O'Toole as Lawrence = Greatest Performance of All Time
Peter O'Toole's performance as Lawrence of Arabia in the eponymous 1962 David Lean epic film has been voted the greatest of all time, reports the Sun Online, as chosen by the film magazine Premiere.
"Part of the legend surrounding this mightiest and yet most intimate of epics—and surrounding O’Toole, who fearlessly and often dazzlingly dominates almost every scene—is that the role was first offered to both Marlon Brando and Albert Finney. We thank the movie gods that director David Lean spotted O’Toole “playing a silly-ass Englishman in a trout-fishing scene,” as he recalled, in the actor’s third movie, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. The measure of what O’Toole, then 30, accomplished is that it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the part. Whether supremely self-confident or querulous, deeply wounded or frighteningly vengeful, O’Toole manages to achieve the many shades of an unfathomable man. And when the time comes to show a shattered Lawrence (after a torture sequence in a Turkish prison, which the expanded 1989 rerelease made all the more suggestive of rape), he does so with heartbreaking frailty. Amid so much tragedy and grandeur, the dark wit in the performance is sometimes forgotten, as when he’s promoted to major by a pompous general and patiently rejoins in his plummy English accent, “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.” The shoot was a harsh test in the North African desert (though he and costar Omar Sharif often fled to Beirut for drinking bouts), and the last shots were made with O’Toole’s feet soaking in an ice bucket in a Jeep. He would say good-naturedly that the role haunted him for the rest of his life (indeed, having lost the Oscar to Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, he was jinxed with six more nominations but no wins before getting an honorary statuette when he was 70). Thus he would say of the experience (during which he was knocked out twice, sprained both ankles, and dislocated his spine), “I was obsessed. . . . I spent two years and three months thinking about nothing but Lawrence. Day after day. It was bad for me. It killed my acting later on.” Whatever the cost, his pal Richard Burton rightly included him among “the odd few men and women who, once or twice in a lifetime, elevate [acting] into something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing."