The Melkites are Catholics living in the Middle East who accepted the spiritual authority of the pope in the 18th century.
The famous actor Omar Sharif was born in Egypt on this day in 1932. His birth name was Michel Demitri Chalhoub, but he later adopted the name he became famous by. He was of Melkite Catholic Origin. The Melkites are Catholics living in the Middle East who accepted the spiritual authority of the pope in the 18th century. It was the beginning of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, which still exists today and has 1.6 million members. Its official language is Arabic. Most of them are of Syrian or Lebanese origin, as was the case with Sharif’s ancestors.
Omar Sharif was born in Alexandria. He studies Mathematics and Physics at the Cairo University. He began starring in Egyptian movies as early as the 1950s, but only became famous in the western world in the 1960s. This is largely thanks to his role in the Hollywood epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962), starring Peter O’Toole.
In 1965 he starred in another renowned movie, Doctor Zhivago, based on Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize-winning novel. Sharif lived in Egypt until the mid-1960s, when he moved to Europe. He married the Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in 1954 and converted to Islam.
