His father, Dr. Ibrahim Kabil, was head of the internal revenue service in Alexandria and the Western provinces as well as the Minister of Finance in the shadow government of the Saadi opposition party before the 1952 coup.

Chahine, credited with launching the career of Omar Sharif, took Kabil under his wing and established him as a promising young actor in Egyptian cinema during the 1970s.

Some of Kabil's more notable films during this period include Chahine's The Sparrow, Love Under the Rain (based on the Naguib Mahfouz novel), and The Damned (an adaptation of King Lear).

Based on his experience of capturing Israeli pilot Yair Barak in the Six-Day War in 1967, the film was ideally to be a joint American-Israeli-Egyptian production that would highlight the possibility of peace between Egypt and Israel.

By 1979, Dustin Hoffman had signed on to play the role of Kabil's prisoner for $3.5 million, but the project ultimately never advanced past the preliminary stages due to Sadat's assassination.

After a visit to Israel in March 1980, Kabil was subsequently blacklisted by the League of Arab States and threatened by radical terrorist groups such as the Abu Nidal Organization.

After years of involvement with the United Nations, Kabil was named the UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for the Middle East and North Africa in November 2003.