How I choked Peter O’Toole — and punched Pinter’s lights out
‘O’Toole and I went jogging ... stark naked!’
WITH his booming voice and huge beard, Brian Blessed remains one of stage and screen’s most recognisable actors. In his new autobiography, extracted here, he recalls his long love-hate relationship with fellow actor and riotous Irish hellraiser Peter O’Toole — and the vicious wrestling match that sealed their lifelong friendship...
THE post-production party for cast and crew was at a grand old country house full of antiques just outside Dublin. Bagpipes were playing when the doors were flung open and in walked the star of the film — Peter O’Toole, actor supreme and hellraiser extraordinaire, with a gang of cronies. He was obviously very drunk, far from an unusual O’Toole condition.
He grabbed the pipes and to everyone’s astonishment played them brilliantly. Was there no end to this amazing man’s talent? After huge applause, he bowed… and threw the instrument straight through a glass window.
It was the signal for mayhem. Carpets, chairs, tables were flung all over the place. Tapestries were torn off the walls, and paintings, too. The producer, with the distraught old lord who owned the house by his side, begged me to do something.
I stepped forward. ‘STOP THIS, O’TOOLE!’ I boomed in the unmistakeable deep bass Blessed voice. He turned and glared, his eyes wide and bloodshot. ‘Stop this now, do you hear me?’
He raised his leg to knee me, and froze like a statue. ‘You try that, Peter,’ I continued, ‘and I promise you won’t be able to walk for months. You can kiss your acting career goodbye.’
‘You are a miserable f****r, Blessed,’ he rasped and walked out.
I spent the next few hours comforting the owner and trying to comprehend how such a great actor and wonderful human being could turn into such a violent monster. I had been his friend since I was in drama school, and I seemed to be one of the few people able to keep him in order. That went back to the very first time I met him — at a party in the mid-1950s where I’d memorably just punched Harold Pinter’s lights out. No long dramatic pauses as in his plays. Wham! He got one right on the side of the jaw.
I was a drama student at the Old Vic theatre school in Bristol and we were celebrating the opening night of Pinter’s very first play in the university drama studio. Though he was then an unknown, he could be extremely rough when ‘refreshed’ and was wandering round threatening to hit everyone. Because I was a big lad and I’d boxed in my youth, my friends were looking to me for protection.
Pinter came up to me and said menacingly: ‘You must be the hard man everyone’s talking about.’ Then he took a swing.
Now, Pinter was without doubt a great dramatist — the heaviest of them all — but his punches were more Gilbert & Sullivan. I dodged a couple, then let go a quick left hook, which sent him tumbling backwards.
O’Toole — a leading actor at the Old Vic Theatre — was also at the party. (Of course he was! He could smell a booze-up at a thousand paces. Unlike me: I don’t touch alcohol.)
He rushed up, helped Pinter to his feet and led him away, turning to give me a ‘did you really do that?’ look. It was the start of a friendship that lasted more t han 50 years, t hough throughout that time I both loved and loathed him.
By far the best actor of his generation, he was also often moronic, bumptious, insulting and violent, a complete pain in the backside — especially when his head was inside a bottle. He was like Lord Byron with a knuckle-duster — mad, bad and dangerous to know — as I discovered after he saw me acting in a student play.
He was gushing with praise for my performance and ‘its fragility, love’, but within minutes had switched and was picking a fight with me. We were almost eyeball to eyeball as he said menacingly: ‘I’m going to the gym l ater to do a few strength tests. Why don’t you come along?’
‘I’d be delighted,’ I said. ‘You’re going to sweat a bit,’ he shot back, ‘You scared?’ ‘Not of you, no!’ I replied. At the gym, I took on him and the gang of cronies and sycophants he always went a r ound with — and slaughtered the lot of them at bench-pressing, pull-ups and abdominal crunches.
Foolishly he challenged me to a bout of wrestling, something I’d been proficient at since I was young. About two minutes in, I got him in a choke-hold. ‘I can’t breathe!’ he gasped.
‘That’s the idea, Pete!’ I said. It was the first time I’d called him Pete. ‘One to me. Want to go again?’
‘ No way, love! My God, you’re a rough bastard.’ From then on, we were friends. It was as though I’d passed some initiation ceremony.
The macho challenges continued, which was fine by me. O’Toole’s acting style was to play on the fragile side of his nature, which is why off stage he always felt the need to act tough, particularly with a physically heavyweight person like me.
We’d run for miles, just the two of us — sometimes stark naked, for a laugh — and by God could he run. He was built like a gazelle! He might even have got the better of me, had he not smoked a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes every day.
O’Toole was an extraordinary actor, brimming with confidence and ability and very brave, if unorthodox.
I remember watching him as Jimmy Porter in Look Back In Anger when he saw me in the front row, jumped off the stage and sat down next to me for a chat.
‘You enjoying it, love?’ he asked, ever so nonchalantly. ‘This next bit’s good. Bit heavy going, don’t you think? How’re you keeping?’
Then he stood up and jumped straight back on to the stage — 4ft up from a standing start!
He was just as athletic when it came to drinking. He was constantly being thrown into the cells by police. The moment he left the theatre he and his cronies — who weren’t there to keep him out of trouble but to get him into it — would be off terrorising ordinary people.
They destroyed restaurants and bars, and because his gang were generally well-off students from the United States, they paid for the damage with pocketfuls of cash. They’d just slap it down on a table — if they could find one that hadn’t been smashed. ‘ How much do you want? A hundred pounds? OK, here you go.’
O’Toole would usually be on his knees, vomiting. I once saw him in the middle of a main street in Bristol waving his arms trying to stop all the buses, while covered from head to toe in his own sick.
This man, blessed by God with an amazing talent, was p***ing it up against the wall, and that’s what made me hate his guts sometimes.
Richard Harris, Oliver Reed and Richard Burton were notorious for their exploits — but they didn’t compare with O’Toole. They merely drank a lot, threw a few punches and got on everyone’s nerves. When it came to hellraising, O’Toole was the only genuine article.
The other three made a lot of threats — they’d throw stones and chuck spears at the castle. O’Toole would pull down the drawbridge, charge in screaming and starts winging from the flaming chandeliers! I kept in touch with O’Toole after we left Bristol and I got my break playing PC ‘Fancy’ Smith in Z Cars. We even made a couple of films together. When I arrived on one set, he gleefully told me he had spent the night in the cells after a wild pub fight. He also tried to wrestle me, to see if I could still beat him physically.
I quickly had him on his back, with a vice- like grip. Then I saw the director, J. Lee Thompson, watching us and clearly thinking: ‘Why the hell have I employed this guy Blessed? He’s worse than O’Toole.’
ome years later, we were in Rome ming the musical The Man Of Mancha, in which Peter was mesmerising Don Quixote. was having a quiet dinner in a resurant with other actors when he rst in with three minders. He was drunk, breaking glasses, pouring ne over the table and threatening eryone, that I got up to leave. ‘You bloody going nowhere!’ O’Toole eamed, instructing his tough guys bar my way. Peter,’ I said quietly, ‘I’ll tell you at I’ll do, I’ll flatten these silly **rs and then I’ll kick your teeth wn your throat.’ fter a pause, he waved his hand, torpedoes moved out of my way d I left. he next time our paths crossed s during the making of the BBC i es I, Claudius, i n which his n wife, the beautiful Welsh actress n Phillips, was playing my screen e.
One morning she told me she’d been up all night with Peter. ‘I thought he was going to die, Brian. His body just broke down. The doctors say that if he even has a drop of alcohol it might kill him.’
I suggested she brought him in so I could cheer him up, and he arrived looking terrible. ‘Hello, Brian, you big rough bastard,’ he said. ‘Get in here,’ I replied, ‘And don’t go messing up our rehearsals, otherwise I’ll chin you!’ Ov e r the next few days, I laid into Peter to keep him awake and alert. Everyone else was so respectful and considerate, but it was no use.
O’Toole needed buckets of abuse. He needed to laugh. ‘Lawrence of Arabia?’ I’d say, recalling his most famous role. ‘ You look more like Catherine of Aragon. You know noth- ing about acting, O’ Toole . I have never seen a more untalented human being. You’ve got no face, no voice. Look at you there, all shrivelled up!’ It did the trick. Put some much-needed colour in his cheeks! That was back in the mid-1970s and he was still alive and kicking 30 years later.
We had plenty of ups and downs. There was the time he rang out of the blue: ‘ I’m doing Macbeth, Brian, at the Old Vic in London, and I want you to be Banquo. I’m shaking with excitement, love.’
I was not keen. ‘Honestly, Peter,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to work with someone who behaves like you do. I am ashamed of you as an artist.
‘Actors look after their bodies, they study and study to try and better themselves. Yet you have a God-given talent and all you do is p**s on it.’ I went to his home in Hampstead to tell him to his face what I thought of him. ‘You’re either off your f ace, angry or violent,’ I raged. ‘ You bully and manipulate people. You’re marvellous for a time, and then you’re ugly once again.’
While I was saying this, I dragged him all over his house by his shirt. I bounced him off the walls. ‘You’re a good-for-nothing, O’Toole. That’s what I’ve come to tell you!’ He was crying his eyes out. ‘Brian, I love you. You’re the only person who makes any sense. You’re the only person who fazes me. Please play Banquo for me. I must walk on that stage with you by my side.’
The great Peter O’Toole was begging me, but I turned him down. I felt no remorse. Telling him the truth was something I should have done 20 years earlier.
When I arrived home, my wife said he’d been on the phone, weeping. ‘He said you beat him up! What on earth have you been doing, Brian? I’m worried. The man is distraught.’
Peter and I talked again that evening and, finally succumbing to that Irish charm, I agreed to play Banquo. Sadly, the production was a disaster and he was ridiculed.
The last time I saw him was in 2009. I was walking down Wardour Street in Soho and realised I was being sworn at. ‘Blessed, over here!’
Standing in the road was O’Toole, by now in his late 70s, arms in the air, looking as though he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards.
‘Come here and give me a hug,’ he shouted, ‘ you big lovely f****r! Then I’m going to knock you out!’
He threw a gentle punch and I grabbed him, lifted him into the air, slowly lowered him on to the pavement and pinned him.
‘Submit?’ I said as taxi drivers and tourists stared. ‘ Of course I submit. I can’t move!’
With that, I picked him up, dusted him off, gave him a big hug and a kiss — and away he went to the Groucho Club, to receive an award. Before he turned the corner, he gestured as if to say: ‘I’ll call you.’
He never did, nor I him — and that’s the last time we saw each other. It had been just like the old days: profane, confrontational and fun.
Professionally, when Peter O’Toole was good he was, in my opinion, the best there ever was. Better than all the great actors. But if he messed up, which he did occasionally, he did so majestically.
I miss him dreadfully. With his death in 2013, a great light went out on this planet. We shall never see his like again.
EXTRACTED from Absolute Pandemonium by Brian Blessed, published by Sidgwick & Jackson
‘You’re either off your face, angry or violent’