Omar Sharif

Cairo came first. Omar Sharif was a leading man in Egyptian cinema from the early 1950s, in pictures like Struggle in the Harbor, The Blazing Sun and The Beginning and the End, before any English-language production had heard of him. That is the part of the career most profiles skip, and it is the reason the Hollywood arrival looks so sudden from the outside: he did not appear from nowhere, he transferred.

What he brought was patience. As Sherif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 he spends much of the film watching someone else make decisions, and the performance is built almost entirely out of how long he waits before reacting. Doctor Zhivago works the same way: a very long film about a man who is mostly acted upon, held together by a face that never oversells the grief. Put him in a part that wants charm instead and he supplies it without strain, as Nick Arnstein in Funny Girl, or as Major Grau in The Night of the Generals, where the politeness is the threat.

After that he simply kept working, in American, British, French and Italian productions, across more than a hundred films and roughly fifty years. Some of it is prestige, some of it is not: Mackenna's Gold, Juggernaut, The Tamarind Seed, a deadpan turn as Agent Cedric in the spy parody Top Secret!, and much later Hidalgo, The 13th Warrior and narration for 10,000 BC. Monsieur Ibrahim in 2003 gave him a genuine late leading role. His accolades include three Golden Globes, a Cesar Award for Best Actor and a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.