Peter O'Toole's record

[rudeboy]

Well done to Peter O'Toole on his eighth oscar nomination for best actor. This rather touching interview was published in The Observer last weekend.

Cheerful rebel

Peter O'Toole emerged during Hollywood's glittering golden age - acting, and partying wildly, alongside legends Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Now, at 74, his performance as a lecherous old actor in Venus has placed him among the favourites to win the Oscar he has been denied seven times.

Gaby Wood
Sunday January 21, 2007

Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.

The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.

Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')

You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.

His face lights up at the mention of What's New, Pussycat?, a madcap caper which was Woody Allen's first script and (depending on your sense of humour) possibly O'Toole's most appealing role. He is as proud of his comic roles as he is of his epic, tormented heroes. 'There's a line I had to say in a film once,' he grins: '"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Which had been said by Edmund Kean. And it is, it's bloody difficult to get it right. I've never known a good actor who couldn't play comedy, and I've never known any actor who found it easy.'

He speaks in a purring, plummy voice, his diction elegantly clear yet fluid enough to suggest the years of nocturnal slurring to which it must have been subjected. He is dapper yet mischievous, a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his white shirt, the electric white wisps of his hair fighting the smoothness of their renowned style. He is charming, but not shy of correcting you with a glowering, sidelong look, or of swearing his heart out to punctuate a point. When he laughs, it is a hoarse, chesty laugh from which you imagine he might not mind if he didn't recover: however frail he says he feels, he approaches every tale with aplomb.

There is something mysterious about O'Toole: from this vantage point, he seems to have been an old-school successor to Gielgud or Olivier, yet when he first came on the scene he was lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism. I ask him whether, when he was at the Bristol Old Vic or at the Royal Court in the 1950s, he was aiming to shatter a tradition or defend one. The response comes slowly, deliberately, accompanied by dramatically hooded eyes.

'One of the enduring myths of our time,' says O'Toole, 'is the ####ing Royal Court. George Devine was a third-rate mummer who couldn't act for toffee. He was a nice old stick, George, but surrounded by these bloody gruesome young amateurs. I found it deeply overrated, but the myth continues. The revivals of Look Back in Anger have been execrated. Well, it was never very good. I went to see it - dreary little production, drearily done. It's all PR. A PR put out a flyer and referred to John Osborne as an "angry young man". It was one of those phrases, everybody used it - I was called an "angry young actor". God!'

Weren't you a rebel? 'I had a rebellious nature, of course. But I wasn't particularly angry about anything. I was quite cheerful!'

O'Toole's first London success was The Long and the Short and the Tall, a Second World War play put on at the Royal Court in 1959 (the part had been written for Albert Finney, a classmate of his at Rada, but Finney developed appendicitis during rehearsals). The all-male cast made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. It was partly their carousing offstage behaviour, and partly the fact that most of these new young actors had come from the provinces (they were the unwealthy beneficiaries of Clement Attlee's postwar reforms), that made them right for the kitchen-sink age.

Yet O'Toole was always a traditional actor - the fact that he's listed alongside Finney, who kept his northern accent, Richard Burton, always inalienably Welsh, the Irishman Richard Harris and the famously cockney Michael Caine, is perhaps an accident of timing more than a true description of his impact. O'Toole was brought up in wartime Leeds with an Irish bookie father ('I'm not working-class,' the self-described 'slum Mick' once said, 'I come from the criminal classes.'); but he was not on stage to flaunt his lower-class roots, and on film he lived up to the aristocracy of his breathtaking looks.

The looks themselves, though, were a kind of mask: in 1960, after a stunning few years at the Bristol Old Vic and that run in London, O'Toole was advised by certain film-makers to fix his nose (Joseph Losey was against it, Nicholas Ray was in favour). The nose, which was then long and - O'Toole claimed - wonky as a result of a rugby game during National Service in the Navy, was surgically straightened in time for a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. ('I thought, well, #### it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy little heap,' he later said.) It was this picture that David Lean saw when he was casting Lawrence of Arabia

There were those who said the pretty boy we have come to know was a sell-out compared to the rugged man of the stage. But he went on to give some historic performances in the theatre - as Shylock at Stratford that same year, as Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963, in Waiting for Godot in Dublin in 1970 (Beckett once told him he thought no decent film could be made with dialogue - it had all been downhill since the silent era). And he more than made up for the prettiness with his behaviour: there was an undercurrent of (as was said of his character, TE Lawrence) 'insubordination', a choice of brilliant, 'difficult' men as mentors, and a dashing flair for being banned from every drinking establishment he set his sights on.

Michael Caine was O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall; considering he never went on stage, Caine later said, it was incredible he was so exhausted at the end of the run, but waiting anxiously in the wings every night as O'Toole swung in at the very last minute was enough to give any man a coronary. Once, the pair went out drinking and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole, 'What ####ing day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.

'I do not regret one drop,' O'Toole now says of his long nights, most famously spent with Richards Harris and Burton. 'We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public!'

I wasn't wondering about the regrets so much as the pleasures, I explain, and urge him to recall particular nights. 'Oh, well there were so many, darling, so bloody many,' he replies, with a look of contented defeat. He claims he really did once go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica.

What percentage of his life, would he say, has he woken up in places he didn't recognise? 'Oh,' O'Toole says, shaking his head at the incalculable number, 'the one to ask was Harris. He literally would say to Elizabeth, his third wife: I'm just going down to the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes. And a month later he didn't know where he'd been. But don't forget, we weren't morose. It was just a fuel, it was in addition to what we were doing, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? It was a fuel for various adventures ...'

They would play snooker or watch rugby together; sometimes, in a jazz joint, O'Toole would find Burton draped over the bass player, beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to a picked out iambic accompaniment. Burton, he says, was 'bursting with life'. One of O'Toole's party pieces was climbing - climbing the wall of Lloyd's bank in Covent Garden, for instance, in the early hours, just for fun. Walls people now climb with ropes, he adds, they used to scale 'in our Sunday shoes'. Did they ever think they'd die? I ask. 'No,' he says with a smile, 'we enjoyed the climb.'

Meanwhile, he had a family in Hampstead. The actress Sian Phillips, to whom he was married for 20 years, has written of their relationship in terms that almost make it rival that of Burton and Taylor. O'Toole, a 'dangerous, disruptive human being' in her description, would disappear for days, or pick fights that quickly escalated to shattered glass. But, as with many of his onscreen incarnations, she suggested, he was so charismatic all was routinely forgiven. (The alcoholic matinee idol he plays in My Favourite Year has a line O'Toole delivers inimitably. Wandering into the wrong loo, he is reprimanded by a stern old woman. 'This is for ladies only!' she grumbles, to which he replies, unzipping his fly: 'So is this, Ma'am, but every now and again I have to run a little water through it.') In the end, it was Phillips who had an affair and left. They have two daughters, Kate O'Toole - named after Katharine Hepburn and now an actress herself - and Pat. O'Toole has a 23-year-old son, Lorcan, from a later relationship with an American model called Karen Brown (Lorcan is Lawrence in Gaelic). As a result of a very public custody battle some years ago, Lorcan primarily grew up with his father, and now he is an actor.

About many of his friends and acquaintances, O'Toole is discreet to the point of looking injured at the mention of their name. 'I don't want to be rude - if you don't mind,' he says when Elizabeth Taylor comes up in conversation. But assuming he's happy to offend the dead, I ask him about an incident in which he reportedly roughed up Kenneth Tynan, this newspaper's celebrated theatre critic. I imagine this to be just another entertaining brawl, a mythical, whisky-fuelled fistfight, but O'Toole seems terribly saddened by the memory.

'Oh, all right, since it's come up ...' he says, and tells the story. It was the summer of 1974. He was making a film in Paris with the noir master Otto Preminger, about a kidnap by Palestinian terrorists. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: 'To Peter O'Toole, the so-called Irishman ... we have planted a bomb in the building.' It was signed by the IRA, and the terrified crew cleared out. 'This was the height of the bombings,' O'Toole says now, 'Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.'

Eventually, word was sent that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag - by Tynan. O'Toole couldn't believe it; he marched off to find him. 'He was sitting in the room, looking un-Ken-like, smoking cigarettes over and over again. He said: "But I thought you'd see through it!" And' - a look of sweet regret comes over O'Toole's face - 'I'm afraid I punched him. Very hard.'

That was the last time they spoke, an awful result, since Tynan had been such a champion of O'Toole, whom he called an 'insomniac Celtic dynamo'. 'You'll find there's a bit cut out of Ken's diaries because I wouldn't tell the story,' O'Toole explains. 'Well, I didn't want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls ... I may have done. And so that was the end.'

Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O'Toole for Playboy magazine, and they'd had this wonderful exchange:

Tynan: 'Are you afraid of dying?'

O'Toole: 'Petrified.'

Tynan: 'Why?'

O'Toole: 'Because there's no future in it.'

Tynan: 'When did you last think you were about to die?'

O'Toole: 'About four o'clock this morning.'

O'Toole has said goodbye to certain things he loves - the drinking, of course, is dramatically reduced, and he no longer plays cricket, a game to which he has been devoted all his life, and which he also used to coach. He doesn't mind - he went out in style. His favourite cricket field is in Devon, a place near Dartmoor called Lustleigh, and that was where he batted for the last time, several years ago. 'The grounds are behind a church - they're beautiful - and there's a river. The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river. I knew I was finished - I could hardly see the bloody ball - but I went bang! And the ball went boom, into the river, in my favourite little cricket field, and I said: Pedro, get out now. And I did.'

All this has left time for other pursuits, however. One thing the bad-boy persona always veiled was a scholarly man of letters. Loitering With Intent, O'Toole's autobiography, of which he has published two volumes, is richly written and Irishly eloquent. He is working on a third volume now, and has a theory about Shakespeare's sonnets he may yet put to paper.

Reminiscing about his mentor, the renegade actor-film-maker Kenneth Griffith who died just six months ago, O'Toole tells me about an episode that cemented their friendship. In the mid-1950s, Griffith and O'Toole shared a dressing room in Manchester with George Formby. Formby, they found, kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys, and they asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find it very difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick up another ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite - whenever anything would go wrong, they'd say: 'pick up another ukulele!' and roar with laughter, as if that were the solution to every problem in life. Even now, wheezing with pleasure in the telling, O'Toole gives the impression that his survival instinct is so strong he won't ever really disappear; he'll just shift into another key.

• 'Venus' is released on Friday

Arabia to Venus: A life on screen

Born: 2 August 1932, Connemara, Ireland.

Career: Photographer and journalist on the Yorkshire Evening News, national service as a radioman in the Royal Navy and then Rada in 1952.

Best Actor Academy Award nominations

Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Becket (1964); The Lion In Winter (1968); Goodbye Mr Chips (1969); The Ruling Class (1972); The Stunt Man (1980); My Favourite Year (1982).

He says: 'I can't stand light. I hate weather. My idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another.'

They say: 'He looked like a beautiful, emaciated secretary bird ... his voice had a crack like a whip ... most important of all you couldn't take your eyes off him ... acting is usually regarded as a craft and I claim it to be nothing more except in the hands of the odd few men and women who, once or twice in a lifetime, elevate it into something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing. I believe Peter O'Toole to have this strange quality.'
Richard Burton

[Hustler]

As for O´Toole choices we need to wait to the Sag awards.

[criddic3]

To be fair, he did what he could for his role in Supergirl, which also benefitted a bit from an appealing Helen Slater. It's not their fault the script was so lousy.

[Booster Gold]

Which film choices do you think they found objectionable? The Ruling Class?

Personally, I think it was Creator and Supergirl.

[flipp525]

I'm 28.

[Uri]

How old are you, flipp? My idea of “many years” was about twenty, but this is because I’m of the tender age of 44.

[flipp525]

They may bear some grudge against him - for many years now his career choices could be conceived as quite insulting, or maybe it something about his personality that turns them off – I don’t know.

Which film choices do you think they found objectionable? The Ruling Class?

I am intrigued by the idea that he could be completely left off these nominations. Has anyone here seen Venus? I can't gauge it from the preview. The song that's playing in the background just does not work me. Too Hilary Duff or something.

[Uri]

Well, if the London Critics Circle nominations are any indication, then O’Toole has a problem. While they don’t ignore Venus - Jodie Whittaker is up for British newcomer, Leslie Phillips is on the list of British actors in support – they certainly gave him the cold shoulder. Not only he’s not up for best actor, they didn’t even find a place for him on the more forgiving British actor category (and I don’t think it’s about him being Irish). They may bear some grudge against him - for many years now his career choices could be conceived as quite insulting, or maybe it something about his personality that turns them off – I don’t know. But even if that’s the case, they for sure didn’t find the performance itself strong enough for them to feel obliged to recognize it.

[Big Magilla]

It all assumes, of course, that the performances of O'Toole and Whitaker are equally memorable and deserving of awards. O'Toole should not win simply because he's old or because he's lost so many times before, but those factors should be considered as a tie breaker.

Forest Whitaker is a wonderful actor and one who is overdue for recognition. He may, in fact, be the winner of my own award this year - I haven't seen O'Toole's performance yet to know who I like better and I don't have the same conflict Oscar has, having already awarded O'Toole twice (for Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter).

What I don't like is the proliferation of critics awards from everywhere and anyone that all give their awards to the same people making AMPAS look like they're out of touch if they award someone else. Helen Mirren may be head and shoulders above other actresses this year, even the African American Film Critics thought so, awarding a Caucasian for the first time in their existence, but is Forest Whitaker her equal among males this year or are the critics making a concerted effort to dictate AMPAS results as they clearly did last year. Greg, help me out here - I smell a conspiracy! As someone on another board asked sarcastically, "what's next, the West Covina Critics Award?" West Covina. for those who don't know, is a suburb of Los Angeles.

I was being tongue-in-cheek, but if all they're going to do is rubber stamp critical consensus, they may as well announce the winners at teh same time as they announce the nominations.

[flipp525]

will AMPAS follow tradition and finally award O'Toole a competitive Oscar or follow the herd and give it to Whitaker? If they do the latter, then maybe it's time for the Academy to change its rules.

I don't see why, it would only perpetuate society's tendency toward treating elderly people with kid gloves. I mean, it would only be about as insulting as creating a category "Best Actor of an Age." O'Toole's a big boy now, and if he loses, I'm sure he can handle it.

I think Magilla was being tongue-in-cheek, however, it's worth noting that there shouldn't be a category for young performers for the very same reason. If you've been nominated for an Oscar, you need to be a big boy or girl and take the whole thing in stride.

[Eric]

will AMPAS follow tradition and finally award O'Toole a competitive Oscar or follow the herd and give it to Whitaker? If they do the latter, then maybe it's time for the Academy to change its rules.

I don't see why, it would only perpetuate society's tendency toward treating elderly people with kid gloves. I mean, it would only be about as insulting as creating a category "Best Actor of an Age." O'Toole's a big boy now, and if he loses, I'm sure he can handle it.

[rudeboy]

I'm normally not a fan of 'career oscars'. But I have to admit, if O'Toole is nominated this time around and loses, I will feel bad for him. I haven't seen Venus - has anyone here? - so can't comment on whether or not he deserves a win. It certainly seems like the kind of role a flamboyant elderly actor can let rip with - not too much of a stretch, perhaps, but the potential for grand, scenery-chewing entertainment is there. I'm quite confident it won't be the performance I judge best this year, but I'm fairly sure I'll end up rooting for him.

O'Toole has his honorary oscar, of course, but it's hardly the same thing. Will it count for or against him? We've seen in the past that a recent honorary award doesn't do a contender any harm, maybe even acting as a timely reminder that the actor in question has never picked up a competitive one.

[Big Magilla]

This is the year we find out if the Academy follows traditon or breaks with it altogether.

As everyone knows by now no actor or actress has ever gone to 8 nominations without winning. Prognosticators cite Geraldine Page, Paul Newman and Al Pacino as previous actors who've won on their 8th bid. I think Eugene Levy was the one who started it and everyone else including Jeffrey Wells and Tom O'Neill jumped on the bandwagon. Well, they're wrong - Paul Newman won on his 7th. Furthermore Peter O'Toole is the only actor other than Newman to have gone to 7 nominations in the lead category without winning, a record he has held for 24 years. Pacino's win was for his sixth in a lead nomination and Page's was for her fourth. Although Richard Burton has as many nominations as O'Toole without having won, his first was for supporting actor.

So, will AMPAS make O'Toole the third actor to win after having won an honorary Oscar for career achievements like Henry Fonda and Paul Newman or will they treat him like the Emmys have treated Angela Lansbury and ignore him once more despite his record losses?

In 1981 when Fonda was the sentimental favorite for On Golden Pond, Burt Lancaster, who already had an Oscar, won all three major critcis' prizes including his third NYFC win. This year Forest Whitaker, who has never been nominated for an Oscar, is winning all the critics' awards, of which there are now much more than three. He even won the National Board of Review award that Fonda won.

In recent years veterans such as Sissy Spacek, Ellen Burstyn and Diane Keaton failed to win Oscars, but had previous competitive wins to console them. The only comparable performance by a veteran male actor was Richard Farnsworth's in The Straight Story in 1999, but he was gettign only his second career nomination.

Veteran status has helped actors like Jack Palance and James Coburn while ignoring veteran actresses like Lauren Bacall and Gloria Stuart, though this year the best actress Oscar will almost certainly go to veteran Helen Mirren.

I say again, will AMPAS follow tradition and finally award O'Toole a competitive Oscar or follow the herd and give it to Whitaker? If they do the latter, then maybe it's time for the Academy to change its rules. Just take a consensus of the critics' awards like they did last year and announce on nomination day who the winners will be and save the suspense for the categories where there isn't consensus.