TORONTO -- Omar Sharif shrugs off any Oscar buzz surrounding his role in the new French film, Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran.

In 1960s Paris, Sharif plays a kindhearted Muslim grocer who befriends a young Jewish boy.

"Oh, I don't think that's realistic at all," the 71-year-old Egyptian screen legend told The Sun yesterday. "I would be genuinely surprised.

"There are parts that get you Oscars," he continued. "You have to have a really good spectacular part. You have to do spectacular acting."

Sharif arrived in Toronto after being feted at the Venice Film Festival, where he was presented with a Golden Lion Award for lifetime achievement - 50 years in film to be exact.

"The sort of thing they give to old people, well you never get it if you're 35," he said, exposing his famous gap-toothed smile.

Next is another such award from the American Film Institute in November, not that Sharif is dwelling on his past.

"I've washed the past out of mind, totally," he said. "I live every moment as intensely as I possibly can. And I concentrate on it. Because I don't think it's positive, the past, to think about it. Forget it, it's done. It was the way it was, when it was. And the future, you don't know how long it is."

Sharif, whose last memorable role, a small one, was in the 1999 Antonio Banderas film The 13th Warrior, had just about given up on acting, as he had smoking and bridge previously, when the Monsieur Ibrahim script came along.

Years of making stinkers following his '60s and '70s heyday in such films as Lawrence Of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and Funny Girl had clearly taken their toll.

"There were a lot of parts for old Arabs that were lousy that I did because I needed to do something to make some money -- all your Ali Baba types," said Sharif. "It's a terrible suffering for an actor, if you like your work, to do bad films with bad directors. You suffer so much during the shooting, the two, three months of stupid dialogue, meaningless, with an idiot director who doesn't know what he's talking about."

Clearly that wasn't the case with Monsieur Ibrahim.

"I think it was a gift," said Sharif. "It came at the right time, because I had resisted for four years all the offers that were made to me and suddenly this came out of the blue. It was a beautifully written thing and it had a little thing that I enjoyed, which is a little bit about tolerance and about loving each other and living with each other."

Sharif also doesn't like the term "comeback role," as far as Monsieur Ibrahim is concerned.

"Nothing that I do from now on will add or subtract anything from what I am," he philosophized. "Because what makes me known is not just my films or my acting, it's a lot of things. I'm a mythical kind of person in the minds of people. I don't understand why ... If bad films were going to hurt me they would have hurt me a long time ago."

Clearly there's a lot of life left in Sharif yet.

He even seems to take pride in the recent incident in which he headbutted a police officer after arguing with a croupier while playing roulette at a casino near Paris. He was fined $1,700 and received a one-month suspended sentence.

"People think of me as a hero for head-butting a cop," he said. "He wanted me to go out, to leave the casino. I said, 'Okay.' I took my chips. I was walking. There were three big tough guys around me and I felt agoraphobia because I don't like crowds. I kept saying, 'Don't touch me. Don't touch me.' They weren't touching me, but I felt they were touching me."


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