"There's no one better for a dirty old man"
"Peter O’Toole is picking up Oscar momentum as an ageing actor who has a relationship with a 21-year-old girl — though he insists he has nothing in common with his character. JASPER REES meets the man who is still not at all unwell Some 20 people in thick Puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouch behind a wooden sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it its modern name. The north coast of Kent glitters in the sun, but this is the coldest week of the winter. Across the Medway, you can see the contours of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbles to his mark on the other side of the sea wall. He is on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas tumble. When the first assistant director calls “Action!”, Peter O’Toole begins to play out his last scene on the last day of the shoot in probably the last leading role he will ever have.You don’t need to be a sentimentalist to note the significance of this moment. The film is called Venus, and it is about a beautiful actor growing undignifyingly old. In an idealised story of O’Toole’s life, this would be the natural terminus to a career that began 44 years earlier with that prophetic credit, “And introducing Peter O’Toole as TE Lawrence”. He carried all before him in the 1960s. But he won the last of his seven Oscar nominations in 1982 for My Favorite Year, in which he played a washed-up swashbuckler who can’t be trusted to turn up on set sober. His most successful role since, as the celebrated tippler in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, also played on the perception that he, too, is fond of a drink.When O’Toole reprised the part at the Old Vic in 1999, it was his way of bidding farewell to the theatre and laying to rest the ghost of his infamous Macbeth on the same stage, which even he concedes was “one of the great, great first-night disasters. Anything that can go wrong in that play will go wrong and did for us. There’s a whole school of thought that I did it deliberately. But in Jeffrey Bernard, I was able, at the end of the 20th century, to do a formidable part that was full of energy, of diction, of movement, full of everything I used to be able to do. I don’t want to shuffle on stage as a butler”.For O’Toole’s admirers, their favourite year will always be 1962, when he embodied in Lawrence the fascinating ambiguities of a man terrified by his own moral passion. Who would have thought he could still hold together a movie in 2006? Only he himself. Three years ago, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose to confer on him an honorary Oscar, initially he turned it down. “I’m still in the game,” was his magnificent retort. After all those near misses, to pass up on the offer of a free statuette — this showed the steely resolve of a high roller. His last truly great film performance was in The Last Emperor, in 1987. After that, there have been several emperors, plus kings, dukes, lords and knights. But his turn in the spotlight seemed to have been and gone. Troy was still to come, but, O’Toole ruefully admits, it was a rotten effort. “Good script,” he says, shaking his head. “Badly made.”In the end, he went to the Oscars anyway. “It was all right,” he says. “I enjoyed it, and my children were with me. The only thing that wasn’t enjoyable was in the green room. I said, ‘Can I have a drink?’ ‘We have lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling.’ I said, ‘No, I want a drink. No drink?’ I said, ‘All right, I’m f***ing off. I’ll be back.’ A man with earphones said, ‘No! No!’ Eventually, this vodka was smuggled in. I had to turn it in for a while and cut down considerably. I still like a drink.”Then, last year, he was sent a script about an old actor who refuses to accept the dying of the light. It could have been written for him. In fact, it wasn’t, although he was mentioned in dispatches early on by writer Hanif Kureishi and director Roger Michell. Their previous film, The Mother, portrayed an older woman’s affair with a much younger man. Although a much warmer work, Venus is its photographic negative. It chronicles the curious, tender, almost wholly platonic romance between Maurice, a jobbing thespian who has been reduced to playing corpses in cheap television dramas, and Jessie, a 21-year-old northern girl (played by Jodie Whittaker), who has been sent to London to tend to her valetudinarian great uncle, Maurice’s old acting mucker (Leslie Phillips). The uncle can’t stand her, but Maurice is charmed by Jessie — or Venus, as he calls her, after the Velazquez he takes her to see at the National Gallery. So he proceeds to charm her back.“I’ve not been in anything quite like this before,” says O’Toole. “As a study of humans cavorting with a finite limit, the script is superb. I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone really had a go at it, because these anarchic, arbitrary sexual urges are disturbing things, and one copes with them. No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young woman. Jodie,” he adds, “is a remarkable young girl. A remarkable young woman, I beg her pardon. She’s a good actress, and she’s game.”She needed to be. Maurice’s sexual interest hits the barrier of Jessie’s revulsion, but slowly, as the characters reveal their vulnerability to each other, she starts to reward him with tiny tokens of favour. She bares her breasts for him when he’s ill in bed and, in a scene only Kureishi would dare write, she slips a finger between her legs and allows him to smell, although naturally he wants to taste, too. “Oh boy,” says O’Toole when reminded of it.Venus is the antidote to all those market-driven Hollywood films that posit as entirely normal the idea of a pensioner copping off with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. It’s inevitable some people aren’t going to like the sheer honesty of it. “The film,” replies its 74-year-old star, “is an examination of whatever statement anybody may make about that.”I meet O’Toole at a photoshoot. He and Whittaker, a no-nonsense Huddersfield girl (O’Toole grew up in Leeds) fresh out of drama college, are evidently close. After the shoot, they sit down for a quiet chat — he on a chair, she on his knee. I ask him if, in real life, he were to meet a 21-year-old... “I’ve done that,” he interrupts, and slips wistfully into Shakespeare. “In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.”Of course, nobody knows this better. He and Richard Burton once went to see their 1964 film Becket, “to watch ourselves 20 years after the event. Richard said, ‘We want to watch the disintegration of our flesh.’ That’s what you start doing if you start making movies in your twenties. Lawrence of Arabia, for example: I was 27, 28, when it began and 29, 30 when it finished. Two years is a long time. So I can see the decomposition of the flesh. You can’t see it, but I can”.But Burton died before he could entirely wither. In Venus, Kureishi and Michell make capital from the collective memory of O’Toole’s stolen beauty. “My God, how handsome you were,” says Vanessa Redgrave, playing his former wife, when one of Maurice’s old films comes on the television. Coincidentally, How to Steal a Million was on soon after I met him, and even in a frothy romantic comedy, William Wyler knew exactly how to introduce his leading man: with a close-up of those preternaturally blue eyes. They are now the only remnant of the Adonis who freed Arabia, and their owner is inclined to make light of them.“An optical illusion, eyes. The sun is amazingly powerful, the pupils shrink to tiny little pinpoints, like a cat. And if you’ve got dark all round them, you’ve got these terrible old things glaring at you. They look as if they’re doing deep and penetrating and mystical and strange thoughts, but, in fact, they’re thinking about maybe a touch of claret about sevenish and a piece of haddock.” I half-suspect him of choosing the rather garish sky-blue slacks he changes into after the photoshoot as a sort of visual pun on his famous peepers.Unlike some actors, he seems quite happy to watch his old films. “I invited myself along to a showing of Lawrence of Arabia at the Imperial War Museum less than a year ago.” As for The Lion in Winter, he watches it “from time to time. I saw it a few years back, but the print was off, so I left”. He caught a bit of My Favorite Year on television a while back, “and it’s very good”. Does it not feel like having his life flash in front of him? “No, it doesn’t work like that at all,” he says. “You learn very early, or you learn never, if you’re an actor. You sit in front of that mirror at the Theatre Royal, Bristol, in 1958 and learn that that is the meat.” He pulls at his face. “You can’t be self-conscious about it. If you are, you’re dead. The rest is self-consciousness and nightmare. I’ve watched actors I know — who are not really actors, but they get away with it in the movies — and they spend their life not being able to bear their profile, poor sods. It’s the vain who get f***ed up. I’ve never thought about it.”O’Toole is not an easy man to talk to, at least about himself and his work. He is not prone to self-analysis and is resistant to the idea that he and Maurice have much in common. “In what regard? We obviously do the same job.” A refusal to grow old? “I am old! I know my age, I know my limitations. He knew his age and his limitations. That’s one of the reasons we like him.” All right, then: the positive outlook, the sunny disposition? “No, that’s not me. I’m a ratty old bugger.” He is mistrustful of the idea that Venus could in any way be seen as a landmark in his career. “No, no,” he says. “It’s another good job. Last year, I played a blinder on television in Casanova. And I do movies. That’s not bad.” He has since gone back to cameos, playing the king in a film called Stardust, directed by Matthew Vaughn. But the extraordinary daring of Venus feels like the perfect book end to his golden-haired desert warrior, right down to Maurice’s quotation from Macbeth (“Is this a dagger...”).His producer, Kevin Loader, draws me aside and says he’s “not sure if Peter understands that nowadays, winning an Oscar is like running for office”. I pass this on to O’Toole. “They always were!” he says. “Always. Don’t forget, the best thing if you want to know who’s going to win the Oscar is to ring the Las Vegas bookies, because there are 100 members of the Screen Actors Guild who back horses. It’s what I’ve done since 1962.” Did he ever put a bet on himself? “Only once, because I was favourite, and I thought I might do it. I’ve always been an outsider.” "
