Mr. Romance It’s 30 Years Since ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ But Sharif Still Captivates

Omar Sharif kisses my hand delicately, as if it might break.

“Champagne?” he whispers.

“Oh, no,” I demur.

He is crestfallen. “To come here and not to have a glass of Champagne?” He opens his arms to the soft, pink light of Petrossian.

“You have some for us both,” I say. (I do?) He picks up the menu. “Are you going to have caviar?” I nod, not trusting myself to speak.

“Good. Why don’t we just have caviar and not mix things?” “Oh, yes,” I murmur.

He looks deep into my eyes. “Do you like it to have some taste, or to be very velvety?” I stare, transfixed. If my mouth’s open, I’ll die.

“Beluga,” he commands the waiter. “Sevruga,” he continues. “And for Madame, some pressed caviar, too, with blini.”

He goes on about grams. In French. “Parfait,” he concludes.

It certainly is. And the most parfait part is that I’ve managed not to burst out singing “Nicky Arnstein, Nicky Arnstein!” especially since Sharif has come here from his home in Paris for the 30th-anniversary release of “Dr. Zhivago,” not “Funny Girl.” Still, the dashing gambler husband of Fanny Brice always seemed more fun than the serious, poetic doctor of the Russian Revolution. Not necessarily more romantic, of course. Sharif is always romantic. Eternally romantic.

“When we were making ‘Zhivago,’ ” he recalls, “David Lean, the director, used to say, ‘Omar, please take out the violins. I hear 28 violins.’ And I would say, ‘But I can’t!’ Then I would do the scene again and he would say, ‘Only eight violins this time.’ And I would say, ‘Eight violins is my minimum.’ “

The caviar comes. He spoons some onto my plate. “Take this one first, darling. This is the velvety one.”

There is only toast, no onion or egg. “You don’t need anything else,” he instructs.

I eat the Beluga. Heaven. He gives me Sevruga. “This is more fishy,” he says, “with more taste.”

I prefer the Beluga. He gallantly puts it all on my plate. “It is more feminine,” he agrees. “It’s a sensual feeling to eat it. Isn’t it?”

Is it me or is it terribly warm in here?

Thirty years have done some work on Sharif, who is 63, but to no avail. His hair is now silver, wavy and thick. The eyes (the eyes, the eyes) are the same warm brown; the shadows beneath only accentuate them. And the voice, with its particular, peculiar accent of a place where everyone waltzes like a dream and wins at baccarat every night, is unchanged.

Yet he is not. It has been a lifetime since “Dr. Zhivago,” not to mention “Lawrence of Arabia,” which won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1962. After becoming an international sensation, living in the penthouse of the Lancaster Hotel in Paris where he shared a balcony with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, his career plummeted, and he became better known for his bridge game than his film roles.

Now, after heart-bypass surgery, he has decided to move back to his native Cairo, where he began his career in the 1950s as a star of the Egyptian cinema, the husband of Faten Hamama, its leading lady, and the father of a son, Tarek. He was divorced in 1966 and has never remarried.

“I’m going back home,” he says. “When I had the surgery, I turned 60 at the same time. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t want her to have a shock, so I was completely alone in an English hospital where they had a very good doctor for this. And I thought, ‘I want to be with friends and own a home,’ which I never have. The people are gentle in Cairo.”

He says he is not bitter about his career. “Look, I had good and bad,” he says. “I did three films that are classics, which is very rare in itself, and they were all made within five years. At the same time, I worked with very good directors - Fred Zinnemann, Sidney Lumet and John Frankenheimer - in what turned out to be very bad films. And at the end of the ‘60s, this cultural revolution happened with the youth movement, and the major studios ceased to have the same influence. There was a rise of young, talented directors, but they were making films about their own societies. There was no more room for a foreigner, so suddenly there were no more parts. Now if these other films had worked, it might have been different. But this plus that was too much.”

For the last 15 years or so, Sharif has worked consistently in television movies and mini-series, most recently shooting “Catherine the Great” in Berlin for the Fox network. “I play the old, senile lover of Jeanne Moreau, who’s always asleep when she wants some action. I didn’t find it very difficult.” He laughs. “Two weeks here, three weeks there. I enjoy that. There’s no time to get bored, and if it’s lousy, it’s the leading actors’ fault. I can say, ‘These young actors are not what they used to be.”’

He has other income, too, from a perfume sold in Europe, race horses kept in Argentina and an internationally syndicated bridge column. He is also affiliated with a travel agency that books bridge cruises on Cunard.

“I have a bit from here, a bit from there,” he says. “I’m doing fine. What I really want is to have friends. I missed that, being like a nomad all the time for my work. The difficulty also about my kind of life is I meet mostly actors and socialites instead of normal people. The choice is more limited.”

And his family is far-flung. Sharif’s mother lives in Spain, his son in Montreal and his sister in Atlanta. His father died in 1979 while playing backgammon with Tarek. “He died laughing,” Sharif says. “He was winning for the first time in his life and had a stroke.

“My son is 38,” he continues, “and he worked in advertising up to two years ago, when he decided to go into business manufacturing shirts. God knows why. He hasn’t sold one shirt. You know, he plays me as the little boy in the beginning of ‘Dr. Zhivago.’ Sometimes what I do when I miss him is put it on and watch until he finishes his bit.”

He smiles sadly. His gold-rimmed glasses are smudged. “I was a lazy father,” he says. “I didn’t take pictures. His mother and I divorced when he was 8, and he went to boarding schools. In a strange way, I never remarried partly because of not wanting to bring someone between us. I don’t know. We’re very close, being always together, two fellas. We used to double date when he was a teenager. I love him. He’s my best friend.”

Sharif says he has not seen “Dr. Zhivago” in its entirety since its original release: “David Lean’s direction to me was to do nothing. He said, ‘Every scene you are in is the scene of the other person.’ It took us 13 months to make the movie altogether, and after three months no one says I’m good! They would say, ‘Did you see Julie Christie today?’ I was having a nervous breakdown.”

Has he seen Julie Christie lately? “For years she was sort of semi-retired,” he says. “I think she suffered. She was a typical woman in love, masochistic in a sort of way. She always seemed to be loving the wrong guy. The same with Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, who were friends of mine. I couldn’t believe the guys they fell in love with.

“Julie Christie was very feminine, and whenever she fell in love she gave up her career. I suppose she wouldn’t change it for anything. She had the real happiness of knowing love. I never really loved someone enough to think of doing that.

“I was with my wife for 13 years, from when I was 21, and I never cheated on her. I was very young with ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’ I went to Hollywood and met a lot of very beautiful women. I thought I would fall in love with some starlet, so I told my wife we are not seeing each other anymore. And she said, ‘Do you love someone else?’ I said no. Maybe I thought once or twice I was in love, but I never married anyone because I didn’t love them enough.

“After an affair, I was never hurt when it was over. I thought that if I felt no pain, it means I didn’t love them. I don’t know why I assume love and pain are connected. It’s what I read all my life.”

Does he ever see Barbra Streisand? He says they have remained friendly, and she invited him to a concert on her tour last year. “While we were rehearsing ‘Funny Girl,”’ he says, “it so happened that the Six Day War began, and the Arab press called me a traitor because she is Jewish and a photograph had been published of us kissing. I told them neither in my professional nor private life do I ask a girl her nationality or religion when I kiss her.”

It boggles the mind to estimate how many that’s been, since he can communicate in English, French, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Greek and Portuguese. Portuguese? “I went to Rio,” he says, “and the girls there were so incredible, but I couldn’t speak a word to them. So I learned Portuguese, went back and took the same girls out. I hated them. They were so stupid. Still as gorgeous, but it meant strictly nothing to me.”

What exactly is this difficulty he has with women?

“All the defects of men come from their mothers,” he says. Even his own? He nods vigorously. “I am very much my mother’s boy. She ruined me. She was a gambler. When I was 14, she gave me money to gamble. She wanted people to say, ‘He is like his mother’ instead of like his father.

“My father was a wonderful guy. He would give me a weekly allowance, which I would finish in one day. Then I would say to my mother, ‘I have to take a girl out to dinner.’ And she would say, ‘Sure, what do you need, baby?’ Of course there are exceptions. But men compare their women to their mothers. And if they don’t, she reminds them to do it.”

Is he still in touch with his ex-wife? “Oh yes, we are good friends. The funny thing is, I had this bypass surgery and my wife, who never smoked or drank or ate too much, had one a week after me. Thirty years we’ve been apart. Scary, the connection.”

He sips his Champagne and smiles his big, generous smile with the same gap between his teeth. It’s reassuring to see it still there.

“It’s all written,” he says, “so I might as well be content and happy. I really am living a wonderful life. Here we are eating caviar. Tonight I’m going to the Meadowlands with my son in a limousine to the trotting races. They have a marvelous restaurant there overlooking the track. And I will go to Los Angeles for the opening night of ‘Zhivago,’ which is already sold out. And they will all come up to me and say, ‘Omar, we love you. Where have you been?”’