O’Toole a paradox
Squandered opportunities haunted actor
On the one occasion I was able to talk to Peter O’Toole as a journalist, I started off with the wrong question.
It was the spring of 2004, and the venerable actor, who died this past weekend at the age of 81, was sitting with journalists in a New York hotel discussing his role as Priam in the film Troy. By coincidence, a longawaited DVD release of Man Of La Mancha was also coming out — so I asked him about his memories of starring in that film.
Big mistake. No, he had nothing to say. “That was not the happiest time of my life,” he said tersely.
Actually, this was not my first encounter with him. I had first seen O’Toole in person in a small Italian restaurant in Hampstead where the London bureau of our news service was once based. A sad, solitary figure, always at the same small table, he was a regular presence most nights I was there with my London colleague. And I did speak to him once.
He was leaving as I was entering, and gave me a courteous “good evening” as I held the door for him. So I took the opportunity to tell him how much I’d enjoyed the first volume of his autobiography, Loitering With Intent. He thanked me. “I can only write in the morning,” he said almost apologetically. And then he was gone.
It would be flattering to my ego to be able to say he remembered me years later in New York. But no, I was just another journalist, one whose question had brought back painful memories of one of his many bad movies. It was the first press junket he’d done since 1968.
I worked myself back into his good graces by asking him about his writing. He perked up.
“It’s kind of a performing art — writing. I can’t sit down to write unless I’m dressed. I mean dressed well and comfortably and I have to be shaved and bathed and then the curtain goes up, and if I’m not in my study by 10 or 10:30, forget it. I can’t write a word.”
He was still dressing well on that press day in New York. In contrast. to his scruffy co-star, Brad Pitt, O’Toole had shown up impeccably attired in beautifully tailored dark suit. True, he resembled a dissipated Edwardian dandy — at 71, the ravages of years of alcoholic excess were showing — but he remained the class act of the day.
But there was also a certain melancholy about him. He seemed almost wraithlike — a man looking like his own ghost, to paraphrase film historian David Thomson — when you compared him with the vibrant young warrior he had portrayed more than four decades previously in Lawrence of Arabia.
There is a painful paradox when you examine O’Toole’s life and career. On the one hand, those eight Oscar nominations and all the critical accolades hailing him as the most exciting actor of his generation. On the other hand, the sense of squandered opportunity.
The list of disappointing films seems endless — from How To Steal A Million to Supergirl. Even the much-touted Becket was flawed from the beginning but rendered even more so by the fact that he and Richard Burton were drunk for much of the filming.
His stage career was similarly checkered — an indifferently received Hamlet, a disastrous Macbeth, and then redemption of an ironic sort in 1989 when he scored his biggest London stage success playing a drunk in Jeffrey Barnard Is Unwell. Meanwhile, his few good films were often distinguished by an over-the-top eccentricity that was often alcohol-fuelled.
There was a side of O’Toole that was always defiant about his hellraising behaviour, even though booze had come close to killing him more than once. “I like booze because it anesthetizes pain and makes things a little less nightmarish,” he once said — and there’s a despairing subtext in this admission.
When we journalists talked to him in 2004, an emaciated O’Toole was offering no apologies for his selfdestructive history. Yet he remained impressive in his ravaged dignity — especially when talking about a scene in Troy incorporating text taken directly from Homer’s Iliad. “Flesh of my flesh killed by flesh of his flesh ... my flesh killing his flesh ...” There was poetic rapture in his voice here.
But in contrast to these almost mystical utterances, there were also affectionate memories of his many nights of “carousing” with his old drinking buddy Richard Harris. They had been “rugby game chums” for 50 years. “I have millions of yarns about Richard,” O’Toole said, and there were tears in his eyes. He proceeded to tell one about Harris on his deathbed — and it had to do with his dying friend’s hatred of cricket.
“I went into his room. It was the last time we saw each other. The television was on, and there was Harris in his specs on watching cricket — after 50 years of cursing it. Then he took his specs off and put his head on the pillow. And I thought — well, after the unnameable horror of the game of cricket, death must have been a walk in the park.”
O’Toole told the story well that day in 2004. But he also seemed to be telling us that he’s own mortality was waiting in the wings and that it held no fears for him.