Omar Sharif could hold our attention beside Peter O’Toole without matching his flamboyance. We value that restraint, and the romantic warmth, though his films did not always give him enough to do.
Fi1m perspective
A man approaches across the desert, and the film makes us wait for him. By the time Omar Sharif’s Sherif Ali arrives in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), we are already watching him closely. Young’s desert photography keeps him distant, while editor Anne V. Coates lets the approach run long enough for waiting to become absorbing. We were transfixed by how little the image needed: a figure, a horizon and time.
David Lean then gives Sharif something more useful than a grand entrance: room to remain distinct from Peter O’Toole. Beside O’Toole’s flamboyance, Sharif makes no effort to compete, and Sherif Ali feels like a person with his own reasons for being there. Even the formal dialogue cannot reduce him to someone whose only job is to listen to Lawrence. This is where we rate Sharif most highly, holding his place in a large-scale film without insisting that every exchange belong to him.
His work with Youssef Chahine in Egyptian cinema in the mid-1950s preceded the international breakthrough with Lean. Doctor Zhivago (1965) followed, with Sharif in the title role, and it exposed the risk in that inward-looking manner: some critics found him passive. We would not mistake every quiet performance for subtle acting, though Lawrence of Arabia gives ample reason not to demand a more demonstrative one. Funny Girl (1968) cast him as Nick Arnstein opposite Barbra Streisand, another use for his romantic appeal. Hollywood nevertheless struggled to find parts that used him fully.
The later career is too uneven for us to recommend a film on the strength of his name alone. Monsieur Ibrahim (2003) brought renewed acclaim in a French-language drama, with Sharif playing a wise, paternal figure. The paternal part offered another use for the warmth that had served his romantic leads. Start with Lawrence of Arabia, on a screen large enough for that distant figure to hold our attention.
Biography
Omar Sharif was an Egyptian actor. Born Michel Dimitri Chalhoub on 10 April 1932 in Alexandria, he was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria and obtained a degree in mathematics and physics from Cairo University.
He began his career in Egyptian cinema in the early 1950s, appearing opposite Faten Hamama in Struggle in the Valley (1954). He converted to Islam to marry her. Sharif gained international recognition for his role as Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by David Lean, and later played the title role in Doctor Zhivago (1965). He died on 10 July 2015 in Cairo.
