A legend of his own
Peter O’Toole by Robert Sellers captures what was unique about the enduring star
Peter O’Toole might not have been as charming as Cary Grant, as convincing at projecting nobility as Jimmy Stewart, or as proficient on horseback as John Wayne, but he shared with those screen legends an even more important quality: star power. To be sure, his acting abilities did not exactly go unnoticed: after all, O’Toole — born in 1932 in Leeds, England — was singled out for eight Oscar nominations for Best Actor between 1963 and 2007 (in addition to receiving an Honorary Oscar in 2003).
Yet it was arguably his persona — more than his chops as an actor — that left the biggest impression on audiences. Whether cast in roles that were swashbuckling (Lawrence of Arabia) or studious (The Last Emperor”), O’Toole frequently came across as variants of the same man: svelte, dashing, somewhat impetuous.
The point is nicely expressed in a passage in Peter O’Toole: The Definitive Biography, an accurately — if self-aggrandisingly — titled book by Robert Sellers. Discussing the rationale behind casting the actor in The Last Emperor, producer Jeremy Thomas itemises the salient aspects of O’Toole’s façade: “He was the symbol of Western style, in a top hat and tails, and very statuesque with a great clarity of speech.”
Sellers himself is keenly aware of the ways in which O’Toole’s “theatrical performance style” set him apart from the roughhewn, realistic approaches favoured by such actors as Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Al Pacino — all of whom came into their own in the decade after O’Toole’s initial triumphs in the 1960s.
“O’Toole never had much truck with ‘gibberish spouting’ Method actors,” Sellers writes. “He knew nothing of the Stanislavski school, nor did he wish to know anything about it; that kind of introspective style of acting he felt did not fit in with what he believed to be the actor’s main job — the telling of a story.”
Perhaps the source of his emphasis on the externals of acting can be found in his youth, which is deftly sketched by Sellers. “One can almost trace O’Toole’s love of performing and theatricality from those days watching his bookmaker dad, dressed all dandy on a stool shouting the odds,” Sellers writes. “The stool was his stage, the racetrack his theatre, the punters his audience.”
Sellers thoroughly documents the star’s peak professional years — those that saw the release of Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter, among others — but the author underestimates several major films made after O’Toole’s marketability began to diminish. O’Toole won his fifth Oscar nomination for his virtuosic performance in the deliciously acrid satire The Ruling Class (1972), but Sellers is too milquetoast in his assessment when he writes that it has achieved status as a mere “minor classic”. Similarly, a producer of the bewitching comedy of early television My Favorite Year (1982) — which led to O’Toole’s seventh Oscar nomination — damns his own film with faint praise when he describes it as a “semi-classic”. Both films deserve to be regarded as full-fledged classics.
Of course, many of the films O’Toole made in the late 1980s and 1990s were beneath his station. Happily, however, the author recognises that the star brought authority to even the silliest projects. “His name and presence could still add gravitas to any production,” Sellers writes, and a fine case study is made of the two-bit science-fiction film Phantoms (1998): O’Toole is described as being genuinely respectful of the screenplay by Dean Koontz and acing a long monologue shot during a snowfall. And although Supergirl (1984) is blithely dismissed in a single line, the actor’s function in that film is roughly equivalent to that of Marlon Brando in Superman (1978) — he is there to supply a certain stateliness to a pop-culture product, and he does so with panache.
Near the end of the book, a blow-by-blow account of the making of O’Toole’s last film of note, Venus (2006), is offered. Relying on diary jottings by director Roger Michell, Sellers describes how O’Toole was wooed into signing onto the film; how his eccentric behaviour and infirm condition nearly derailed it; and how the strength of his work brought about his eighth Oscar nomination, just six years before his death at age 81. Venus was a high note for O’Toole to end on — and the story of its making is the perfect note with which to conclude this fine biography of an actor whose star power never dimmed.