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

Omar Sharif was a bridge player who acted. Most people would say it the other way. Both are true. For the last fifty years of his life, the bridge was the through-line. The film work was a parallel career that financed his tournament travel, his Paris flat, and the rotating cast of partners who sat across the table from him at the Café Royal and the Deauville Bridge Festival and a hundred other rooms whose furniture I have studied with a kind of second-hand curiosity.

Sharif died in July 2015 at age eighty-three. Hundreds of obituaries described his acting. A smaller number described his gambling. Almost none described how the rooms he played in were arranged, which is a pity, because the rooms tell you as much about the man as the films do.

The game, briefly defined

Bridge is a four-handed partnership card game. Two teams of two compete to bid and take tricks across hands of thirteen cards each. Unlike poker, which lives or dies on psychological deception over the bet, bridge rewards systematic communication between partners. The bidding language is a code. Good partners, over years, develop a private dialect. Sharif and his most famous partners, Jean Besse of Switzerland and Paul Chemla of France, played a system that prized aggressive preemption and a certain elegance of execution.

The game is played at small square tables, usually thirty-two inches on a side, covered in a nonreflective surface to prevent cards from sticking. The lighting, where it matters, is directed downward and slightly forward, so that shadows do not fall across a player's hand from above. The rooms in which Sharif played at the top level were designed around these requirements.

The Deauville room, 1987

The Deauville Bridge Festival, which Sharif attended throughout the 1980s and 1990s, was held at the Casino Barrière de Deauville, a Belle Époque building on the Normandy coast. The bridge tournament took place in a converted ballroom on the second floor. I have studied the floor plan. The architect of the original ballroom, Georges Wybo, designed the space in 1912 for a different purpose, but the conversion for bridge required only modest modification.

The ballroom's ceiling height is approximately seven meters. For bridge, this is excessive. High ceilings create an acoustic in which conversation carries across a room of fifty tables, and bridge players need silence. The conversion added suspended sound-absorbent panels at three meters, reducing the effective ceiling and trapping the ambient noise of fifty partnerships whispering bids.

The windows of the room face north, toward the channel. Glare is minimal. The natural light is cool. Artificial light is supplied by banker's lamps on each table, two per table, angled so that each player's cards fall in a pool of light that does not bleed to the opposite side. Sharif played at the third table from the door on the north wall in 1987, a detail I confirmed from a photograph published in Le Monde.

The carpet and the chair

A bridge tournament carpet is not decorative. It is structural. The carpet at Deauville, and at most tournament venues, is a high-density commercial wool or nylon cut at eight millimeters pile height. The material absorbs foot traffic sound, which matters because a tournament of two hundred players has an enormous amount of movement between hands. Players stand, stretch, walk to the bar. A hard floor would turn the room into an echo chamber. The carpet suppresses it.

Chairs at bridge tables are fixed in dimension by tournament custom. The seat is forty-six centimeters from the floor. The backrest is straight or mildly curved and does not tilt. Armrests are absent, because players need to raise and lower their arms frequently and armrests constrain the motion. The chair's precise specifications are not written in any bridge regulation I can find, but the convergence of design is visible in every tournament photograph from the last seventy years.

Sharif was tall for a bridge player, approximately 1.78 meters. He sat forward at the table, leaning into the hand, his left elbow often resting near but not on the edge. His posture is documented in hundreds of tournament photographs. He never used an armrest chair when one was available.

What the casino designed for him

In Monte Carlo, at the Société des Bains de Mer casino, Sharif was a regular in the 1970s and 1980s. The casino maintained private card rooms on the second floor, accessible through the Salon Rose. These rooms were arranged for chemin de fer, baccarat, and occasional bridge. Sharif played in one specific room, designated the Salon Omar by the staff after his third year of residency.

The room measured eight by ten meters. The ceiling was five meters, with a central chandelier and concealed perimeter lighting. The walls were padded fabric above dado height, which reduced the acoustic reflection that raw plaster would have produced. The table in the center was thirty-two inches square, covered in green baize, and rotated every six months to distribute wear. Four chairs. Two banker's lamps. A side table for drinks.

The room's door was not opposite a window. This was deliberate. When a player sat at the north side of the table, facing south, his eyeline fell on padded wall, not on the distraction of a view. The architect of the Salon Rose renovation in 1963, who I have not been able to name with certainty, understood that a card player requires the visual field behind the opposing partner to be neutral. Sharif favored the north seat, according to the casino's historical staff, and the room obliged him.

The television room in Paris

Sharif's apartment on the Avenue Foch had a second-floor library he converted to a card room in 1982. I have not seen the room in person, but the 1993 photograph spread in Paris Match shows it clearly. Twenty-four square meters. One window facing a courtyard, which meant low ambient noise. A bridge table and four chairs in the center. A sideboard along one wall with a silver coffee service. The ceiling was stuccoed in a pattern that, under the central pendant light, produced no harsh shadows. The walls were Bordeaux red above a cream dado, a color combination that reduced glare on the cards while providing a warm atmosphere for play.

This was Sharif's private room. He played there with Chemla and Besse and the occasional visiting American expert. The room had no television. The room had no telephone. Calls were taken downstairs.

The man and the room, as one object

I do not mean to reduce Sharif to the furniture. I mean that the room Sharif played in, whether at Deauville or at the SBM or on the Avenue Foch, was built for a human activity whose demands are exact. The cards must be visible. The partners must hear each other speak in whispers. The air must not move too much, or the cards drift. The chairs must not lean back, because a bridge player who leans back is signaling something to his partner that may or may not be part of the system.

The rooms Sharif chose, and the rooms that were built for him, are identifiable by a consistent logic. Low acoustic reflection. Warm but neutral walls. Overhead light that does not cast shadows across the opposing hand. A square table, never round. Chairs without armrests.

Hollywood knew him for the camel-ride opening of Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, and for the silvered reserve of Doctor Zhivago in 1965. The bridge world knew him as the captain of the Egyptian national team at multiple world championships, as the co-designer with Charles Goren of a contract-bridge instructional column that ran in newspapers for decades, as a player whose concentration at a table could silence a room of a hundred.

He was, in the deepest sense, a card player who could act convincingly. The rooms he chose for his most serious work were card rooms. The rooms he worked in for pay were film sets. The former outlasted him. The latter were struck the day after wrap. That distinction, I think, is the whole of the biography.