It was there that Sharif discovered his love of acting - a passion that horrified his father, who wanted his son to follow him into business. His parents packed him off to a tough, traditional English-style boarding school in Cairo when he was ten. ‘He believed she was good luck to him - she was his mascot.
‘My mother used to play cards with King Farouk,’ Sharif recalled. Regular visitors to their home included King Farouk, the Egyptian monarch who was deposed in 1952. They lived in a wealthy area of Cairo where his glamorous, extrovert mother became a noted society hostess. His father was a successful timber merchant who made extra money salvaging barbed wire left behind by the British after World War II, turning it into nails. Psychiatrists might have seen trouble ahead from Sharif’s earliest years.īorn Michel Demitri Shalhoub in Alexandria in 1932, he was of Lebanese ancestry. He gave up roulette after losing £750,000 in a single night, but continued to leach money as only a gambling addict knows how. Instead, he lived in Paris because he could enjoy the city’s casinos and the nearby racetrack at Deauville. ‘I’d rather be playing bridge than making a bad movie,’ Sharif once declared in his defence.Ĭritics might have noted that if only he had applied himself to acting, the talented performer - who could act in six languages - might have spent his life making ‘good’ movies. Sharif eventually gave up on acting, becoming a world-class bridge player and largely devoting his life to gambling instead. He became an inveterate gambler, touring the casino tables of Europe, frittering away his fortune which he had to replenish by taking uninspiring roles as the ‘foreign gentleman’ or ‘exotic lover’ in a string of forgettable films. But to wining and womanising, Sharif added a third vice he had inherited specifically from his mother. He and his Lawrence Of Arabia co-star, Peter O’Toole, were two of the greatest Hollywood hell-raisers of their generation. Sharif, pictured here in November, admitted that he squandered his lifeĪlthough he was certainly not lacking in self-belief, he was the first to admit that he had squandered his life and career, throwing away the early promise he showed for the easier pleasures of carousing and gambling.
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