CAIRO FRED.(The Talk of the Town; Omar Sharif)(Interview)

Omar Sharif--Cairo Fred to his friends--has played a bandit and a Catholic priest and Khalil Gibran and Tsar Nicholas II and the British agent Cedric, who gets trash-compacted in "Top Secret!" He is seventy-one. He has wide-set, glistening eyes the color of caviar, though the comparison might not impress him: "Caviar--for me it's like eating beans." His hair resembles a mold of white-truffle mousse ("In my hotel"--the Royal Monceau, where he lives, in Paris--"I eat white truffles every night"). His brows are still black. He doesn't wear makeup, cologne, or aftershave--"never in my life." He is fearsome: "I have flown millions of miles, millions, in first class--L.A.-Paris, L.A.-New York, China, Egypt, Argentina, Argentina, Argentina--and never gotten a single free mile." (Sputter, fist slam, hiccup.) "I will take all the airlines down. I will hold a press conference with all the journalists in the world! It's not the money, it's the principle!"

If you're not careful, he's apt to turn on you. Recently, he spent a night in jail after assaulting a policeman who tried to escort him from the roulette table where he'd lost more than thirty thousand dollars on one bet. "It made me the hero of the whole of France. To head-butt a cop is the dream of every Frenchman." Catherine Mareska, his assistant of thirty-five years, has a long-suffering look. "It was a Saturday," she said wearily, about having to fetch him from jail. (Sharif is an expert bridge player, and he has amassed enormous gambling debts over the years.)

The other night, he was eating dinner at "21." The maitre d' greeted him familiarly, and then steered him to a table and chose a seat for him. "I want to show you to Walter Cronkite," the maitre d' said, tilting his head at an adjacent group of diners.

"How sweet," Sharif said, smiling to show the gap between his front teeth.

A waiter who said that he was Turkish brought the first course. "My wife is Egyptian," he said.

"She makes love ...