Omar Sharif: That look – an obituary – SPIEGEL ONLINE

wistfully, as it should be for a man with such outrageously beautiful sparkling eyes, his look back at one’s own destiny. He had millions of women’s hearts enraptured and many millions of dollars gambled at table games, as the world famous Egyptian actor Omar Sharif said. “I would have liked to live the life of Omar Sharif, which was described in the newspapers” But he also said: “I’ve spent half my life in hotel rooms and would say all in all it was a happy life.”

The gap between his incisors was the blemish of the almost too good-looking heartthrob actor Omar Sharif made only really irresistible.

In his greatest success “Doctor Zhivago” he shows this tooth gap with a small smile as he faces for the first time Julie Christie: It’s a glorified moment of cinema history, as today’s viewers oddly close it and yet infinitely far found one. Because the couple Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, playing in this tearjerker about the turmoil of the Russian Revolution the married doctor Yuri Zhivago and his beloved Lara also married, actually looks unearthly beautiful even by today’s standards. And because the actor craft of film originated under the thumb of the British director David Lean, today looks really creepy turgid and frumpy

“Doctor Zhivago.” – A project of the Cold War

Omar Sharif was born in 1932 in Alexandria, the son of a wealthy timber merchant, and grew up in Cairo, where the family moved soon. The ancestors of his parents came from Lebanon and Syria. Home spoke to French, English in school, and as Omar Sharif wanted despite a talent in mathematics necessarily be an actor, he was sent to London on a Royal Academy of Arts presentation.

He quickly made career in Egyptian cinema and married a 21-year-old female star of the time, the then 22-year-old Faten Hamama. He became internationally known through supporting roles in major productions such magnificent David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and Anthony Mann’s “The Decline of the Roman Empire” (1964).

As then Lean wanted to film the wise, wicked, wonderfully poetic novel “Doctor Schwiago” of Russian writer Boris Pasternak, which was actually a project of the Cold War. Pasternak had 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to get and have to reject at the behest of the Soviet rulers; he was in the USSR as a traitor, because he told in his poems and in his only novel much of the madness and brutality of the communist revolution.

However, the director David Lean chose largely against the political polemics and for the melodrama. Omar Sharif should be the title of Hero, was allegedly clear from the outset, Julie Christie could lean only after hard fighting prevail with producer Carlo Ponti, who wanted to occupy absolutely Sophia Loren as Lara.

was Either way the love story of Doctor Zhivago Omar Sharif’s fate. In the film, in which he wears a exemplary groomed mustache and schmerzvergeistigt back and forth staggers between his bitter wife Tonja (Geraldine Chaplin) and the radiant Lara, he paid his riotous bustle at the end so that he in the street because of a heart failure his life breathes. In real life he was going to Zhivago ever again. In the sixties he had with Barbra Streisand in William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” still a big show, then you did not know much to begin with him in Hollywood.

To the horror of religious fanatics kissing a Jewess

1974 was he divorced his wife Faten Hamama and lived from then on almost exclusively in the hotel, mostly in Paris and in Cairo. He appeared in various means good movies and took in the seventies and eighties television roles in monumental miniseries Quark as “Harem – Rebel of the Desert”, “Peter the Great” or “Palace of Winds”. In the time between infrequent appearances he played bridge, he even operating professionally at a young age, and put money on the roulette tables of famous casinos, apparently not too successful.

In 2003, Omar Sharif was allowed in François Dupeyrons bestseller adaptation “Mr Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran” then play an ethnic Arab greengrocer who befriends in Paris with a Jewish boy. Once again he showed brilliantly his incomparable eyes shimmer.

All his life has Sharif, who was raised Catholic, came over on the occasion of his marriage to Islam and to the horror of religious fanatics kissed a Jew in “Funny Girl”, used with a passion for the reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. The melancholy but had him under control in later years also politically: “My hope is that my generation will experience the peace still equals zero.”

During the protests of the Egyptian people against the dictator Hosni Mubarak Sharif expressed in February 2011 his sympathy for the protesters, although he himself was one of Egypt’s upper class. In interviews, the actor spoke affectionately about his son Tarek, who comes from his only marriage, his four grandchildren and horses.

In addition, the impish charm stud Omar Sharif said about the nature of the physical attractiveness of a human being: “I personally have always felt attracted to people who seemed to have no idea that they have sex appeal.”

Omar Sharif is now died at the age of 83 years.