Omar Sharif: Google Doodle pays tribute to Doctor Zhivago star

Image 1 of 6

Today’s Google Doodle pays tribute to the late Lebanese-Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, who was born 86 years ago today in Alexandria.

His parents, Lebanese Catholics who had emigrated to Egypt, christened him Michel Chalhoub. He would adopt the name Omar Sharif in 1955, when he converted to Islam in order to marry Egyptian actress Faten Hamama.

He attended boarding school in England - he told The Guardian in 2012 that he was “a fat little boy" and his mother thought the "horrible" food there would help him lose weight.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“So I lost my weight, I became thin, I learned to become an actor and I learned English very well,” he said. “All this was because my mother didn't like looking at her fat son.”

After training at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, he returned to Egypt and became a successful film actor there.

His first English-language role, as Sherif Ali in David Lean’s historical epic Lawrence of Arabia, earned him two Golden Globe awards - for best supporting actor and most promising newcomer - as well as an Oscar nomination.

He told the Guardian that the enduring success of the four-hour T.E. Lawrence biopic was “extraordinary”.

“When I made this film I thought: 'This is a crazy thing. There are no girls, no very famous actors at that time, only men and no action, not a lot of action’… It was so good because the director was a brilliant man. That's the truth. David Lean was a great, great man.”

Sharif remains best known to Western audiences for his star-making turn as Doctor Zhivago in the 1965 romantic drama of the same name, which made him “one of the first Middle Eastern sex symbols to win hearts, awards and major box office numbers”, says The Hollywood Reporter. The role won him his third Golden Globe.

He went on to appear in dozens of films in the US and abroad. In 2004, he won a Cesar Award - the French equivalent of the Oscars - for his performance in Monsieur Ibrahim, as a Persian immigrant who befriends a Jewish boy in 1960s Paris.

A noted bon vivant, after his 1974 divorce Sharif spent most of his life living in hotels around Europe, indulging in his passions for horse-racing and contract bridge, and even developing an iPhone app for players.

He died of a heart attack in a hospital in Cairo on 10 July 2015, months after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He was survived by his son and two grandsons, one of whom - his namesake, Omar - is also an actor.