By : Mohamed Adel.
Omar
Sharif, the legendary actor who burst on to the U.S. film scene with his role
in “Lawrence of Arabia,” died today in a hospital in Cairo after he suffered a
heart attack, his agent told FOX Egypt News , He was 83 years.
Sharif earned
an Academy Award nomination for his role in the 1962 film, his first
English-language role. He won the Golden Globe that year for Best Supporting
Actor and New Star of the Year. Still Sharif, who was Egypt's biggest
box-office star when director David Lean cast him, was not the director's first choice to play
Sherif Ali, the tribal leader with whom the enigmatic T.E. Lawrence teams up to
help lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
Lean had
hired another actor but dropped him because his eyes weren't the right color.
The film's producer, Sam Spiegel, went to Cairo to search for a replacement and
found Sharif. After passing a screen test that proved he was fluent in English,
he got the job.
Egyptian
actor Omar Sharif poses for a photograph during the presentation of his latest
film entitled "Disparadme" at a hotel in Aviles, northern Spain, June
16, 2009. (Reuters( His entrance
in the movie was stunning. He was first seen in the distance, a speck in the
swirling desert sand. As he drew closer, he emerged first as a black figure on
a galloping camel, slowly transforming into a handsome, dark-eyed figure with a
gap-tooth smile.
Three years
later, Sharif demonstrated his versatility, playing the leading role of a
doctor-poet who endures decades of Russian history, including World War I and
the Bolshevik Revolution, surviving on his art and his love for his beloved
Lara in "Dr. Zhivago."
Lean's
adaptation of the Boris Pasternak novel had a rocky beginning in its first U.S.
release. Attendance was sparse and reviews were negative ، After MGM
removed it from theaters and Lean re-edited the sprawling tale, it was
re-released and became a box-office hit. Still, Sharif never thought it was as
good as it could have been ، It's sentimental. Too much of that
music," he once said, referring to Maurice Jarre's luscious Oscar-winning
score.
Although
Sharif never achieved that level of success again, he remained a sought-after
actor for many years, partly because of his proficiency at playing different
nationalities, He was Argentine-born revolutionary Ernesto "Che"
Guevara in "Che!", Italian Marco Polo in "Marco the
Magnificent" and Mongol leader Genghis Khan in "Genghis Khan."
He was a German officer in "The Night of the Generals," an Austrian
prince in "Mayerling" and a Mexican outlaw in "Mackenna's Gold
، He was also the Jewish gambler Nick Arnstein
opposite Barbra Streisand's Fanny Brice in "Funny Girl." The 1968
film was banned in his native Egypt because he was cast as a Jew.
In his middle
years Sharif began appearing in such films as "The Pink Panther Strikes
Again," ''Oh Heavenly Dog!," ''The Baltimore Bullet" and others
he dismissed as "rubbish, The drought
lasted so long that finally, beginning in the late 1990s, Sharif began
declining all film offers.
I lost my
self-respect and dignity," he told a reporter in 2004. "Even my
grandchildren were making fun of me. 'Grandpa, that was really bad. And this
one? It's worse.'"
In 2003 he
accepted a role in the French film "Monsieur Ibrahim," portraying a
Muslim shopkeeper in Paris who adopts a Jewish boy.
The role won
him the Cesar, the French equivalent of the Oscar, and he followed with
"Hidalgo," a lively western starring Viggo Mortensen. In that one he
was a desert sheik who duels 11 assailants with a sword. His career was back on
track , He suffered a
public embarrassment in 2007, however, when he pleaded no contest to
misdemeanor battery and was ordered to take an anger management course for
punching a parking valet who refused to accept his European currency.
Born Michael
Shalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt, Sharif was the son of Syrian-Lebanese parents.
After working
three years at his father's lumber company, he fulfilled his longtime ambition
to become a movie actor, going on to appear in nearly two dozen Egyptian films
under the name Omar el Sharif.
His fame only
increased when he married Egypt's movie queen, Faten Hamama, in 1955. They had
a son, Tarek, and divorced in 1974.
In 2004
Sharif acknowledged that he also had another son, who was born after a
one-night stand with an interviewer.
Away from the
movies, Sharif was a world-class bridge player who for many years wrote a
newspaper column on bridge. He quit the game in later years, however, when he
gave up gambling.
Sharif spent
much of his later years in Cairo and at the Royal Moncean Hotel in Paris.
In May,
reports surfaced that Sharif was battling Alzheimer's disease.
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