FRIENDS TRIED TO WARN ME OFF, BUT I KNEW PETER O’TOOLE WAS MY DESTINY
Now 88, and still performing to rave reviews, the legendary actress looks back on her rollercoaster marriage to the hell-raising, controlling, movie wildman
AS SIâN Phillips threaded her way through the busy London streets, heading towards Piccadilly Circus, a familiar face suddenly loomed out of the crowds towards her.With a jolt she realised it was Peter O’Toole, the ex-husband she hadn’t seen since their bitter divorce 12 years before. “He had spotted me, I think, but as we drew level I suddenly saw him and did a huge double take,” she says. “Still walking on, I looked back and he was laughing. So I laughed as well and continued on my way, still laughing.”
They never saw each other again. So how had it come to this? How had one of the most glamorous couples in showbusiness ended up like passing strangers, barely acknowledging each other in the street?
When they first met, they were inseparable. “There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him and he said as much for me,” she says simply. “I didn’t feel as though I existed without his presence.”
But when, after 20 tempestuous years together, she left him for another actor 16 years her junior, he cast her off and seemingly never looked back.
“I knew he would never speak to me again,” she says. “Once betrayed, that was it. That was part of his problem. I was sorry about that, but I never lost my respect for him. Never.”
Dame Siân is speaking today from her chic flat at the Barbican in central London. She moved there just before the first lockdown and, with characteristic efficiency, saw it, bought it and sold her existing home all before lunchtime in a single day.
Realising that none of her cherished antique furniture she’d brought from her previous home in Spitalfields would fit into her new mid-century surroundings, she sold all that too.
You sense this lack of sentimentality and her willingness to adapt to new situations have served her well in the 40 or so years since her divorce.
At 88, her advancing years have served only to make the indefatigable actress more striking, heightening her remarkable bone structure and classical features. She sits up straight, a testament to the gymnastics she did when she was young and her devotion to a brutal form of Pilates.
In recent weeks Siân has garnered rave reviews for her performances in a Samuel Beckett double bill in theWest End (now transferred to Bath), but the hours on stage have had no ill effects. “I rarely get tired, but then I don’t do much socialising,” she says.
She admits to a little Botox, but only to soften a pronounced scar between her eyebrows, the legacy of a serious car accident when she was 19. “I’ve been having fillers since the late 1960s, although I didn’t know what they were then. I had Botox before Botox was invented,” she giggles.
We are talking about the reissue of the two volumes of her memoirs, first published in 1999 and 2001. It’s unusual for old showbiz reminiscences to be dusted off after so many years, but these are modern classics: elegantly written and breathtaking in their honesty.
When she re-read them, there were moments she hardly recognised herself.
“A lot of it I couldn’t quite believe because I kept making the same life mistakes over and over again,” she admits. “I was also horrified by my candour. I kept thinking, ‘Why did I say that?’ because I’m normally quite a reticent person.”
She was introduced to O’Toole – who would become so key to her life – in the street near RADA in the 1950s while she was still a drama student.
“I’d heard about him because he’d left RADA leaving a trail of scandal, mayhem and glory. It was all men behaving badly and we were all girls behaving rather well by the time I was there. He was up in
London from the Bristol Old Vic and looked very handsome, with Irish black curls. I remember filing him away in my head and thinking, ‘That’s the man I’ll marry eventually.’”
THREE YEARS later, in 1958, they were cast in a play together, John Hall’s The Holiday. She was dazzled by him – and he with her. They started dating after he climbed in through the window of her Notting Hill flat in the early hours. Theirs was a whirlwind romance.
“We went to movies and art galleries. We stayed up late, playing the guitar and singing. I’d never talked so much in my life or been as open with anyone. We told each other everything about ourselves. He always knew things about me that no one else would guess at.
“He could see that I was shy and it was an effort for me in public life.We weren’t lovers at that point; he was very proper.We were just great companions.”
But one thing would come between them, time and again; alcohol.While she made her name in tele
vision, O’Toole carved a name for himself in Willis Hall’s The Long And The Short And The Tall, his first big London stage triumph. After the play, the company would move to the bar next door and drink pints until late into the night.
On their walks home, a drunken O’Toole would scale the wall of Lloyds Bank in Covent Garden while she sat watching, terrified.
She admits she was naive about alcohol because back then everybody in acting drank heavily.
“I didn’t know about drink because I’d come from a non-conformist, teetotal Welsh background. And in those days, people only went to Alcoholics Anonymous as a last resort because it was regarded as sissyish.”
Friends tried to warn her off O’Toole, telling her bluntly he would destroy her career, but she thought they were mad.They moved in together but, rather ominously, O’Toole started showing signs of a forceful personality.
Taking a dislike to her expensive clothes, carefully chosen by a film company, he threw them onto the sodden cobbles outside. From then on, he said grandly, she would wear his clothes.
Their first child was no sooner suggested than conceived. But marriage, in 1959, seemed to change O’Toole. Sometimes, after one of his drunken binges, he’d disappear for nights on end.
“He was leading the life we used to lead together, but now I was the wife and not really eligible to join in,” she explains. “Afterwards, he would beg for forgiveness and promise he’d never do it again.”
In 1960, as she was nearing the end of her pregnancy, O’Toole was offered the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in Peter Hall’s new company, necessitating a move to Stratford-upon-Avon. She was shocked to find her equal partner expected her to do all the housework and be on parade when needed. “I couldn’t begin to think where my work fitted into all this.”
She made meals and threw them away uneaten before going to bed alone. Sometimes there’d be a dawn demand for something to eat; more often she’d wake to find O’Toole asleep in an armchair, an overturned glass beside him.
“I was a very alone person when I was married to O’Toole,” she says. “My friends were not welcome in our life.
Distances were different in those days and I couldn’t dash back to Wales to see my parents – and we had no phone. I had nobody.” The situation unravelled further after their first daughter, Kate, was born.
O’TOOLE knew Siân was not a virgin when he married her, but used that as an excuse to persuade her she was worthless. “He wanted to rake over old relationships we’d talked about years before. It was hateful. He never hurt me when drunk but he would smash glasses and bottles, and make a lot of noise. It terrified me. I never rowed with him. My God, if I’d rowed with him I can’t imagine what would have happened.” She found a way to work, but it had to be carefully calibrated. “It couldn’t be too spectacular. If I made waves, O’Toole would react in a bad way and our lives became impossible.” One night, after an explosive exchange while being driven home from a party, he opened the passenger door of the car and ordered her out. “It was raining and I was in evening dress and I had no money. I had to walk home.” After another row which lasted all night, she was loading her things into a taxi in readiness for a matinee performance at an Oxford theatre, when she looked up and saw O’Toole swaying precariously on the roof.
“I was aghast but it didn’t occur to me to stay. I had to leave or risk missing the play. My doctor promised to come over immediately, and I told the driver to drive on. I was conscious of my lack of a ‘normal’ response, but O’Toole’s extreme behaviour had numbed my reactions. When I got home that evening, we didn’t speak of what had occurred.”After yet more hours of drunken interrogation one evening, O’Toole overturned a table, slammed the front door, jumped into his car and raced erratically into the night. It was one explosion too many.
“I walked out of the house and lay in the wet, long grass on the lawn in my nightgown,” she says. “It was almost dawn but I didn’t feel the cold. I thought, ‘I can’t go on any more.’ I could never be irreligious enough to kill myself, but my wish was to get ill and die.”
● Private Faces And Public Places by Siân Phillips (Sceptre, £12.99) is out now. For free UK P&P on orders over £20, call Express Bookshop on 020 3176 3832 or visit expressbookshop.com