Peter O’ Toole dies at age 81 after a legendary acting career filled with debauchery.
Hard-living actor won acclaim for Lawrence of Arabia
LONDON — Known on the one hand for his starring role in Lawrence of Arabia, leading tribesmen in daring attacks across the desert wastes, and on the other for his headlong charges into drunken debauchery, Peter O’Toole was one of the most magnetic, charismatic and fun figures in British acting.
O’Toole, who died Saturday at age 81 after a long bout of illness, was fearsomely handsome, with burning blue eyes and a penchant for hard living which long outlived his decision to give up alcohol. Broadcaster Michael Parkinson told Sky News television it was hard to be too sad about his passing.
“Peter didn’t leave much of life unlived, did he?” he said, chuckling.
A reformed — but unrepentant — hellraiser, O’Toole long suffered from ill health. Always thin, he had grown wraithlike in later years, his famously handsome face eroded by years of outrageous drinking.
But nothing diminished his flamboyant manner and candour.
“If you can’t do something willingly and joyfully, then don’t do it,” he once said. “If you give up drinking, don’t go moaning about it; go back on the bottle. Do. As. Thou. Wilt.”
O’Toole began his acting career as one of the most exciting young talents on the British stage. His 1955 Hamlet, at the Bristol Old Vic, was critically acclaimed.
International stardom came in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. With only a few minor movie roles behind him, O’Toole was unknown to most moviegoers when they first saw him as T.E. Lawrence, the mythic British First World War soldier and scholar who led an Arab rebellion against the Turks.
His sensitive portrayal of Lawrence’s complex character garnered O’Toole his first Oscar nomination, and the spectacularly photographed desert epic remains his best known role.
Playwright Noel Coward once said that if O’Toole had been any prettier, they would have had to call the movie Florence of Arabia.
British Prime Minister David Cameron said Sunday the movie was his favourite film, calling O’Toole’s performance “stunning.”
In 1964’s Becket, O’Toole played King Henry II to Richard Burton’s Thomas Becket, and won another Oscar nomination. Burton shared O’Toole’s fondness for drinking, and their off-set carousing made headlines.
O’Toole played Henry again in 1968 in The Lion in Winter, opposite Katharine Hepburn, for his third Oscar nomination.
Four more nominations followed: in 1969 for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, in 1971 for The Ruling Class, in 1980 for The Stunt Man and in 1982 for My Favorite Year. It was almost a quarter-century before he received his eighth and last, for Venus.
Seamus Peter O’Toole was born Aug. 2, 1932, the son of Irish bookie Patrick “Spats” O’Toole and his wife, a former nurse, Constance. There is some question about whether Peter was born in Connemara, Ireland, or in Leeds, northern England, where he grew up, but he maintained close links to Ireland, even befriending the country’s now-president, Michael D. Higgins.
Ireland and the world have “lost one of the giants of film and theatre,” Higgins said in a statement.
After a teenage foray into journalism at the Yorkshire Evening Post and national military service with the navy, a young O’Toole auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a scholarship.
He went from there to the Bristol Old Vic and soon was on his way to stardom, helped along by an early success in 1959 at London’s Royal Court Theatre in The Long and The Short and The Tall.
His carousing became legend, particularly in the 1970s. As he himself said, he had long been “happy to grasp the hand of misfortune, dissipation, riotous living and violence,” counting Burton, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw, Francis Bacon, Trevor Howard, Laurence Harvey and Peter Finch among his drinking companions. He lost much of his Lawrence earnings in two nights with Omar Sharif at casinos in Beirut and Casablanca.
Though he won many lesser awards during his career, triumph at the Academy Awards eluded him, perhaps in part because he had made no secret of his dislike of Hollywood and naturalistic acting, which he considered drab. He was nothing if not ambitious, but success would come on his own terms, not the movie industry’s.
He gave up drinking in 1975 following serious health problems and major surgery.
He did not, however, give up smokingunfilteredGauloises cigarettes in an ebony holder. That and his penchant for green socks, voluminous overcoats and trailing scarves lent him a rakish air and suited his fondness for drama in the old-fashioned “bravura” manner.
A month before his 80th birthday in 2012, O’Toole an- nounced his retirement from a career that he said had fulfilled him emotionally and financially, bringing “me together with fine people, good companions with whom I’ve shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.”
“However, it’s my belief that one should decide for oneself when it is time to end one’s stay,” he said.
“So I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell.”
Good parts were sometimes few and far between, but “I take whatever good part comes along,” O’Toole told The Independent on Sunday newspaper in 1990.
“And if there isn’t a good part, then I do anything, just to pay the rent. Money is always a pressure. And waiting for the right part — you could wait forever. So I turn up and do the best I can.”
In 1989, O’Toole had a big stage success with Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, a comedy about his old drinking buddy, the legendary layabout and ladies’ man who wrote The Spectator magazine’s weekly Low Life column when he was sober enough to do so.
The honorary Oscar came 20 years after his seventh nomination for My Favorite Year. By then it seemed a safe bet that O’Toole’s prospects for another nomination were slim. He was still working regularly, but in smaller roles unlikely to earn awards attention.
O’Toole graciously accepted the honorary award, quipping, “Always a bridesmaid, never a bride, my foot,” as he clutched his Oscar statuette.