Or so says Omar Sharif. Evidently, he was in New York for the filming of “Funny Girl” when the 6 day war broke out in 1967. Apparently, he was immediately attacked in the press, both by the Arab press, for playing a Jew and starring in a film with Barbara Streisand (who, according to his account, the Arab press assumed was sending all her money to Israel). He was equally attacked by the Jewish press in America, who assumed he was sending his money to the Middle East, to Egypt and the other Arab states. When interviewed, his response was the aforementioned line about women and religion.
He related this story at a film screening I attended a few weeks ago with my roommate and her friends. Although he did wander in his speech, this particular topic was pertinent to the event, as it was part of a festival devoted to cultivating harmony between West and East through the arts. The film “Hassan wa Morcos” was shown and Omar Sharif, one of the stars, was to speak before it.
The festival was hosted by a church in Maadi, which is basically an American suburb outside of Cairo. It’s a strange place. At the event, there were a few Egyptians, a few expats not speaking American English, and then a lot of Americans.
Anyway, as we walked out to the area (outside!) where the film was to be screened, we saw Omar Sharif. As has happened to me when I’ve seen other famous people, it took a minute for the reality to sink in. He seemed familiar, of course, and but only belatedly did I realize that he looked familiar because he was. That he didn’t just look like Omar Sharif, he was Omar Sharif. We joined the group of people asking for pictures to be taken with him. The woman in front of us was an American who looked to be around my mother’s age. “I’ve been waiting for this moment since I was 11 years old,” she said to him as they posed for the picture.
The festival’s focus was tolerance between people and religions, and Sharif spoke generally on the topic. He began by explaining that as he was growing up, the boys in his school didn’t distinguish between religions. They didn’t even know who was what, only that some had different sounding names. He spoke in glowing terms of this earlier time. “A time without war,” I think he said. Then corrected himself, explaining that he had, in fact, lived through the Second World War. So it wasn’t a time without war, but it was “a time of love, not hatred.” (If he weren’t Omar Sharif, I would have been rolling my eyes at this comment. But he was so charming, I was a bit smitten, to tell the truth. It was clear why he was such a popular actor; he had a presence on stage. Even as he lost his train of thought or lapsed into platitudes, he was entertaining.)
Sharif explained that he had only had one great love in his life, his wife. The marriage had stalled when he was in Hollywood to do films, while she was an actress in Egypt. They didn’t divorce, he made clear, only separated. But, he said rather wistfully, although she found another man, he had never fallen in love with another woman. And even though people assumed that he had had many affairs and quite a lively love life, in fact, his heart had always remained with this one single woman.
As a person currently in a long distance relationship with a spouse who lives across the world (in California, no less) for the purposes of career, I took this part of his tale as a cautionary warning. Listening to him speak longingly about his lost love, I thought about my own husband, and the difficulties we face living across the world from each other.
My own internal processing about marriage aside, Omar Sharif continued his discussion; the expression he wore while when speaking of his wife faded and his animated countenance returned. He moved on, he brought up his son who had married 4 women, each of them from different religions and nationalities. His son, he explained, had simply taken him at his word when he once said: “Never ask a girl her religion or her nationality before kissing her.”
And that, dear reader, is the great Omar Sharif’s romantic advice. (The bitter, but unspoken, corollary being: you may only have one love, don’t squander it.)
-Pen
