At 80, Omar Sharif chuckles when he looks back on his improbable life. “I’m an old man. What do I know?”
Sharif, who came from Egypt, was a complete unknown in the West when he got the call to do his first English-language movie: the masterpiece “Lawrence of Arabia.”
It was an unusual audition. “They put me on a plane to the middle of the desert, and when the plane pulled up there was one man standing there: [director] David Lean,” recalls Sharif from his home in Paris. “He didn’t say anything. He just took a tour around me to see what I looked like, and that was that.”
“Lawrence of Arabia,” the jewel in the crown of Columbia Pictures and a winner of seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Director, is being reissued Tuesday in a sumptuous four-disc Blu-ray gift box with the restored 227-minute cut, a making-of documentary, a feature on star Peter O’Toole, interviews with Lean’s cinematic heirs Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, a coffee-table book and a soundtrack CD.
Sharif, who was originally hired to play a smaller part, found his role expanded when Lean couldn’t land another actor. He ultimately received an Oscar nomination and was catapulted to international stardom at the age of 30.
Lean was so impressed with his new find that he immediately rehired Sharif to star in his very next film, “Doctor Zhivago,” an even bigger success than “Lawrence of Arabia” that remains among the top 10 box office hits of all time in inflation-adjusted terms. (In today’s dollars, it earned $996 million.)
Sharif is modest about winning over Lean. “It just came within five minutes,” he says. “They didn’t know anyone who could do this, and they just said, ‘Bring anybody who speaks English and can act a little bit and looks Egyptian or Arabic.’ ”
Before Lean’s call, Sharif says, he thought, “I would have stayed in Egypt my whole life, making Egyptian films. Egyptian cinema is not so huge. We showed [our films] to the Arab countries, and that was it. I made about 25 films, love stories and all that.”
Instead, Lean made a global heartthrob out of Sharif (a stage name; he was born Michel Shalhoub), whose look could be read as any number of ethnicities.
“I always was an actor,” he says. “I could do anything. My nationality is all sorts of things. I played Germans. I played a Jew in an American film.” (That would be “Funny Girl,” one of the biggest hits of 1968, in which he played Nicky Arnstein to Oscar winner Barbra Streisand’s Fanny Brice.)
Shooting “Lawrence” in the Jordanian desert (and then in Spain after cheapskate producer Sam Spiegel abruptly ordered Lean to shut down halfway through shooting and move to a cheaper location, hence the dirtier-looking sands and cloudier skies of much of the second half of the film) wasn’t that challenging, Sharif recalls.
“I’m used to the desert,” he says. “I was used to the heat, all of that. I had lived in tents sometimes for other films. I found Peter [O’Toole] to be a close friend of mine. It was extraordinary. We lived together for one year. We slept in tents next to each other, and we drank our whiskey under the stars, and we chatted about acting.”
O’Toole, also 80, recently announced his retirement. Sharif says he has lost touch with his old friend. “I can’t find him,” Sharif says sadly. “He’s locked himself up. He doesn’t want to come out.”
Sharif, on the other hand, seems as feisty as ever in old age. A few years back, at 73 (!), Sharif slugged a Beverly Hills parking valet in a dispute over prompt delivery of his Porsche SUV.
Today, though, he is humble, and loath to obsess over his younger self. After introducing a restored cut of “Lawrence” a couple of months ago in London, he says he didn’t even make it through the screening.
“I hadn’t seen it in years,” he says. “It was OK. I left after two hours. I thought, that was enough of me.”