood. She became the king's mascot - he would not gamble without her.

Sharif's childhood was dominated by the comings and goings of this elegant, red-haired, adoring mother and her exploits. She is 83 now but still dominates his life.

"She lives in Madrid and is blind," he says. "But passionate about football. Her team is Real Madrid. Every week, I listen anxiously to the results because if her team loses, she is in despair. I have to ring to comfort her."

He had a heart bypass operation he did not tell anyone because he did not want to alarm his mother. He admits she is probably the reason that he has remained single since he divorced Faten, his first wife, in the '60s: "I have this incredible mother who was there all my life and is still there, so I don't have a need for a woman with me. In fact, I like my space. I like to have a girlfriend but I cannot sleep in the same bed with someone. I can make love, but then I must sleep alone."

This flirtatious brand of openness comes naturally to Sharif, who may be 62 and a grandfather but still expects you to fall for him and was once as famous for his womanizing - companions included Barbra Streisand, Ava Gardner and Sophia Loren - as he was for his acting.

However, in other key areas he claims he has truly reformed. He now dilutes his scotch with water and worries about his health. And he has cut out gambling altogether.

In spite of newspaper reports claiming he was addicted to it, he says: "I'm not, and never have been a compulsive gambler. The truth is when you live in hotels all the time, it gets boring. Casinos are exciting places to go - the women, the drinks, the atmosphere."

Sharif has never played bridge for money: he plays only tournament bridge.

"What interests me is the intellectual challenge. With rubber bridge you cut for partners so you can end up with an idiot, and can't play elaborate enough systems."

These days, he only plays tournaments in places he likes: Juan Les Pins , Trouville, London.

"There was a point when I became too keen. It was obsessive. I would play all the tournaments. I would not make certain films if they interfered with my bridge schedule. I dreamt about cards. I was driven by the competition. I was good at it and I wanted to be perfect. But bridge is like golf; you can never achieve perfection. You get better, but because it is a game of partnership there is no way you can get there. You need to perfect a system between you and your partner."

At dinner, Sharif said his ultimate fantasy was to have an affair with a secretary. When I asked why, he explained unselfconsciously that being surrounded by socialites and movie stars all his life made him long for someone "ordinary." Bridge for him holds the same attraction: at the card table all are equal.

'THE ONE THING I REGRET IS NOT HAVING FLINGS' - INTERVIEW - OMAR SHARIF
By Mary Riddell, 24 January 1996

What, you wonder, are the toughest moments for the world's greatest heart-throb (retired). The awareness that one's hair is greying and one's waistline is thickening a trifle? Locating one's teeth by the bedside in the morning?

Although not a vain man, Omar Sharif is swift to set the record straight on the dentures. "Actually, I do have nine teeth left. But, yes, my hair is getting thin, or so I have been informed by people who look up there.

"I understand your question, but being a heart-throb never affected my life. I don't live with my image. I live with my friends with people who train horses and play bridge."

It has been Omar's habit over countless years to convert his pay cheques into thoroughbred horseflesh. Bridge, a game he learnt to while away idle moments when he was filming Lawrence of Arabia, is his second passion.

Today, he begins his challenge in the Macallan International Pairs Championship knowing that he ranks among the best bridge players in the world. And yet he is modest.

"I can still play well over a limited period of time. My mental faculties are good, although not as good as those of a 40-year-old."

Omar is 63 now, and it is fair to assume that his judgment at least has improved with age. How long it seems since he lost #750,000 in a single evening's gambling, how long since he and Peter O'Toole sold their passports in the lavatory to defray their losses at cards.

It has, what with one thing and another, seemed an intemperate life. Omar, blue-blazered ornament of the world's leading bridge tournament, balks at the word.

"I had a much more temperate life than most actors. I smoked a lot [60 a day until he gave up recently], but I never drank much. I had one heart bypass which is not extraordinary. I only married once [to the Egyptian actress Faten Hamama], and I didn't have a lot of affairs.

"I would say that Hugh Grant is much more intemperate than me. I'm not talking about that particular incident, simply that he has a girlfriend and I do not."

But Omar, you were once said to have accumulated 25,000 marriage proposals in a month. In addition, it barely seems five minutes since an Italian popped up in Hello! magazine, talking about the child you had together.

Languid he may be, not to mention charming and possessed of an informal way with female interviewers. "More tea, darling?" he will ask at solicitous intervals. But there is nothing that Omar Sharif likes more than a good debate.

He stares fiercely through gold-rimmed spectacles, and the limpid brown eyes burn, Zhivago-style. "It takes two seconds to have a child. If every time a man makes love he has a child, you could have thousands."

This sounds like the arithmetic of a life of flings. "Flings, flings. I don't have flings. I admit to making love once a month on average, but that is not flings. As a matter of fact it's the only thing I regret, not having flings.

"No long-term relationships either. I never had a relationship that lasted more than three months. I had to travel all over the globe, and, quite honestly, a woman who packs suitcases and follows you around would be a very boring person. I like a woman who will fight and discuss and argue. I don't like object women or women who cook for me. I hate that."

You see the problem. Neither Anouk Aimee nor Catherine Deneuve nor Barbra Streisand three of the women with whom he has been linked is known for her skill in rustling up beans on toast for tea.

"Streisand wasn't a liaison. I had a lot of affection for her while we were making Funny Girl sometimes reciprocated, sometimes not. I was a father figure. We parted on good terms, and the friendship still goes on. If she has a problem, I will try to help."

Suddenly, he says: "I know this will sound very Freudian, but my mother is still living, and perhaps if she weren't I would have had a different life.

"My son, Tarek, lived with me as a child. His mother was not there all the time, and now he is marrying for the third time because he must have women around him. I, who had an always-present mother, do not feel like that."

And yes, he says, sometimes he is lonely. His Egyptian nationality has decreed for him a life itinerant even by Hollywood standards. He has traipsed the world for work and film parts to pay his debts and now, at last, he plans to abandon Paris, his only base, for Cairo and his roots.

Bar the odd few seconds, he has liked none of his 50 films but he has not the slightest intention of retiring. This spring he will appear in the cameo role of The Sorcerer in the Channel 4 mini-series, Gulliver's Travels, currently being promoted in America.

On his other recent film role a home video he is more diffident. Ask him if his fast-lane existence has translated into something more tranquil, and he hesitates. "Actually, no. I sleepwalk now, since I gave up smoking. I set up a video and filmed myself doing it. I have tried not to eat too much, so perhaps this is my body defending itself. I munch out of the fridge or mini-bar, and in the morning I find the wrappers in the bin."

But do not think him troubled, for he is not. A great admirer of women, he has long since abandoned any thoughts of marriage. "Quite simply, I never met the right person."

His is the bachelor lifestyle, pared-down and full of foibles. His wardrobe contains rows of identical and expensive navy blazers, and he complains about the irksome details of a nomadic existence. "I hate those Victorian English taps. Hot and cold. No mixers. How am I supposed to shave?"

A small price to pay, for this week he is happy. The luminaries of the bridge world drift in and out of his London hotel suite. "Omar, how good to see you again. Dinner? Where shall we go?"

A filmstar to the core, Omar says San Lorenzo. But he has no particular wish to be in the public eye, for this is a more peaceful interlude.

Effortlessly talented at many sports he was an Egyptian football international and a fine cricketer he has clung to bridge through the wayward and the sober years.

He likes the atmosphere, likes the contestants, likes the competition. But perhaps most of all, he enjoys the uncertainty.

"I am a fatalist. Things weave into a pattern. If I hadn't lost #750,000 in a night, I wouldn't have made a particular film. If I hadn't stayed in one day with a cold, I might have met the woman of my life.

"Oh, I've been lucky. I've been on the verge of being broke, but then money has come raining in from heaven. Something always turns up."

In other words, when Omar sits down for his first contest today, he will merely be doing what he has always done. Simply playing the cards he is dealt.

Star Watch: 30 Years Later, Omar Sharif Recalls `Doctor Zhivago'
BOB THOMAS, 8 May 1995, The Associated Press

LOS ANGELES (AP) - It is arguably the greatest entrance in the history of film: a small speck in the shimmer of desert heat, growing imperceptibly into a galloping figure, finally arriving to face the apprehensive T.E. Lawrence.

"Lawrence of Arabia" in 1962 brought Omar Sharif instant stardom, an Academy Award nomination, and an international career that continues to this day. Three years later, he played the title role in another David Lean epic, "Doctor Zhivago."

The film is observing its 30th anniversary with the theatrical release of a fully restored print and a digital soundtrack. Turner Entertainment and MGM launched the rerelease with a gala screening at the Motion Picture Academy theater, attended by cast members Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin and Rod Steiger.

Sharif appeared for an interview during his visit here, and he seemed little changed at 63. Grayer, of course, but dashingly handsome and with his wholesome, candid charm intact.

He has grown more philosophical with the years, analyzing his life with startling honesty.

"Being on the move for 30 years, I have no friends," he remarked. "Hundreds of acquaintances, yes. But real friends, no. The only friends I have are the ones I knew in Egypt when I was young. For that reason, I moved back to Cairo on March 21.

"Yes, Cairo is a difficult city. When I left, there were 3 million people. Now there are 15 million. The city is dirty and overcrowded. But when the lights go on at night, you don't see the dirt. It is a beautiful city all over again.

"And I see my friends there. Good friends, ones you can pick right up with, no matter how many years have passed.

"People were amazed when I gave up the apartment I had in Paris for 20 years. It was easy. Paris has become a difficult city to live in. I still go there, but I am much happier in Cairo."

Of Lebanese parentage, he was born Michael Shalhoub in Alexandria and attended college in Cairo. When he converted to Islam, he took the name Omar El-Sharif. He worked in the family's lumber business until he was cast in a 1953 film. Soon he was Egypt's most popular star, and he caught the eye of Lean.

Sharif became an international star in good films ("Doctor Zhivago," "Funny Girl") and bad ("Che!" "Oh Heavenly Dog!"). Lately, he admitted, his work is mostly in television miniseries.

"With my age and accent, I'm not easy to cast in movies," he said with no hint of self-pity. "When you are over 60, producers aren't interested. Most of the pictures today are aimed at the kids. Action is what they want.

"No matter what the picture, I have to be a foreigner. It's impossible for me to play an American."

He was reminded of his Nicky Arnstein, the charming gambler who was Barbra Streisand's love in "Funny Girl" and "Funny Lady." He laughed as he recalled how he had tried to mimic a New York Jewish accent. The director, William Wyler, stopped him cold and told him to talk naturally. "We'll call it a Boston accent," he said.

Sharif's memories of "Doctor Zhivago" were happy ones despite the 13-month schedule (three months preparation, 10 months shooting). Wasn't it cold?

"No," he said. "Most of the picture was shot in Spain with artificial snow. The only real cold was when we shot for two months in Finland on a frozen lake.

"One day we were filming on the lake, and the lunch wagon arrived. Everyone was standing around, and we suddenly discovered that we were slowly sinking. The heat in the lunch wagon was melting the ice. We got out of there in a hurry."

You think of "Doctor Zhivago" as being an immediate success. But it wasn't, Sharif said.

"We finished the picture on Oct. 16, and David had promised MGM he would have it ready for a Dec. 20 release, in time to qualify for the Oscars. He worked with 13 editors for two months and made the deadline.

"The critics didn't like the picture, nor did audiences. David took another look at it in theaters and said, `I cut it all wrong.' MGM gave him permission to re-edit the film and change the music, and the new version was sent to the theaters. It caught on immediately and became a big hit."

Sharif has made millions during his career, and lost millions as well. No, not at bridge - he is a world-class player and has written a book and newspaper column on the subject.

"My money went to gambling," he sighed. "When you're living in hotels all over the world, there's not much to do but go to the casinos. How alluring they are! Beautiful palaces, bright lights, lovely women, exciting sounds. And then the thrill of betting your money and hoping luck will strike you. That was my downfall."

`Zhivago' still brings out the romantic in Sharif
Marshall Fine, 4 April 1995, USA Today

NEW YORK - Why don't they make romantic epics like Doctor Zhivago anymore?

"Because the world is not the same," says Omar Sharif. "Society is harder, faster. There's no time today to court a woman - not slowly, where you hold hands, look into each other's eyes and take your time. And with sexual harassment and AIDS - this is such an unlucky generation!"

Sharif - still regally handsome at 63, despite a heart attack and surgery last year - stopped in New York from his Paris base to talk about the restored version of 1965's Doctor Zhivago, which is being released Friday in 15 North American cities to honor its 30th anniversary.

"I haven't seen it in 30 years," Sharif admits. "Occasionally I'll watch the beginning on TV. My son played me in the early scenes; I'll watch it that far if I'm missing him."

Sharif's most vivid memory of Dr. Z: His nervous breakdown three months into the 10-month shooting schedule.

Before production began, Sharif recalls, director David Lean warned him that he would set him a difficult task: "He asked me to do nothing. All the scenes would be scenes for other people. Then at the end, they'd turn the camera on me for reaction shots.

"After a few months, I couldn't take it. I was crying in my room every night, convinced I was going to be lousy. When I told David, he said, `Trust me. If I do it right, the audience will be thinking about you more than anyone else when the film is done.' And he was right."

That's a lesson he also learned from the late Jack Hawkins when they were shooting Lawrence of Arabia. Hawkins spotted Sharif popping Dexedrine: "I was very intense and used to take them to make me more excited. And Jack said, `Dear boy, acting needs sleeping pills.' The secret is to relax; you need energy, but relaxed energy."

Lean's Lawrence of Arabia turned Sharif (real name: Michael Shalhoub) from a stalwart of Egyptian film into an international star.

But after a run of highly visible roles (including Funny Girl), Sharif's acting career hit a lengthy dry spell: "I haven't had an offer of anything reasonably good for 20 years."

He writes a syndicated bridge column and still plays bridge, but only a couple of tournaments a year.

"As you get older, you get less good - and I'm lucid enough to realize it," he says. "The tournaments today are so intense, they last for a couple of weeks, 10 hours a day. I get tired after five or six hours. I lose my concentration."

Sharif was never as enthralled with bridge as he was reputed to be, using it to distract himself when acting jobs failed to materialize.

"I may have exaggerated my passion, even to myself, to have my mind on something else. Nothing is as exciting as acting when it's good."

Sex symbol in peril

Omar Sharif's roles in Zhivago and Funny Girl made him a worldwide sex symbol - and the target of over-zealous fans.

"One night at a hotel in Dallas in 1970, there was a knock at my room at 4 a.m. - and when I opened the door, this woman walked in. She was drunk and she demanded that I make love to her," Sharif recalls. "I said, `Madam, please get out or I'll call security.' She opened her purse, pulled out a gun, pointed it at me and said, `Take your clothes off - everything.' So I did.

"She was laying on the bed, pointing the gun - and she lifts her skirt and says, `Now - (make love to) me.' I said, `I'd love to but, as you can see, at the moment, it's not possible.' She began cursing me, calling me a fraud. Then she walked out. I was afraid she would pull the trigger by accident."

Likes To Cry At The Movies

Omar Sharif

Sharif had 'ogling eyes' for Barbra by Ruthe Stein 31 August 2001

When Omar really got the hump MCENTEE 25 July 2001 The Express