‘No one in the world is called Omar Sharif. I shall call you Fred’ (Peter O’Toole)

saw the movie release of Lawrence of Arabia¹ directed by David Lean. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year and six other Oscars.

A tiny dot materialises in the heat shimmer as a mirage on the horizon in one of the film’s many stunning visual tricks. A hauntingly effective moment, the dot slowly grows bigger until it is distinguishable as a man dressed in black aboard a trotting camel. The scene, captured masterfully, serves to highlight the majesty and almost unfathomable space of the desert environment. Shot on a 450mm lens, the film crew had a lot of trouble framing the man because their camera’s view finder didn’t show the exact image the camera saw. A line was famously painted in the sand to look like a path, drawing the viewer’s eye into the depths of the frame.

Accomplished in just one take, the extraordinary scene lasts two full minutes unfolding in silence and with a growing tension that reaches an almost unbearable crescendo. Then a sudden flash of violence as the protagonist’s guide who watches this otherworldly sceptre’s approach with growing unease panics, then reaches for his gun before being shot dead.

The man is Sherif Ali, played by Omar Sharif an Egyptian actor of Lebanese descent, announcing himself in some style to an international audience in one of the greatest entrances in film history.

“He was nothing” Sherif Ali later explains to Lawrence played by Peter O’Toole. “The well is everything”.

The film is a 1962 British epic historical drama loosely based on the life of T.E Lawrence and his campaign against the Turks during the First World War. It was directed by David Lean (following his earlier success with Bridge over the River Kwai² in 1957) and produced by Sam Spiegel with an excellent screenplay written by Robert Bolt and a gorgeous desert cinematography by Freddie Young. An inspiration to countless future directors including George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, the latter of whom estimates the film cost $285 million to make in today’s money.

The film conveys the exploits of Lawrence, an eccentric, rebellious, desert-loving, messianic, Oxford-bred British Army officer and cartographer with a military reputation the importance of which varies wildly according to the source consulted. The subtext however is Lawrence’s own sad decline from a position of honour and courage to a collapse into savagery amid the follies of colonialism and hypocrisies of war.

Upon its release, Lawrence of Arabia was a huge critical and financial success and it remains popular among viewers and critics alike as one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema.

The character of Sherif Ali is fictional – an amalgamation of numerous Arab leaders of the time, particularly Sharif Nassir who led the Harith forces involved in the attack on Aqaba. This was because Lawrence did not serve with any one Arab leader (aside from Auda Bin Tayi raucously played by Anthony Quinn) throughout the majority of the war.

Sherif Ali becomes a key ally in the desert fighting. Omar Sharif had to learn to ride a camel for the part. Critics found him to be an intriguing blend of intensity and charm. He serves as the film’s conscience, becoming more reasoned and pacifistic compared with Lawrence’s growing bloodlust as the film progresses. It is Ali, the uncivilized ‘wog’ who repeatedly tries to restrain Lawrence’s most savage impulses.

In fact, the role of Sherif Ali would prove pivotal to the film’s success with Sharif’s swarthy, romantic aura played off to great effect against the blue-eyed blondness of O’Toole’s Lawrence.

O’Toole, a British Shakespearean stage actor, was a virtual unknown before the film was released yet was Lean’s first choice to play Lawrence. The two lead actors soon bonded:

“Peter O’Toole showed me the tricks of the trade. He drank, brawled, and dressed with a great deal of originality maintaining the traditions of the actors of his childhood” ³

They spent over a year together filming in the Jordanian desert:

“We were complete brothers. We slept in tents next to each other. We ate the same food….At night, we put our table outside the tent – the sky was wonderful at night, the stars were wonderful – we just sat there and talked and had some whiskey…..we became very close friends” ⁴

Sharif’s absence became a concern to his family back home in Egypt:

“It wasn’t difficult for me at all. On the other hand, I was rather happy to be in the desert. I was rather happy not to have women, I don’t know why. I was married then [the couple had a 5-year-old boy, Tarek Sharif]. My wife, you know, wanted to see me all the time. She tried to come one or two times in the desert, but she wasn’t allowed to come there”. ⁵

Sharif and O’Toole did not seek respite from their desert toil by spending time with their respective spouses according to Sharif in his aptly named autobiography: The Eternal Male⁶. Instead, they would take a wild trip in a small aeroplane to Beirut every month, have a bubble bath in a hotel, and then drink and hunt for and sleep with women without stopping for 48 hours like sailors at the end of a voyage. According to Sharif:

“The desert had nothing impure so that is what we needed” ⁷

More endearingly, the pair also had a dance teacher flown in from Paris with instructions to teach them how to do The Twist as they didn’t want to look like “a couple of hicks” when they returned to the world outside. They trained taking turns with each other and with the instructor in the desert through the night to the sound of a single scratched record played on repeat.

Ali’s role had initially been assigned to a French actor, Maurice Ronet, but Lean insisted on using ethnic actors when possible, to make his films authentic. Casting Sharif in the main supporting role instead was risky as he was similarly virtually unknown at the time, outside of Egypt.

Originally invited to audition for a more minor part, Sharif was dropped off in the middle of the desert in a small private plane. David Lean walked towards him without saying a word and unashamedly looked at him from every angle with a hawk-like gaze – to inspect his hair, his face. He ultimately picked Sharif to play Ali based entirely on his looks.

Sharif recalls of Lean:

“He was a brilliant person. He didn’t think of anything except films…He didn’t like actors; he hated actors, but he loved me. I don’t know why because I didn’t know myself what I was going to do, and the first shot I had to make, I spent the whole night to practice it for the next day…And he knew about this, and he loved me for it” ⁸

David Lean helped curb Sharif’s Middle Eastern temperament; a characteristic more usually prized in Egyptian cinema. “He who can do the most can do the least” ⁹ Lean would remind him by way of encouragement.

To secure the role, Sharif had to sign a seven-film contract with Columbia at just $50,000 a film. He hadn’t imagined the film would be a success in a Hollywood which prized romantic scenes and famous faces above all else. In fact, Lawrence of Arabia proved the turning point in Sharif’s career. It was a box office and critical sensation with Sharif’s performance earning him Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Most Promising Newcomer.

Yet as he later ruefully observed: “Maybe if I hadn’t made Lawrence, I would have gone on living in Cairo and had five children and lots of grandchildren” ¹⁰ and “It separated me from my wife, from my family…We didn’t see each other anymore and that was it, the end of our wedding”. ¹¹

The role also seemed to typecast him. Fluent in several languages, over the next few years he would use his accent (or be used for it) to became an all-purpose “foreigner” for mainstream cinema roles. A man from everywhere and nowhere for Western audiences not especially concerned about precise ethnicity.

Lean warned Sharif after Lawrence that he would be offered many bad parts but that he should reject them all. However almost like the main character of a Victorian novel, Sharif would over time become overtaken by his own success, to the extent that in order to service the debts he incurred by gambling and living a playboy lifestyle, he was forced into accepting any work that came his way thus perpetuating a downward spiral into more and more trivial films and ludicrous roles. These in turn sadly diminished him and his standing in the film industry.