Sting, a loyal cat, and an enchanting night at the wake of Peter O’Toole
Family friend Philip Nolan, the only journalist invited to Peter O’Toole’s wake, Reports on the extraordinary send-off for the greatest actor of his generation
IT WAS a deeply touching act of devotion. At an extraordinary, funny and moving Irish wake for Peter O’Toole, who died last Saturday, his cat, Sydney, sat on the legendary actor’s chest all night as family and friends arrived to pay their respects.
Stirring only occasionally, Sydney alternated between curling up to sleep and then waking to gaze almost motionlessly at Peter’s face.
Peter was reposing in an open coffin made from willow – ‘ he would have loved that because he was so passionate about cricket,’ his daughter Kate told me – in the conservatory of his north London home.
Kate, herself an acclaimed actress, was at the San Antonio Film Festival in Texas when she learned her father was seriously ill, seven weeks ago, so she brought home Mexican garlands traditionally hung on the Day of the Dead, adding a sense of colour and gaiety to the celebration of Peter’s life.
Photographs were placed on the bookshelves in the conservatory, mostly of Peter with his family, a reminder that while the world has lost a legend of stage and screen, the loss was much more personal for Kate, her sister Pat and brother Lorcan.
In the bathroom of his detached house in a suburban street, there was a reminder of his meaning to the wider world, a photograph of him on stage with all the winners of Oscars in 2003, the year Meryl Streep presented him with an honorary Academy Award for his life’s work on screen.
He was brought home from the undertaker’s on Friday morning – he would, Kate said, have been hugely amused by the fact that the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs was in the room next door – and friends started arriving from midafternoon.
Among the guests at the wake were the Irish jewellery designer Slim Barrett, who made Victoria Beckham’s wedding tiara and also has bespoke pieces featured in three of the videos for Beyoncé’s new album; Tara McGowran, daughter of the late actor Jack McGowran, famous for his interpretations of the works of Samuel Beckett; Miriam Allen, managing director of the Galway Film Fleadh; the band Alabama 3, whose song Woke Up This Morning was the theme tune for The Sopranos; Joan Buck, the former editor of French Vogue; Gerry MacLochlainn, the former Sinn Féin representative in London and more recently a councillor in Derry; and rock star Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, who was Peter’s partner before she met the singer.
As the night wore on, Sting joined Alabama 3 (whose singer, Rob Spragg, arrived in a leather jacket with the word ‘Death’ on the back of it) to sing a folk song in an eclectic session that also included old Irish airs such as Carrickfergus and The Galway Shawl, in a tribute to the time Peter spent at his house in Clifden, Connemara.
A lone fiddler played the theme tune to Schindler’s List, while Erin Gibbons, a friend who had flown in from Galway on Friday, sang The Rivers Of Bawn unaccompanied to spine-tingling silence from the audience.
Erin reminded me of the story Peter told about a favourite jacket he wore for pretty much all of the Sixties. When he eventually sent it to the dry cleaners, some of the stains could not be removed and a note was attached saying: ‘It distresses us to return this in imperfect condition.’ He immediately decided that would be his epitaph.
Of course, in so many ways, he
In the Irish tradition, some stayed up all night
actually was perfect, from electrifying performances at the Bristol Old Vic to instant worldwide fame as Lawrence of Arabia and a series of classic roles that brought eight Oscar nominations (a record without a win in open competition) and, finally, an honorary Oscar in 2003 for a body of work that is almost unequalled.
On stage, he received late-career plaudits for his remarkable oneman tour de force, Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, where more than 80 people were injured on Thursday night when part of the roof collapsed on the audience. He had tired of the West End and its crowd-pleasing musicals and revivals, wistfully remembering the glory days of the Sixties and Seventies, when he was one of its biggest draws.
In the Irish tradition, he never was left unattended in the conservatory. Some stayed up all night before he was removed to the Golders Green crematorium for the funeral yesterday at noon. Kate had looked up undertakers on the internet to find one who was local, and hit upon Levertons. When the representative called to the house, he told Kate the firm had also looked after the funerals of her grandparents and brought the orders of service Peter had chosen for them. She followed every detail, sending him off the way he had done for his own parents. ‘Everything you’re hearing today is an exact replica of what he chose,’ Kate said.
His former wife Sian Phillips flew in from New York, where she is rehearsing a play, bringing a wreath that said, simply, ‘With my love, Sian’. Theirs was a passionate relationship and she was the great love of his life; Kate said that Peter warned every girlfriend that Sian was the only woman ‘he would ever love with all of his heart’.
Also at the service was another former partner, Karen Somerville, the mother of his son, Lorcan, who was born when Peter was 50.
The coffin arrived to the hymn Panis Angelicus and was placed to the side of the altar, where a large photo of the actor rested on an easel. In keeping with the strong Irish flavour of the occasion, the celebrant was Fr Gerry Sheen, whose parents emigrated from Kerry and who is parish priest in nearby Swiss Cottage. He opened with a reading from the Song of Solomon before Peter’s son Lorcan, whose looks and voice are poignantly reminiscent of his father, read from John 14, ‘do not let your hearts be troubled’.
The hymn was an old Irish staple, Faith Of Our Fathers, and then Kate delivered a funny and moving eulogy. She has, she confessed, a shamrock branded on an unusual part of her body, put there, she believes, by Peter when she was a child, so no one would be in any doubt she was ‘made in Ireland’.
‘The world has lost a great actor but I’m not concerned about that,’ she said, ‘I simply have lost a great dad and the best friend I ever had.
‘Daddy made me laugh more than anyone else I have ever met in my life. He was always there for me in times of crisis and frequently danced with me in times of joy and celebration.’
He never offered advice, she said. ‘I’ve never been much good at taking it so I’m not in the business of dishing it out,’ he told her.
Peter was, she said, empathetic and ‘extraordinarily kind to people from all walks of life’. Beneath the ‘giant’ that was the public Peter O’Toole, ‘he was extremely modest, sometimes shy, and unassuming. He didn’t care much for airs and graces and he treated all people equally, from the person who cleared his drains to the president of Ireland.
‘This quality of lovely, down-toearth decency is what I think lies behind the overwhelming world-
‘Beneath the giant he was modest and shy’
wide sorrow at his passing.’
Kate also recounted another detail of the funeral of Peter’s mother, Constance.
‘My sister recalls that at the end of the funeral, he got up and celebrated her life by waltzing around the chapel,’ she said.
aaughter hate dances in the aisle with Martin l’MalleyX left, the willow coffin is carried into dolders dreen crematorium
And so, when Noel Coward’s song, Someday I’ll Find You, was played at the end of the service, a family friend from Galway, Martin O’Malley, took Kate’s hand, and Lorcan O’Toole took his sister Pat’s hand, and they too waltzed in the aisle of the church.
The undertaker removed the large floral arrangement and each of the three children plucked a single yellow rose from it and laid them on the coffin. As they did so, Kate’s quotation from TE Lawrence, one that always stuck in Peter’s memory from the days when he was studying the soldier before immortalising him on film, sprang again to mind. ‘All men dream, but not equally,’ Lawrence wrote. ‘Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their
aaughter mat and son Lorcan, right minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.’
Peter O’Toole was a man with big
At the end of the service they waltzed in the aisle
dreams who lived for 81 years and achieved the status of legend in his profession.
Once known for his hellraising with fellow actors such as Richard Harris and Peter Finch, he had mellowed with age but the fire still was there and the great performances kept on coming.
But it was the first starring role in Lawrence Of Arabia, the finest piece of acting ever committed to celluloid in the eyes of many, that came to define him.
It was fitting, then, that a quote on the order of service – ‘rest in peace and may your grave be a piece of paradise’ – also appeared in Arabic script.
And, as the mourners filed out of the church, the organist, so softly you barely could hear it until the soaring crescendo, played Maurice Jarre’s unforgettable theme tune from Lawrence. And any eye that had, up to that point, remained dry finally succumbed to a tear, not of sadness but of joy for the legacy the inimitable Peter O’Toole has left us.