Omar Sharif: Bridge Champion and Hollywood's Greatest Card Player

The year is 1957. A young Egyptian-British actor named Michel Demitrius Shalhoub is on the set of a film in Egypt when he is introduced to a game called bridge. Within a few years he is playing with Grand Masters in Monaco. Within two decades he has won the World Open Pairs championship. He becomes Omar Sharif, the movie star. But everyone in the bridge community knows him as something else entirely: one of the greatest bridge players who has ever played the game.

Omar Sharif's bridge career is stranger than fiction because it happened alongside a Hollywood career that made him one of the most celebrated actors of the 20th century. He appeared opposite Audrey Hepburn in "Funny Girl." He was James Bond's rival in "From Russia with Love." Every magazine wanted him. Every studio courted him. And every time he had a free week, he flew to wherever the major bridge tournament was being held.

The Game

Bridge is not poker. It is not a game of deception. It is a game of pure information exchange and probability. You and your partner have a code, a bidding system, that lets you convey information about your hand to each other without speaking. The opponents are listening and trying to extract information from every bid. The play of the hand is a series of calculations: count your sure tricks, figure out which suits might break your way, execute the sequence that maximizes your chances.

Bridge players are mathematicians. They are patient. They are precise. They memorize sequences that have been played ten thousand times. Omar Sharif fit the profile of a great bridge player perfectly. He had the discipline. He had the memory. He had the willingness to sit at a table for eight hours and play hand after hand, card after card, with the same intensity for every single one.

The bridge community does not care about fame. It cares about results. A bad bridge player is a bad bridge player whether they were also Genghis Khan in the movies. Sharif was not a bad bridge player. He was an elite one.

The Travel

In the early 1970s, Sharif's bridge career reached its peak. He traveled constantly. He played in tournaments in London, Paris, Monte Carlo, and Las Vegas. He partnered with other great players. He won major championships. He wrote a column about bridge for a British magazine. He authored a book about bridge strategy.

Actors do not do this. Actors disappear from public view or they appear constantly. They do not have the kind of dual career that Sharif maintained. He would film a movie, complete a press tour, and then vanish to a bridge tournament for three weeks. The studios found this maddening. The bridge world found it completely ordinary.

In the early 1970s, Sharif's bridge career reached its peak.

The Paradox

Omar Sharif was famous for being an actor. But he wanted to be remembered as a bridge player. This is the paradox of his life. He was one of the great faces of Hollywood. And he poured his energy and time and genuine competitive spirit into a game that almost nobody watches, played at card tables by people who wear practical shoes and care about nothing except the mathematics of the hand.

By the time he was in his fifties, Sharif had essentially left acting. He was a bridge player who appeared in movies, not an actor who played bridge as a hobby. The filmography became sparse. The bridge tournaments became his primary focus. The newspapers that once followed his dating life started reporting on his tournament results the way they reported on the World Chess Championship.

Shakespeare said all the world is a stage. Omar Sharif proved that the opposite is also true: the stage is not the world. You can be the most famous actor in the world and still want something else more. You can walk away from the thing that made you famous and pursue the thing that actually interested you.

The Legacy

When people talk about great poker players, they mention Doyle Brunson, Johnny Chan, Phil Hellmuth. When people talk about chess players, they mention Kasparov, Fischer, Karpov. When people talk about bridge, among the top ten or twenty players who ever lived, Omar Sharif's name appears. This is extraordinary. This is a man who was also a movie star. There are maybe five or six people in history who have achieved that kind of dual excellence in two completely different fields at the highest level.

Omar Sharif died in 2003. The obituaries led with his acting career. Funny Girl. Lawrence of Arabia. Doctor Zhivago. That is what he was known for. But the obituaries buried the lead. The thing he cared about, the thing he devoted his energy to when he was not obligated to be famous, was bridge. He was one of the greatest bridge players in the world. That is the story that matters. That is the story he would have wanted told.