Marcel Proust wrote, “We are healed of suffering only by experiencing it to the full” and there is perhaps no more trenchant comment on the life of Omar Sharif Jr.
Grandson of the actor Omar Sharif, Sharif Jr., just 38, chronicles his complex and bravely iconoclastic life in his soon to be released autobiography A Tale of Two Omars.
The heartfelt and heroic memoir traces his bullying as a child and teen, attempted suicide, the horrors of sex trafficking, and receiving tens of thousands of death threats after coming out in the Arab world. It’s also a story of survival—instilled in him by his mother’s family, who survived the Holocaust death camps—but with his compassion and empathy intact. And there are wonderful details of his escapades as the only grandson of his glamorous, globe-trotting grandfather—the legendary star of Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, and Funny Girl among a host of others. With his huge liquid eyes and shock of thick dark hair, Sharif Sr. was an unparalleled ladies’ man.
It’s easy to see Omar Sr. in his grandson. The face on the book’s cover is of a beautiful young man with enviable thick, dark lashes, chiseled features, and cheekbones reminiscent of the Golden Age star. The younger Sharif was his grandfather’s best friend, protégé, and constant companion on the many escapades they shared.
He writes clearly and fluently, describing the day his grandfather died when he finds himself in Central Park, staring at “a large pond with half-dozen rowboats, some drifting aimlessly like me.”
In an interview, he speaks flawless English, though he is also fluent in French, Arabic, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic. He is soft spoken, extremely polite, and humble.
“I grew up in distinctly different worlds,” he explains. “My father was Egyptian, my mother, Jewish, and early on I knew I was gay. So, I became a chameleon.”
After his parents’ divorce, he lived primarily with his mother in Montreal, spending fabulous vacations and summers with his father and Grandfather Omar, as he refers to him. His paternal grandmother, Fatem Hamama, was an Egyptian actress of such fame (the Elizabeth Taylor of Egypt) that she could rarely leave her home without being mobbed. She had “exquisite taste,” as Sharif remembers, and kept villas in El Gouna on the Red Sea and in Sahel on the Mediterranean.
He speaks of his time he would spend with Grandfather Omar, in Cairo, Deauville, Madrid, London, Beverly Hills or wherever he was shooting a film. “Deauville is renowned in the horse-racing world for its races and for its thoroughbred auctions,” he explains.
At one auction, when he went with his grandfather, the young Omar admired a thoroughbred with a dark chestnut coat. “Her muscles rolled beneath her glossy coat each time she walked past,” he writes. “While leaving the auction, Grandfather was handed a yellow slip and I was shocked to learn that he had secretly purchased her for me. We spent two days coming up with names and decided to call her Dinner Time.” This was a nod to the two’s most hallowed time together—dinner at a favorite restaurant in whatever city where they happened to be.
“Whenever I started school as a kid, in every new grade and every class,” Sharif said, “my grandfather was a shadow. I came to understand quickly that all the teachers cared about was asking about Grandfather and [Funny Girl co-star] Barbra Streisand."
“I knew my whole identity was being Omar Sharif’s grandson growing up in Montreal,” he adds. “I was so afraid I would bring dishonor to him and my grandmother if anyone ever knew my secret—being gay.”
Sharif writes poignantly about the changes he began to notice in his grandfather, especially at their precious dinners. At one of their favorite spots in Paris, Le Fouquet, his grandfather suddenly pushed back his plate, as if the food were awful.
In a particularly painful passage from the book, Sharif recounts a sudden and cruel outburst from his grandfather: “Do you know what’s wrong with you?...You’re not handsome. You want to be something, but you are never going to be anything like I was because you will always be a failure…”
Sharif explains that his grandfather would be diagnosed with Alzheimers and his inexplicable outbursts would only grow worse: “In the end, Alzheimer’s relegated one of the most talented people in the world to an unknown landscape, lost in time and space, isolated to scraps of memories and a few friends.”
The book details many of the false starts and heartbreaks the young Omar experiences in his attempt to find his way as a gay man. Ultimately, in the wake of Arab spring, he makes a decision to come out in The Advocate.
What followed was an unexpected firestorm and torrent of hate from Egypt, along with a movement to revoke his Egyptian citizenship and ban him from the country. To this day, he explains he can’t yet return. “As soon as my feet would touch the ground, I would be arrested for inciting debauchery.”
Ironically, the same intolerance was encountered by his grandfather after he appeared with Streisand in Funny Girl, including a campaign under Nasser’s regime to have his citizenship revoked for being a Zionist spy (since Streisand was Jewish.) The elder Sharif left Egypt in self-imposed exile, not returning for decades until President Anwar Sadat invited him to return.
Sharif has recently finished shooting the third season of Amazon’s Israeli series The Baker and the Beauty, where he plays a gay Lebanese man married to an Israeli. And sadly, the backlash in the Middle East against him for working in Tel Aviv and accepting the role was ferocious.
Sharif emphasizes that he believes the answer to this entrenched hatred and intolerance is to increase one’s own tolerance of the haters and to adopt a posture of forgiveness. “I can finally do what my grandparents did and use art to change people’s hearts and minds,” he says.
“I thought my job was to straddle the walls between my Arab, Jewish, and gay worlds but now I know it is my job to dismantle them. And nothing tears through walls better than art.”
Caroline Taylor is a writer and musician who has contributed to The Boston Globe and Vanity Fair, and is co-author of SEIJI: An Intimate Portrait of Seiji Ozawa and Symphony Hall: The First 100 Years. She was a member of the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities under Barack Obama and was part of the first cultural mission to Cuba in 60 years. She splits her time between Massachusetts and Montana.
