Omar Sharif, legendary actor, has Alzheimer’s disease
KARIM SAHIB/AFP/Getty ImagesOmar Sharif, shown at the Doha Qatari Film Festival in 2011, is suffering from Alzheimer’s, the actor’s son told a Spanish newspaper.
Egyptian film legend Omar Sharif, 83, is ailing with Alzheimer’s disease, his son told Spanish newspaper El Mundo.
The “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago” star struggles these days to distinguish the 1960s masterpieces that brought him widespread fame, Tarek El-Sharif told the publication.
“My father has Alzheimer’s,” he said, according to a translation by The Telegraph. “It’s hard to determine what stage it’s at. It’s evident he’ll never improve and it will get worse.”
The actor whose work spanned seven decades has distress when fans recognize him on the streets of Cairo or in the Red Sea resort of El Gouna, where he often resides, according to his son.
“He knows who he is but not necessarily the reason people greet him,” El-Sharif told the Spanish paper. “When someone see him in the road and approaches him, he often thinks it’s someone he used to know whose name and face he’s forgotten, when most of the time, it’s just a fan.”
Columbia PicturesPeter O’Toole and Sharif, 83, became “brothers” during the filming of the landmark “Lawrence of Arabia,” Sharif once told NPR.
Sharif earned an Oscar nomination for playing Sherif Ali alongside Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s 1962 film about the British military commander T.E. Lawrence’s service to Britain and the country’s Middle Eastern allies during World War I.
Sharif once reminisced about effective with O’Toole, who died in 2013 at 81, on the 50th anniversary of the film’s release in an interview with NPR.
“We were perfect brothers,” he said. “We slept in the same tent. We ate the same food. … At night, we put our desk further than the tent — the sky was wonderful at night, the stars were wonderful — we just sat there and talked and had some whiskey.
Three years after “Lawrence of Arabia,” Sharif played the titular role of Dr. Yuri Zhivago in Lean’s well-known adaptation of the Boris Pasternak novel on like in the time of the 1917 Russian Revolution, with his son also playing his son in the film.
Columbia Pictures/Everett CollectionPrince Faisal (Anthony Quinn), T.E. Lawrence (Peter OToole), and Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) perform in the still-relevant 1962 masterpiece “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Sharif, who was born Michel Demitri Chalhoub, later won a total of 118 credits in both movies and television over his long career, according to his IMDB profile. He was born to Lebanese and Syrian parents and converted to Islam in 1955 before he married Tarek’s mother and Egyptian acting contemporary Faten Hamama.
The actor’s temper marred an otherwise-brilliant career. A video showed him slapping and upbraiding a female fan on the red carpet of a 2011 film festival in Qatar. A judge ordered Sharif to pay $ 318,000 to a parking lot attendant who accused Sharif of punching him and calling him a “stupid Mexican” in 2008.
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