New Faces: Arabian Knight

There is nothing quite so Arabian in Lawrence of Arabia as an actor named Omar Sharif, a flashing dark fellow with the white Formica smile of a desert chieftain, the scowling fury of a sandstorm, and the overall dash of half a dozen swordsmen trained by Abdul Abulbul Amir. Actors like that usually come from Pasadena, or some similar place, but this one is an exception. He is a citizen of the United Arab Republic, born in Alexandria, raised in Cairo.

At the outset of the vast trackless movie, when T. E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) and a guide drink at an oasis, a rifle shot cuts down the guide. It is Sharif who has thus spoken; the oasis is his. Lawrence adroitly talks his way past this crisis and proceeds with Sharif as his new guide and eventual friend. For the remainder of four hours—through thick, thin and thaumaturgy—Sharif stays close to the side of the English Enigma. Women who have seen the picture say that they go away thinking about the fine performances of O’Toole, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins and so on, but at night they dream about Omar Sharif.

General Sheriff. Since Omar wouldn’t really qualify as an actor unless there were something a little bit fake about him, there are a few small redeeming flaws in his essential oneness with the desert. His Arabic is, well, shocking, and he is studying to improve it. He is the son of a rich lumber dealer, who sent him to Cairo’s Victoria College, a properly English Eton on the Nile, where he captained the association football club. French was spoken at home.

Omar’s dazzling teeth are his own, but his name is not. He is actually Maechel Shalhoub. Years ago, planning ahead toward international fame, he guessed correctly that to Western ears there was no chic-of-Araby in the sound of Shalhoub. He thought, he says, of Omar Khayyam and Omar Bradley, both familiar names several thousand miles west. He may also have thought of Matt Dillon and Gary Cooper. At any rate, he entered his profession as Omar Sharif.

Gently forced into his father’s business after school days, Omar hated the lumber game, and he cost the firm thousands of pounds by extending credit only to dealers who needed it most. He became a Cairo playboy, good at billiards, unfaithful to his sports cars and always buying new ones. He played, too, with the theater, acting a little. Then one day he got a chance to audition for a leading role opposite Fatten Hamama.

Every syllable of her precious name—fat ten ha ma ma—was a treasure on the tongues of the moviegoers of Egypt. She was, by Egyptian description, “the Shirley Temple of Arabian movies”—a star since the age of seven and a radiant symbol of sweet, untouched Islamic puritanism. She was 20 and spoke no English. When she auditioned Omar in her east-side apartment high over the Nile, she said to him: “Do something.”

“What?”

“Act, of course.”

“Get thee to a nunnery,” bellowed Omar, pointing a long finger at her and pouring Prince Hamlet’s cruel speech into her uncomprehending ears.

Pseudo-Arabian. It got him the job. And in the picture there occurred a moment that stunned the Pan-Arabian world. She kissed him. Beautiful, pure, polyunsaturated Fatten had—right there on the screen—besullied herself. And not only had she kissed at all—to make it worse, she had kissed this impostor, this Oxford-accented, pseudo-Arabian, undeserving Catholic!

Omar was indeed a Roman Catholic. Further scandalizing Arabs everywhere, he swiftly became a Moslem and therefore a hypocrite (in the public view) in order to marry Fatten. No one seemed to care that she had to get rid of another husband, Director Izzeddine Zulfikar, before she could join in the ceremony. For that matter, no one cares very much any more about kisses in Egyptian movies; since that scandalous icebreaker, kisses have become commonplace.

Omar and Fatten now have a five-year-old son. At 31, he has long since become an Arabian film star nearly as celebrated as his wife, who is currently making her 80th picture, in Cairo. Since Sam Spiegel cast him in Lawrence, Omar has felt the pull of the West. He is now in Spain, ready to start work in Samuel Bronston’s Fall of the Roman Empire. He plays an Armenian king who falls in love with Sophia Loren, beloved daughter of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. “It is not a very long part,” says Omar grandly, “but it is pivotal. I believe that after having been known so long chiefly as the husband of my wife, I am now on the way to making her well known mainly as the wife of her husband.”