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Here are the trailers for the North American release of Venus zip!. (Link goes to trailers.apple.com page for the trailers)
The way they're bumping this movie it's clear Miramax are giving Peter a real push to get the best actor nod at the Oscars this year. Cross your fingers!
Bloomberg: "'Beautiful' O'Toole Still Charming, Cranky at 74: Rainer File."
By Peter Rainer
Dec. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Peter O'Toole, 74, is wonderful as an aging rogue in the new film ``Venus.'' This should come as no surprise since he's been wonderful from the beginning, starting with his first major role in David Lean's ``Lawrence of Arabia.'' No actor ever kicked off his career more auspiciously.
Lean actually had Marlon Brando in mind for Lawrence, and Albert Finney was another early contender. When he was cast, O'Toole had been a member of the Bristol Old Vic company and a secondary player in films like ``The Savage Innocents'' and ``The Day They Robbed the Bank of England.'' However, Lean recognized a majesty in O'Toole that was perfect for Lawrence.
He needed an actor beautiful enough to upstage the vast desert panoramas. After he saw the film, Noel Coward supposedly said, ``If he was any more beautiful, they'd have to call it `Florence of Arabia.'''
With his hawkish features, blinding blond hair and radioactive blue eyes, O'Toole is a magnificent camera subject in ``Lawrence of Arabia.'' His bristling passion and savage melancholy were far beyond the waxworks heroism of the standard Hollywood icon, but his greatest acting came later.
In ``Becket'' (1964), O'Toole plays King Henry II opposite Richard Burton's Archbishop of Canterbury. It's a peerlessly strange performance in which Henry's overfond attachment to Becket becomes the film's driving force. Seen today, the film is closer to ``Brokeback Mountain'' than to a typical Hollywood historical pageant.
`Lion in Winter'
In ``The Lion in Winter'' (1968), O'Toole again played Henry II, this time opposite Katharine Hepburn's Eleanor of Aquitane, and he was suitably lionish. O'Toole is one of the few actors who can roar his lines and still give them the subtlest of shadings.
A year later O'Toole gave what may be his best performance in ``Goodbye, Mr. Chips,'' a musical remake of the 1939 war horse starring Robert Donat. Imperially fastidious, O'Toole's Mr. Chips represents the essence of the musty British scholar. But O'Toole shows us the frailty and pride beneath the persnickety facade.
Two unheralded performances followed, in the upper-class comedy ``Brotherly Love'' (1970) and especially in ``Under Milk Wood'' (1972). As the blind Captain Cat, the wraithlike O'Toole gave Dylan Thomas's dramatic poetry an ineffable lilt.
`My Favorite Year'
That same year O'Toole appeared in ``The Ruling Class'' as a royal British heir who is under the delusion he is Jesus Christ. O'Toole is so exhaustingly loony that his performance often seems more like calisthenics than acting, but the movie has its ardent admirers. The same year he starred as Don Quixote in ``Man of La Mancha''; looking as gaunt as an El Greco, he was marvelous. O'Toole had the effrontery to reach inside this Broadway kitsch and pull something great out of it.
Passing right over ``Caligula,'' we come to ``The Stunt Man'' (1980) probably the most emblematic O'Toole performance after Lawrence. He plays Eli Cross, a megalomaniacal movie director patterned on both Lean and John Huston (who directed O'Toole in ``The Bible''). He also seems to be patterned on Jesus Christ, and this time around, he got it down pat.
As the sloshed and impossibly narcissistic TV series guest star in ``My Favorite Year'' (1982), O'Toole shows off his high comic manner to best effect. He has the ability to kid his grandeur while at the same time never allowing us to forget just how grand he is. It's an unbeatable combination.
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USAToday: O'Toole shines bright in 'Venus'
Peter O'Toole's tour-de-force performance makes Venus(* * * out of four) a movie not to be missed.
Venus is sharply written with fine supporting performances, but the movie is all about O'Toole, showcasing an actor who at 72 continues to astound with the depth of his talent. Not only has he not diminished with age, but he also seems to have gained new vitality.
The film, though largely comedic, is a meditation on aging and a tribute to a long-lasting youthful spirit.
O'Toole plays Maurice, an elderly, still working actor who was married to Valerie (Vanessa Redgrave) until he left her and their children for another woman. As an octogenarian, his skirt-chasing predilections remain. This doesn't exactly make him a sympathetic fellow, but at his advanced stage of life, he seems more foolish than worrisome.
He is fascinated by Jesse, a sullen teenager (Jodie Whittaker) who is the picture of careless youth and provides a youthful tonic. For Maurice's finicky best friend Ian (a wonderful Leslie Phillips), she is a bothersome niece brought in to care for him and not doing a very effective job.
Though Maurice is rejuvenated by his association with Jesse, some of the film's best scenes are his café outings with his crotchety, well-spoken pals (Phillips and Richard Griffiths) and his lovely nostalgic encounters with Redgrave.
Maurice often comes across as ridiculous despite his roguish charm. A slapstick scene in which he spies on Jesse while she poses nude for an art class is more cringeworthy than humorous.
This is not an uplifting or chaste friendship in the style of Lost in Translation or a quirky but somehow believable May-December romance a la Harold and Maude. Maurice's obsession is at once pathetic and poignant. He is a desperate fellow, beating back the encroaching dimming of his days by clinging to a belief in passion. His mighty struggles to avoid falling into the cantankerous clutches of life's physical decline are moving. Still, there is nothing particularly admirable about him.
Jesse initially uses the old man's lust to her advantage, but a friendship evolves out of something that could have been just creepy. Each has an inherent decency. No great revelations are reached, but their association ultimately enriches both lives.
Roger Michell's direction has some flaws, including awkward travel montage and scenes that drag.
It is O'Toole's wit, inherent dignity and convincing portrayal that compel. Whether Maurice is charming or lascivious is incidental. What captivates is O'Toole's ability to so charismatically convey his character's essence. (Rated R for language, some sexual content and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes. Opens today in New York and Los Angeles.)
Old Man's Still Got It - from the village voice
Maurice Russell, a septuagenarian actor facing the end of his career and life, gazes raptly at the present that fate has given him: the company of a sullen but strangely desirable teenage girl. At first, his appraising looks give her the creeps, but something about his courtliness piques her curiosity—not to mention her vanity. This is a man who says something about comparing her to a summer's day. She is intrigued to learn that during his most recent hospital stay, he passed the time thinking about her body. Which parts, she asks? "Your hair," Maurice murmurs, "your legs, your behind, your eyes . . . your elbows." Then he adds, in a succulent near-sigh of erotic nostalgia, " . . . your cunt."
That distant pbbbtt! sound you hear is a collective Starbucks spit-take, courtesy of a thousand Academy voters watching their "for your consideration" screeners of Venus. In most regards, this funeral wreath of a film about a dying thespian in lust-struck twilight is made-to-order Oscar bait: a gift-wrapped vehicle for a screen legend, full of reverential nods to the craft, with reminders of the star's mortality delivered over loudspeakers from a running hearse. What keeps Venus from sinking ass-deep in Golden Pond is its sexual reverie—and a star who couldn't play a cutely neutered grumpy old man if commanded by God.
Peter O'Toole has never been an actor to disappear into a part, any more than his blue-eyed devil Lawrence could blend into the sands of Arabia. Nor would you want him to: O'Toole was born to sweep a role around him like a matador's cape, transforming it by virtue of sheer heroic panache. Maurice, the protagonist of Venus, is a suit lovingly tailored to O'Toole's ravaged but commanding frame.Apart from in the operating theater, Maurice's command performances are done; he's shown on a TV soap playing the part most available to actors his age—a corpse. ("Typecast again!" cackles his estranged wife, played by a cheerily disheveled Vanessa Redgrave.) His life is a round of prostate exams and sitcom-like coffee dates with his crotchety fellow player Ian (Leslie Phillips). One day he meets Ian's teenage relative Jessie (Jodie Whittaker)—and something about the girl's insolent youth (and the careless peek of midriff between her sweater and jeans) sets Maurice's pulse racing.
The screenwriter, Hanif Kureishi, made his name with disruptive sex-as-weaponry comedies such as My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. His script for Venus appears early on to be riffing on Lolita—another story about an older man and his unsuitable, inscrutable object of desire. Humbert's gauche Lolita popped gum; Maurice's Venus sucks salt off her fingers from a packet of crisps while he watches, entranced. But Maurice can see his foolishness clearly, even fondly. It's a last hurrah. Acutely aware of his lost potency and waning health, he hasn't got a lust for life; he's got a lust for lust. "I can still take a theoretical interest," he tells Jessie, a Sporty Spice Eve who's first seen reaching for an apple—and later, ominously, sports a snake tattoo.
As Maurice negotiates little prizes of intimacy from the brusque, tarty girl—the stroke of a hand, three kisses on a deliciously bare shoulder—O'Toole manages a delicate balancing act, neither coming off as a perv nor erasing the character's frank sexual longing. Without Maurice's "theoretical" libido (and Kureishi's profane wit), Venus might've been a puddle of maudlin goo. Movies that trade heavily on our lifelong associations with a star can quickly become clammy exercises in celebrity genuflection. As delightful as it is to watch O'Toole summon from his entire career— the sensualist's leer he uncurled in 1980's The Stunt Man, the matinee-idol braggadocio he wielded so irresistibly in 1982's My Favorite Year—there's occasionally the sense of director Roger Michell tugging at our sleeves, gushing, "Isn't he wonderful?"
It's hard to blame him, though—in part because O'Toole brings an air of gentle self-mockery to the role that offsets the morbid, if candid, emphasis on his frailty. Maurice is a part that encourages and mocks an actor's narcissism in equal measure. Even wearing a leaky catheter, he's as idealized a figure as the theater folk in All About Eve—people whose wits are keener than everyone else's, whose passions are grander, whose tongues are never at a loss for acid rejoinders.
When Maurice and Ian duck into an abbey filled with the remains of their late colleagues—Robert Shaw, Laurence Harvey, Richard Beckinsale—it's almost impossible to look at the haggard O'Toole, now 74, and not worry about how little time we have left in his company, even if you resent the movie for making the point so insistently. And yet the star's own ragged glory rebuffs any impulse to send flowers. "Come on, old man!" Maurice growls, slapping himself in the face to rouse what spirit he has left.
The nominations for this year's Golden Globe Awards were announced today. Peter's up for Best Actor in a drama. The GG ceremony will be broadcast January 15th, 2007.
He has also been nominated in the Critic's Choice Awards for Best Actor, again for his role in "Venus".
indieWIRE: "Death of a Ladies' Man: Roger Mitchell's Venus"
Death be not proud. One hears stories of men on their deathbeds who, lucidity gone, expend their last energy on a vain attempt to masturbate; of Viagra-boosted sex that climaxes in cardiac arrest. This stubbornness of the erotic urge, past physical failing, is the subject of "Venus": Why can't I get one last screw?
"Venus" stars 74-year old Peter O'Toole (has an actor ever sported a more phallic name?), his desiccation considerably advanced by legendary imbibing, as still-working thesp Maurice, a horny geezer fanning the embers of his libido for one last infatuation with his best friend's great-niece/ live-in nurse, Jessie (newcomer Jodie Whittaker), a philistine northern chav with nonexistent manners and a sideboard of an ass you could rest a cocktail on. Cue Pygmalion - O'Toole's done Henry Higgins before, of course. Or does the part call for a Casanova? Like Maurice, O'Toole's still jobbing, having just played that reminiscing lover on the BBC (he's a natural at wrecked beauty: "My God, how handsome you were," says estranged wife Vanessa Redgrave, watching one of Maurice's old film's on TV). Maurice has been skirt-chasing so long that his Don Juanism's become instinctual, but he's clearheaded enough to realize that he can't play seducer anymore (or consummate a conquest), so he digs into his repertoire, trying any tack-intimidation, pity, poetry-that'll expose a little of her skin, let him smell the nape of her neck.
The crux of "Venus" is the delicate bartering that takes place between Maurice and Jessie as they haggle the fine points of their transaction - she's unloved, hard up for someone to humor her ambitions... and she likes to be taken shopping, of course. Meanwhile, Maurice is only begging for another whiff of a little girl in bloom. So: Three kisses on the neck costs a pair of earrings. It isn't noble, but I can't see how "Venus"'s pragmatic chauvinism is more offensive than any number of movies where some sweet young thing falls, no-strings-attached, for a liver-spotted relic (the awful "History Boys" mounts its own pederasty apologia but muffles the implications in glibness).
There are elements familiar from past wasted nights at the movies that might ward a wary viewer off of "Venus": a graying star showcased for the Monday matinee crowd, an Unlikely, Mutually Enriching Friendship - and old folks playing up friskiness is always a trying spectacle; rent "Cocoon" if you don't believe me. What distinguishes "Venus" is that it strips the May-December cliche to the most basic equation, and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi isn't one to take the power of sex lightly ("The only pleasures that are possible as you get older are... under the aegis of death").
There's plenty of enervating comic relief and dross scenes to sit out - I could've happily lived my life without watching O'Toole wiggle around to Corinne Bailey Rae or hamming in St. Paul's Church (where Shaw's Pygmalion opens) with Leslie Phillips, an O.D. of nostalgic Brittania - but the movie survives. It's small-scale, workmanlike filmmaking, bolstered by O'Toole's unabashed perviness; the tone recalls the fragile creepiness of the late-era Kinks masterpiece "Art Lover," about a "connoisseur" ogling chicks in the park: "I've learned to appreciate you the way art lovers do / And I only want to look at you."
comingsoon.net: Venus Writer Hanif Kureishi
As part of our year-end focus on the screenwriters whose work is making a mark at the cinema this award season, we present the strange case of Hanif Kureishi. His name may draw blank looks from most people, but he's been a triple threat as a screenwriter, novelist and playwright for nearly thirty years. After writing a number of London-centric plays, Kureishi received acclaim for his first screenplay of My Beautiful Laundrette, directed by Stephen Frears, before moving onto equally controversial films, novels and short stories in the years that followed.
His latest film, Venus, teams Kureishi with director Roger Michell (Notting Hill) for the third time, and it's getting a lot of attention for its star, Peter O'Toole, who plays an elderly retired actor who becomes smitten with his friend's 20-year-old niece.
Exhibiting the same dry wit as his good friend and long-time collaborator director Stephen Frears, Kureishi talked with CS Indie about his latest projects.
CS Indie: "Venus" is your third film collaboration with Roger Michell, and he's mentioned that you developed it together. How did the idea come about to do this after you finished making "The Mother"?
Hanif Kureishi: Well, I remember coming back from Cannes with Rog, we were talking about what we're going to do. Then we thought about doing a movie called "The Father" after "The Mother" as a sidepiece. It occurred to me to do a film about a guy having a prostate operation, a guy who was thinking of the women he'd been involved with during his life, an old man looking back, women he had sex with, women he desired, what he liked about women and all this stuff. So I thought about this for a while and it occurred to me that really you have to do a movie in the present tense. It's better to have it happening rather than him remembering. I guess I hang around with a bunch of old guys, like me and Roger and Stephen Frears and our pals in London, who sort of fumble and bumble about, full of insomnia and complaints and arthritis and pills and glasses, aching feet and stuff. So it amused me the idea of doing a film about a bunch of old guys. But to get the story going you need a girl really to kind of break it up or to make them envious of each other or make stuff happen. I thought of taking a rude girl and sort of throwing her into the middle of this bunch of men, and that was the genesis of the idea.
CS: You also created a relationship between Maurice and Ian, who are almost like a squabbling old married couple. Does anyone in your group have that sort of relationship?
Kureishi: I guess we needed one character in the group to be sexual, Peter O'Toole, and you couldn't have everyone else being the same, so you need to balance it out. There are three love relationships in the film, the Leslie Philips and Peter O'Toole, Peter O'Toole and Vanessa Redgrave, and Peter O'Toole and Jodie Whittaker. I was just amused by the idea that the Leslie Philips character couldn't cope with this girl, he didn't like her, he was just fastidious while the Peter O'Toole character adores her. You set up a movie or any kind of story or novel, it's the balance and the contrasts that you're looking for all the time.
CS: When you're working with Roger on the script, how much do you actually do together, before you go off and write on your own?
Kureishi: Well, I go up to Camden sometimes, while he comes down to Notting Hill and we sit around a Starbucks and go "Oh, should he be a farmer? No, he should be a policeman. No, he should be a doctor or an accountant." There's no point me sitting at home writing far into the movie, and then Roger says, "It's really crazy. He should be a policeman rather than a doctor." So we kind of agree we need to talk and then I sit down and I would write quite a lot of scenes probably. And Roger would say, "I like that scene, I don't like that scene, that's not working, that's good" and we'd talk about it, and eventually, after a long time actually, we'd come to some kind of agreement.
CS: Saying that you and Roger meet at Starbucks kind of shatters the illusion I have of you meeting in a quaint café somewhere.
Kureishi: Yeah, I know it's disappointing. I do apologize.
CS: When you're done writing the script and hand it over to Roger to make the movie, do you let go or do you go on set in case he needs something changed?
Kureishi: I don't go on set, but we cast them up together. We sit around and lots of girls come in, and then we talk about "Should it be that one, should it be that one?" and again, in the casting, you're always balancing the parts. If you cast Peter O'Toole in the beginning of the production process, than you have to cast around O'Toole. You don't want a lot of other tall, handsome ex-movie stars. Then we sit around and talk about it together. I think it's fun for all of us to do that.
CS: I imagine Peter O'Toole must have been one of your first choices while writing it. I can't really imagine anyone else delivering that kind of performance. Did you have a second choice in case he couldn't do it?
Kureishi: Well, there aren't that many movie stars of that age who can play that part actually. Maybe Anthony Hopkins.
CS: Or Ian McKellen?
Kureishi: Well, McKellen is younger. McKellen is 66, O'Toole is 75, and we needed someone who was much older, you know what I mean? If you do it with McKellen or you do it with John Hurt, it's less poignant, because they don't look like they're about to die, in a way that O'Toole does. We needed somebody who was more than 70, rather than someone who was more than 60, and then the contrast between the youth of the girl and the age of the man makes the movie work.
CS: Is Peter O'Toole at all like his character in real life or was that just really good acting to portray Maurice?
Kureishi: Well, he's a much more successful actor to start then the part he's actually playing. The guy, Maurice Russell, is a slightly disappointed man. He's not a huge movie star, he hadn't been in "Lawrence of Arabia" this guy, so he is acting to a certain extent.
CS: Is he as flamboyant and does he have a lot of quips and anecdotes to share?
Kureishi: I don't really know what he's like, but he loves to tell stories. He's a real good old boy and will talk for hours telling wonderful stories, and he's a very intelligent man, very well read and a smart guy.
CS: You seem to have this thing towards including sexuality with a perverse edge in your movies, whether it be the relationship between these two characters in this or the one in "The Mother." Is that just a part of you that comes out when you write these movies?
Kureishi: Well, you take the sexuality out, than you don't have anything. You just have an old guy and a woman walking down the street. What you need is the charge between them. It's like "My Beautiful Laundrette." When I wrote that originally, it wasn't a homosexual movie. There was the Daniel Day-Lewis character and the Gordon Warnecke character and they were pals who owned a laundrette together. Once you put the sexuality in, the whole thing charges up obviously.
CS: Right, like you said that "Venus" originally was a different kind of movie in that it was just about Peter's character looking back on his life…
Kureishi: Yeah, but then you put a woman into it and he wants to f**k her, he's 75 and she's 20, then it's alive.
CS: All of your movies have been set in London, so do you feel at all proprietary when filmmakers like Woody Allen arrive and want to shoot their movies there?
Kureishi: Well, when Woody Allen goes to London, he's going to shoot Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, he's going to shoot tourist London. Whereas we live on the street, every day, so we know bits of the city. At the end of my road, there's a café like the café that the old guys go to in "Venus," so we obviously have a different take on the city, and we know parts of the city that outside filmmakers don't necessarily know. On the other hand, outside filmmakers make wonderful films about the city, too. I mean, Patrice Chereau, in the film he made of one of my novels "Intimacy," had a wonderful take on London in that movie actually, really good.
CS: Was there more of the Vanessa Redgrave subplot than we saw in the movie?
Kureishi: Yeah, there was quite a lot more of that and there was a wonderful speech that she made at the end, which was a delight to write for Vanessa Redgrave. Imagine having Vanessa Redgrave read your speech.
CS: Did Roger end up shooting it?
Kureishi: Yes. Roger's quite ruthless. It's just cut and cut and cut and eventually, you get Vanessa Redgrave on the cutting room floor. Too bad. We'll put it on the DVD.
CS: Over the course of your 20-year career, your characters have generally gotten older, since your early movies seemed to be about younger people in London.
Kureishi: Yeah, they're young hip guys hanging around in the '70s, and now I'm writing about a guy who's 70-years-old who's about to drop dead. They're parts of me but they're not me. I'm not 75 and I hope I'm not going to drop dead. The next movie we're going to do is about a couple who are around 50 or in their late 40's I guess. It's really the story that we look for. The age is kind of a concern, but really it's the story that I look for, I think both of us, 'cause these movies are cheap. There's no car chases or explosions, it's only the talking and the stories that make them move.
CS: Do you feel that you're writing for older audiences these days?
Kureishi: I like older audiences! I mean, I've got teenage kids, so they love "American Pie" and "Napoleon Dynamite," and they love MTV. I watch all that stuff all the time with my kids, so I'm aware of it. I really enjoy it. I love American comedies. But I can't write that stuff. I can't write in their voices. I mean, they need to write those movies. And I'm amused by older people, and to be honest, how fantastic to write for Peter O'Toole, to write for Vanessa Redgrave, to write for Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths. These are fantastic actors, so experienced, why not write for them?
CS: With all your experience writing novels and plays, how do you decide whether to turn an idea into a movie screenplay or a prose story? Was "Venus" always considered as a movie since you did it with Roger?
Kureishi: Yeah, I guess. There's an idea I've got at the moment that I want to do with Rog, but I'm also maybe thinking it's really a short novel or there are other ways of telling the story. But what I do is how I make my living, so I have to think I'm going to spend five years writing a novel, and I'm going to have to support myself during those five years, and I'm going to have to support myself maybe by writing a movie. Or if I'm sitting at home writing short stories, I can't make any money writing short stories, nobody does, so it's partly pragmatic what I do. I gotta make a living out of this game.
CS: So your next movie is also going to be with Roger?
Kureishi: We're just talking about it, yeah, maybe. I'm shooting a short next weekend. I'm not directing it myself. It's called "Weddings and Beheadings," it's a ten minute film about a guy who video tapes beheadings, set in a Baghdad basement. It's made by a guy called Emir Jamal, based on a short story I published in Francis Coppola's "Zoetrope Magazine." It's going to be shot in a basement in London.
CS: You've done two movies with Stephen Frears and three with Roger Michell. Is it always about finding a director you like working with, or do you ever envision writing a script and letting a director find it?
Kureishi: The relationship with the director is very important because the director stimulates you and you stimulate them, and finding the relationship with the director early on is important. This guy that I'm doing the Baghdad basement movie with, he put me in a documentary that he made. I liked him and he came over to my house and we met for a drink and talked, and then we went, "Why don't we do a film together?" It's really to do with working with people you like and enjoy being with.
CS: That must be different in London, because Hollywood writers don't really have that luxury of picking the directors that make their movies. Do you think you'd ever want to write a script, sell it and then let it go?
Kureishi: I've never done that and I wouldn't really know how to do that. I wouldn't want to do that. It seems to me if you're going to do a movie, then it's a collaboration. I'm interesting in the director's ideas, because they have good ideas that fortify your own ideas. I've always worked like that, and I think I learned to work like that with Stephen Frears. He did the first film that I wrote, and we'd sit around and talk about it.
CS: Writing a novel must be a lot more secluded experience, so do you still enjoy that process as well?
Kureishi: I've been working on a novel for over five years, quite a substantial novel that begins in the '70s and ends in the bombings in London in the subways last year. But even then, I work with the editor. He says, "What about this section? Why don't you do a bit over there. That's not working." Even though as you say, it's more you I guess, there's always other people involved.
CS: In your earlier movies, you dealt a lot with the Indian and Pakistani community in London, but you've gotten away from that recently. Have you said pretty much all you want to say about that aspect of your life?
Kureishi: I wrote a memoir called "My Ear at his Heart," that was published in England that was partly about that subject, it was never published here. Scribner's and Simon and Schuster, my American publisher, said my books would stop selling here. My current novel is concerned with an Indian family, and it's about race and about Islam and all that stuff, terrorism. It's not as though I got tired of that subject.
CS: Since you were nominated for an Oscar at the very beginning of your film career, what is your take on awards?
Kureishi: It's nice to get an award and it cheers me up for half an hour, but what's distressing is the amount of time and money that is spent on the whole thing, which seems to me to be rather a waste of effort. I would rather the money be spent on the movie. We can spend another week shooting rather than spending a quarter of a million dollars trying to get an Oscar for Peter O'Toole. (You can't write that obviously.)Oops.
(msnbc)
Hard to believe that the 74-year-old actor has never won an OscarCOMMENTARYBy John HartlFilm critic
More visible than he has been in ages, Peter O’Toole turned up this year in a “Lassie” remake and as the prophet Samuel in the Biblical drama, “One Night With the King.” The 74-year-old actor also stands a very good chance of landing his eighth best-actor Oscar nomination for an end-of-2006 release called “Venus.”
Hard to believe, but he’s never won. It’s been 43 years since he received his first nomination, for the title role in “Lawrence of Arabia,” which Premiere magazine recently named No. 1 on its list of the greatest performances ever committed to celluloid.
O’Toole lost that year to Gregory Peck’s formidable Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in the years to follow he would lose repeatedly, sometimes to less memorable competitors. So far, the Academy has awarded him only an honorary Oscar for the body of his work. He almost turned it down.
Still, you can’t fault the Oscar voters too much. They were always there for him when he gave a major performance. Unlike many legendary actors who are overlooked in their prime or recognized when they’re doing mediocre work, O’Toole was nominated when he deserved to be.
Trained as a British stage actor, the Irish-born O’Toole was officially “introduced” on film in “Lawrence,” although he’d made three movies previously, including Disney’s “Kidnapped” (1960) and “The Savage Innocents” (1960), which featured his “Lawrence” co-star, Anthony Quinn.
Plenty of other forgotten films followed “Lawrence,” though often they had large ambitions. There was nothing wrong with casting O’Toole as Conrad’s “Lord Jim” (1964), or as Don Quixote/Cervantes in “Man of La Mancha” (1972) or even as three angels in “The Bible ...in the Beginning” (1966). But the movies failed to live up to their source material.
O’Toole has salvaged such mediocrities as “Creator” (1985) and “King Ralph” (1991), and he’s done marvelous work in such classy television productions as “Rogue Male” (1976) and “Masada” (1981). In his best films, O’Toole usually manages to mix his natural flamboyance with a sharp intellect. Rarely is he caught napping.
Here are 10 of his most alert performances:
“Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)Now that we know a little more about Iraq, David Lean’s landmark epic about the country’s birth pangs plays almost like a critique of 21st Century foreign policy. When T.E. Lawrence says he wants to bring the Arabs their freedom, after calling them “a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel,” he sounds more like an occupier than a liberator. Still, it’s never quite that simple. O’Toole’s brilliance allows for other interpretations.
“Becket” (1964)The story of an intense friendship that ends in murder, Jean Anouilh’s fascinating account of the relationship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket, who was appointed the Archbishop of Canterbury under the king’s watch, gives O’Toole the opportunity to demonstrate his flair for comedy. The tone of the film and the performance of his co-star, Richard Burton, is tragic and dour. O’Toole’s gift for puncturing royal pretensions keeps it from going too far in that direction.
“Night of the Generals” (1967)O’Toole gives his twitchiest performance as a catty, unhinged Nazi general who may be guilty of killing prostitutes in early-1940s Warsaw. Known as “The Butcher,” he destroys a Polish neighborhood just for the fun of it, and terrifies underlings with unreasonable requests. The movie didn’t please critics or audiences at the time, but it’s full of surprises, among them the smoothest performance of O’Toole’s frequent co-star, Omar Sharif.
“The Lion in Winter” (1968)O’Toole makes the most of a second chance to play Henry II in James Goldman’s clever, bitchy play about a Christmas reunion that brings together Henry, his estranged wife Eleanor (Katharine Hepburn), and their bratty adult children. Hepburn won a best-actress Oscar, and she should have been joined by O’Toole, who lost to Cliff Robertson’s mostly forgotten “Charly.” What were the voters thinking?
“Goodbye, Mr. Chips” (1969)An overlong musical reworking of the 1939 movie that won an Oscar for Robert Donat, this adaptation of James Hilton’s novel works in spite of Leslie Bricusse’s disposable songs. That’s largely due to O’Toole’s detailed performance as the beloved schoolmaster and Sian Phillips (Mrs. O’Toole at the time) as a sophisticated actress who didn’t appear in the original story.
“The Ruling Class” (1972)Mad as a hatter, Jack Gurney, the 14th Earl of Gurney, is harmless when he thinks he’s Jesus Christ — because when he’s praying he ends up talking to himself. But watch out when he turns into the reincarnation of Jack the Ripper. It’s hard to imagine anyone but O’Toole tackling the role, which playwright Peter Barnes created to carry his satirical attack on British society.
“The Stunt Man” (1980)O’Toole once more gets to play God, in the form of maniacal movie director Eli Cross, in Richard Rush’s tricky tale of a fugitive Vietnam veteran (Steve Railsback) who finds himself dodging fake bullets and other special effects on the set of a war movie. When the sinister Cross recruits him to replace a deceased stuntman, O’Toole’s truth-or-illusion games really begin.
“My Favorite Year” (1982)This is the backstage comedy in which O’Toole declares “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star.” He plays Alan Swann, a character loosely based on Errol Flynn, who makes this proclamation when he discovers that he’s expected to perform on live television during the early-1950s. In O’Toole’s hands, Swann always has his wits about him, no matter how drunk and pratfall-prone he becomes.
“The Last Emperor” (1987)For once, O’Toole is overshadowed by other performers as well as a lavish production that won nine Academy Awards, including one for his director, Bernardo Bertolucci. Still, O’Toole’s self-effacing performance, as tutor to the last emperor of China (John Lone), is one of his subtlest.
“Venus” (2006)O’Toole plays an aging actor who falls for a much younger woman in Hanif Kureishi’s tenderly awkward tale of an impossible relationship. Doddering, forgetful and impotent, O’Toole claims he has only a “theoretical interest” in the girl, who is both flattered and offended by all the attention. It’s the richest role O’Toole has played since the 1980s.
Nominated in the past for “Lawrence,” “Becket,” “Lion in Winter,” “Mr. Chips,” “Ruling Class,” “Stunt Man” and “My Favorite Year,” O’Toole seems likely to earn his eighth nod for “Venus.” If he’s nominated and the movie turns out to be too slender or eccentric for Academy tastes, he’ll still score a new record for an actor: eight nominations, no wins.
Director Roger Michell has spent much of his career making movies in the rural areas of London, whether it be in his most famous film Notting Hill or his latest, Venus, which reunites him with screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (The Mother).
It's the story of two elderly veteran actors, Maurice and Ian (Peter O'Toole, Leslie Phillips), and the disruption caused when Ian's niece Jesse (newcomer Jodie Whittaker) comes to stay with him and Maurice becomes smitten with the young woman.ComingSoon.net spoke with the British director that some film lovers might consider eclectic about his latest film, its legendary star, and other related topics.
ComingSoon.net: When I spoke to Hanif, he suggested that some of the ideas from "Venus" came from him sitting around a café, much like in this movie, with you and Stephen Frears. You're a lot younger than the picture he painted…
Roger Michell: (laughs) Ancient, lurching old man…
CS: He also said you hung out at Starbucks, which also killed my illusion from the movie of these filmmakers sitting around this quaint tiny London café sipping tea.
Michell: It wasn't a Starbucks. I don't know what he's talking about. He hangs out with some older guys, but he has this ridiculous self-image of himself being ancient, which is not true. He's quite a young guy, but he likes to believe that he's a footstep away from the grave.
CS: This movie came out of your work with Hanif on "The Mother." When did Peter O'Toole enter the picture, was it while you were still writing it?
Michell: No, he was high on the list, but it wasn't written for Peter. He was practically the first person we were interested in, and he came on really early in the proceedings.
CS: Obviously, you don't have to audition someone like Peter O'Toole, so you just send him the script?
Michell: Yeah, what you do is meet these people, and you sort of eye each other up and sniff around each other to make sure you're going to get an okay. He's a very interesting person 'cause I never met him, and I was struck simultaneously by his vigor and his fragility, and both of them are very present in the film. And both of them are really essential to the success of the film.
CS: Do you know if he had seen any of your other movies?
Michell: I gave him "The Mother" to watch. I said, "If you don't like this film, you won't want to do my film," and he watched it and decided he wanted to be in it.
CS: He'd never seen "Notting Hill"?Michell: I don't know. I don't normally ask people if they've seen "Notting Hill." It's not a question I normally like to ask people. It's sort of a personal question.
CS: Once you had Peter O'Toole on board, it must have been difficult to cast the role of Jesse, his "venus."Michell: Well, with a part like that, you know you're just going to have to see everyone in town and everyone out-of-town in fact, and you're just going to have to keep looking until you find someone who you think is perfect for the role. You know it's going to be an unknown person, and in fact, you relish the idea it's going to be an anonymous person, someone you're going to kind of discover in a strange fringe theatre or in a drama school or somewhere out of town. So that's a rather exciting and scary prospect, because clearly, the film won't work unless you have the right Jessie. We saw a lot of people, and it became obvious to me that if Jessie was too immediately beautiful or too like Lolita than that would tip the film in a very unpleasant way into a chasm. If she's enormously fat, then that wouldn't work either. Josie is marvelous because she starts out the film as a spotty, pot noodle scoffing minger, but then she transforms herself into a swan. It's the ugly duckling [story] really.
CS: But is that a real transformation she undergoes or is that only through Maurice's eyes?
Michell: No, I think it's through the course of the film, she physically seems to become a different person in her own wonderful way. Rather like Hanif and I did this film called "The Mother" a few years ago, which also describes the same strange transformation in a granny, who was being f**ked by "James Bond" at the time. You should see that film, particularly in relationship to this film, it's almost a companion piece.
CS: How did you end up finding Jodie? She'd only done some theatre before doing this movie, right?
Michell: She left Guildhall early to do a play at the Globe Theatre in London, so she'd done one play and one TV episode. I found her because I have a wonderful casting director who dug her up. I didn't see her until quite late in the process then recalled her three or four times, screen tested her. It's one of the moments where in the room, you make one choice, but when you watch the screen tests, you make another choice. Something is revealed by the camera, which is not clear in the room.
CS: Can you get an actor like Peter O'Toole to come in to do readings with these actresses during the audition process?
Michell: Yeah, he did. He came and read with the last three. I wanted him to be a part of the process of choosing the girl obviously, and he came in and read with the top 3 girls.
CS: What about getting Leslie Phillips to play his long-time friend? He has to have as much chemistry with Peter as she does.
Michell: Yeah, in a way. I think it's less critical, and also Leslie's a known quantity whereas Jodie wasn't. Leslie was hard to cast, and I was very pleased to find Leslie. Leslie was very pleased to find us. Leslie said to me something like, "I thought I'd never be offered a part like this again in my life," which was terribly sweet.
CS: Had he not been working for a while?
Michell: No, he works all the time. He does the Lord of the Manor in a TV murder-mystery, and he's famous in the UK for much lighter material. He's a comedy star there.
CS: Did you and Peter have any concerns about the material and sensitivity towards Jodie in terms of having her in this role where she's having a semi-sexual relationship with a much older man?
Michell: That she might be offended or upset by it? I had no concerns about it at all. She's an actor and she's read the script and she knows what it's all about. She was very up about it, she got it. That was not a delicate area that we had to biscuit around. I find it's always an issue with sex in films, you have to really be completely head on about them in talking to actors. You can't be coy about it or you make things difficult. You have to be clear about what's going on, then people are fine. It takes the fear out.
CS: What's it like working with Peter on set? Being the legend that he is, one can only imagine that he does his scene and is then off to his trailer…
Michell: Well, he didn't have a trailer and he's very collaborative. He would obey instructions very happily and would have great ideas and is very professional guy who's very pleasing to work with.
CS: How was Jodie while working with him? Was she aware of his legendary status?
Michell: She appeared to be fearless. I think she was frightened but she seemed to be absolutely fearless, and she did a wonderful job both in acting and also in appearing to be fearless, which was probably two acting jobs in one. 'Cause she was working with Peter and Vanessa Redgrave and Leslie and Richard Griffiths, and they're all pretty robust, serious heavyweights.
CS: And she also had to push Peter down in one scene, so that takes some guts. Did Peter need a stunt double for that?
Michell: I'll leave you to work that out for yourself.
CS: Peter's obviously an amazing actor, who continues to work regularly, so what do you think about all this Oscar buzz specifically for his performance in the movie?
Michell: I feel two things about it. Firstly, I'd be delighted for Peter if he eventually got one, but I feel particularly strongly about the film, and I feel the film is actually very accessible and very enjoyable, funny and could be quite popular. If Peter does well in the nominations phase, that could really enhance the profile of the film in a really positive way. I think you have to look at these things, not cynically, but pragmatically. I would encourage any Oscar buzz as a result.
CS: I remember a lot of people liking "The Mother" and were raving about Daniel Craig's performance in a similar way, but it didn't get this kind of attention.
Michell: It's actually worth seeing, and I'm really very pleased with that film, especially now that Daniel is the biggest star in the world. It'll be interesting to rediscover that film.
CS: Have you had a chance to see Daniel in the new Bond film yet?
Michell: I have, I liked it. He came at it the right way, because he had everyone saying he'd be terrible, and he's wonderful, which is much better than the other way around.
CS: Over the years since "Notting Hill," you've jumped around between genres, doing thrillers as well as comedies. Do you have a preference to the style or genre you like working in?
Michell: I think the preference is for jumping around, the preference is for doing different things, and not getting stuck in a particular genre. As you probably know, if you direct something which is halfway successful in a particular genre, you get offered nothing but that genre. So one is instinctively trying to dive into another genre.
CS: Is that why there seemed to be such a long gap before doing "Changing Lanes"?
Michell: Was there a gap? It was two years in between "Notting Hill" and "Changing Lanes." I've done 7 films in ten years, so I've been reasonably productive.CS: That's not bad. I mean, it's no Michael Winterbottom, but I guess no other director can be that insane.
Michell: (laughs) That's true, but I do plays as well. Michael doesn't do plays. During the same period, I've done five or six plays.
CS: It seems your recent movies have been very dramatic and character-based, so have you had a chance to work with any of your film actors on stage as well?
Michell: That's a good question. Lots of people in "Notting Hill" I've worked with on stage, lots of people in "Persuasion" I've worked with on stage, but I don't think anyone in "Venus." I've worked with Rhys Ifans on stage before I worked with him in film. And I'm about to do a play written by Joe Penhall, who adapted "Enduring Love," at National, that's called "Landscape with Weapons."
CS: Tragically, a lot of those great British plays never get over here.Michell: This is a different theatre culture.
CS: Besides adaptations like "Enduring Love," you've tended to lean towards doing movies based on original material. Do you enjoy the process of developing these ideas yourself or with a writer?
Michell: Well, finding a book and finding a writer and putting them together, but almost without exception, I develop the material that I do. Unfortunately, it's very unlikely I feel that a script is going to drop through the letterbox fully formed. They don't tend to work like that.
CS: You developed "Venus" and "The Mother" closely with Hanif, so why don't you have a writing credit?
Michell: I'm curious about that myself, as well. I reckon I should start doing so. I should take a writing credit. I'll have to tell that to him.
CS: Do you and Hanif have a third movie in this trilogy planned?
Michell: We're starting to talk about another film, yeah. This is in fact our third collaboration now. We did "The Buddah of Suburbia." We've already started talking about another film, which uncharacteristically for us, will be set in Paris hopefully.
CS: Is that because filmmakers like Woody Allen are starting to usurp England?Michell: Yeah, why is he shooting those films in London?
CS: I don't know. You always hear about the cost of shooting in England being very expensive, so is it difficult getting locations for your films?
Michell: Yeah, this is a very particular way of working. Like I said, we don't have trailers or huge catering vans, so it makes things much more flexible. You can shoot in places where normally you couldn't shoot.
CS: Though you've become known as a London director, "Changing Lanes" was a bit of an exception in your filmography, being the one "Hollywood movie" you've done.
Michell: Well, that was sort of attempting to be an art house movie masquerading as a Hollywood movie, and I think it's quite successful in that respect. I'm very pleased with the film, and apart from the ending, which was a bone of contention between the studio and myself, it's pretty much the film that I wanted to make. I didn't have any studio interference, and I shot it in this amazing city. But it was a full-on thing… if you're shooting a scene in a coffee bar, you closed all the streets all around it, which is kind of weird and extraordinary, closing down the highway for Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. It was quite nice for me to retreat from that big circus to a much, much smaller more touchy-feely, personal side of filmmaking. And I haven't worked outside the M25 (the main road around London) for five years now, and that's really been to do with family things, my kids, and that type of thing. I'm about to make a safari outside the M25 again.
CS: If you're next movie won't be with Hanif, do you have something already lined up?
Michell: Yeah, my next movie won't be with Hanif. I've got a few ideas but they're not fully formed enough to run yet.
Malkovich, O'Toole join Ruiz pic
Lewis stars as knight in Charlemagne's courtBy ARCHIE THOMASVARIETY.com
LONDON — Helmer Raoul Ruiz has marshaled a cast headed by John Malkovich, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah, Peter O'Toole, Damian Lewis, Saffron Burrows and Virginie Ledoyen for his period epic "Love and Virtue," about the battles that raged within King Charlemagne's empire.Brit thesp Lewis toplines as a knight in King Charlemagne's court who falls for Ledoyen's character. Malkovich and Madsen play barbarian marauders. Stephen Dillane ("The Hours") plays Charlemagne, the first ruler of a united Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire."Love and Virtue" is produced by Fountain of Life Productions from a script penned by Mia Sperber and Stefano Pratesi. The script is based on epic poems "The Song of Roland" and "Orlando Innamorato."Scribe Sperber produces for U.K.-based Fountain of Life alongside Alex Sullivan for the Leo Media and Entertainment Group. The co-producers are Jimmy de Brabant and Bob Bellion of Delux Productions and Kwesi Dickson of Future Films. John Daly exec produces.The cast also includes Leonor Varela ("Blade II"), Vincent Perez ("Nouvelle-France"), Cristian de la Fuente (CSI: Miami"), Anna Massey ("The Importance of Being Earnest") and child thesps Alexa Rey and Boo Boo Stewart."It is a pleasure to work with such an outstanding cast and team that has put its heart and mind into creating a feature of superb cinematography, stunning sets and costumes, and unforgettable music," commented Ruiz."The dreamy, magical side of the characters does not detract from their authenticity, but rather enhances the chance that modern viewers will be able to identify with them given the current widespread mystical approach to life."The pic is scheduled to begin shooting March 21 on location in Belgium and Luxembourg before moving to London.The project sees the Chilean helmer reteam with "Klimt" stars Malkovich, Burrows and Dillane.London-based sales agents Intandem Films is handling international sales.
After a long slump, Peter O'Toole reemerges as a leading man, hilarious and wrenching.
By Rachel Abramowitz
Times Staff Writer
http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-ca-otoole3dec03,0,432121.story?coll=cl-movies
It's hard not to stare at Peter O'Toole's face, hunting for vestiges of one of the most beautiful male visages to grace the silver screen. Yet, the clear blue eyes that once peered out from under a white kaffiyeh have gone rheumy. The cheeks sag. The skin no longer gleams.
There are flashes of who he used to be: A certain tilt of the face and the amazing bone structure suddenly emerges from the haze of age. There are moments when the smile animates — and he is again naughty, charming, ruminative and elusive.
On a recent fall afternoon, the actor, now 74, was sitting on a settee in an old-fashioned English hotel, meticulously and repeatedly applying lip balm to his faded lips. He's still tall and thin, with the erect carriage of the fatally elegant but fragile. One misplaced thump looks as if it could send him reeling, though he's dressed for cavorting, dandyish in an olive jacket, tan pants, vest and tie.
He's rhapsodizing about falling in love, as he does in his latest film, "Venus," which lands in theaters Dec. 15. "Within seconds, it's as though these two have known each other for 25, 30 years. It doesn't matter if they're pretty or ugly, suddenly you find yourself at ease and in the pleasure of that particular company. If it is a pretty girl so much the more enchanting." He gives an old roué laugh. "But that is the way it is, I find. And this was written on a piece of paper" — the script for "Venus" — "and I thought, 'Hello.' "This is his first leading role in 20 years. Despite getting seven Academy Award nominations, the last for "My Favorite Year" in 1982, O'Toole is not a recognizable figure for younger moviegoers. One year older than Michael Caine, two years younger than Sean Connery, O'Toole seems to belong to another generation. He sparred with Richard Burton in "Becket." He played opposite Katharine Hepburn in "The Lion in Winter." As T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, he rode a camel across the desert for David Lean.
When he was nominated for an honorary Oscar in 2003, he initially demurred, sending a letter to the academy saying that he still "might win the lovely bugger outright.
"At the time, the quip came off as a jolly, quixotic riposte — especially since his prodigious early talent seemed all too often squandered. But it appears he wasn't joking. O'Toole, who's spent the last 20 years largely slumming through the movies playing parts like Priam in the paint-by-numbers tent pole "Troy" and a doctor in the little-seen horror flick "Phantoms," returns finally with one of the most hilarious and wrenching performances of the year in "Venus."
The film tells of an aging journeyman actor who spends his days cavorting with his best chum, another aging journeyman actor (Leslie Phillips) and playing stiffs in hospital dramas, until he unexpectedly falls for his friend's niece, a tarty, angry, lost young woman, Jessie, played by newcomer Jodie Whittaker. "It's about a man continuing a hopeless passion for a woman he's too old to fulfill. He's almost enjoying a memory of what he was once capable of," explains screenwriter Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"). "It's a sad film because he has so much sexual desire, but it's rather cheering because he's still going."
Directed by Roger Michell ("Persuasion"), the film catapults O'Toole from the ether of old-world Hollywood into the gritty domain of modern-day London, from the grand tradition of acting to the current vogue for naturalism at all costs.These lives are not epic but small and real, and O'Toole strips down for the occasion. Shot without makeup, in natural light, he is unvarnished and almost unrecognizable as a jaunty wreck of a human being grasping for one last flicker of life.Michell recalls sitting in the Garrick Club, a famed actor's club in London, waiting to meet O'Toole for the first time. "There was a commotion," and suddenly O'Toole was there, climbing up the marble staircase, arm in arm with compatriot Richard Briers. "They were hanging on to each other. I'm not sure who was holding on to whom. There was Peter, mischievous, funny, clever, and very, very alive. I knew before even shaking his hand he was the right man for the part because he has all those combinations of charm and grace, yet he's a person who's quite elderly now, and that brings a wonderful sense of truth and vulnerability to what he does. He's still a swashbuckler, but a swashbuckler who's marching through time.
"Indeed, O'Toole appears older than his years but carries himself with perennial panache. The filming took place on the streets of London in midwinter, and O'Toole suggested that the production purchase him a little heater, and a small tent in which he could sit when not acting, so he wouldn't get too cold. "We all thought it was absurd when we heard about it, but it was this rather wonderful invention," says Michell. "Quite a few people would congregate in his tent, having coffee or hot drinks. Then we got into a habit of photographing the tent wherever it was erected, and what resulted is a Christo-like record of the tent all over London.
"He hates the cold. He's terrified of the cold. He found the cold the most intimidating enemy. I don't think he found any of the rest of it particularly difficult," adds Michell.On this afternoon, O'Toole is almost congenitally charming, dropping names and anecdotes from a famed life like Hansel tripping along the forest path. Although this role in "Venus" is more naked than almost any before this, he insists he prepared as he always does: "Lock myself in a room and send everybody away and see you in a month or a week or however long it takes until I complete the study and memorize everything that I am going to do. And then I am open for suggestions."
"Vanessa," he says, referring to Vanessa Redgrave, who plays his ex-wife. It at first seems like a non sequitur, but it turns out to be a longer explanation. "I have worked with Vanessa's father. I have worked with Vanessa's children. I have worked with Vanessa's sister, brother and niece. Vanessa and I have never worked together before. We have known each other since the '50s; Vanessa is rooted in the old tradition of study, private, uninhibited, unobserved private studies. So I said in theater parlance, 'Do you know the jokes [the lines]?' And she said, 'Of course.' She said, 'Now I am free.' It liberates you. Then you can take advice or direction, whatever."
WARTIME YOUTH
DURING the afternoon, O'Toole offers glimpses of his life, almost like pristine images in a slide show, from which the psychological threads must be deduced. Born in 1932, the son of an Irish bookie, he grew up during World War II, a real "Hope and Glory" childhood. "The war began for us children of the war when we were 7 and then six years later we were 13. And those six years were an eternity. There were no schools from 1942 on." They spent their days playing — "we were hiding in shelters that were bombed. I was only in three high explosive raids, only three. It is not the scariest thing in my life, but it was scary. And then there were the fire bombs, and we didn't count those because they didn't often go off and they didn't make much scream or much bang, and yet the nearest I have been to blown up was by an incendiary bomb maybe about 30 yards from me.
"He initially tried his hand at journalism at the Yorkshire Evening News, which he didn't like much, although "I loved the company. Men really did have tickets for the match in their hats, and they did get drunk after filing some decent copy."
At 19, he joined the Navy, spending 14 months on a submarine depot ship with veteran sailors who had "been bombed, torpedoed and mined. I was just a young kid with them, these hairy, wonderful men." He rethought his life, and afterward he fell in with an artsy crowd and ultimately into theater. "Accidentally, I got involved in a production, a professional production of Turgenev's 'Fathers and Sons,' because the leading man fell over, broke his leg. His name was Luck." He ultimately attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, in a class that included Albert Finney and Alan Bates.
His big cinematic break came when he was cast as Lawrence in 1962's "Lawrence of Arabia." That was the era when filmmakers actually shot hundreds of living people riding through the desert rather than just generating them with the computer. It took two years to make the film. They stationed themselves in Aqaba, Jordan, and then flew out the cameras and crew on a larger plane and then used an "eight-seat De Havilland Dove. We would land on mud flats and set up a tent and shoot. For as long as we could."
On their off days, "Omar Sharif and I, we would vanish to Beirut." He sighs. "In the better days." In those days, Beirut was the glamorous playground of the Middle East. "Beautiful." He says sadly. "Poor Beirut. Poor Lebanon. Poor Middle East."The pair spent their breaks visiting the "fleshpots as one now calls them." He appears to be referring to brothels. He says that whenever people ask Sharif, a close friend, what he remembers most of the shoot, "he always says fleshpots. But for me it was wonderful. One never was used to that heat and the aridity. The nothingness. It isn't pretty sand; it is just nothing, grit. Flat. And one just never, ever, ever … you get accustomed to it in a couple of days and then it hits you" — he smacks his hands. "You would need 16 pints of water per day to stay alive. We all lived on salt pills, which are the worst thing in the world for you. When you get the shakes, somehow you get a pot of water and you put a spoonful of salt in it and stir it. If you can taste the salt you don't need it. If you can't taste the salt you have got about 10 minutes before you dry out and then you start bloating and you are gone."
Playing Lawrence left O'Toole with a lifelong interest in the man, and in archaeology, and he's traipsed to archeological sites in Israel, Turkey, China, and Cambodia. The last was when he was filming 1964's "Lord Jim," a legendary clunker though a memorable shoot. "I came out of my concrete hut one morning and I looked on the road, there were two stiffs," he says. "One was American. I was in Phnom Penh with a couple of stunt men and we were walking around the street to see what was going on, and the British Embassy was on fire. The American Embassy was on fire, and the customers were roaming around cutting their tongues with razorblades and using the blood to draw 'Yankee go home.' There we were filming and hiding. We got out by plane eventually."
One suspects that stories like this stream steadily out of O'Toole, but he insists that "I don't often think of former parts, but sometimes they pop up in conversation or into my mind and I can be amused." He'd never be able to itemize his most meaningful roles because "they are though they are human." He played Henry II twice, in "Becket" and "The Lion in Winter," and was nominated both times for Academy Awards. Other Oscar-nominated performances include "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," "The Stunt Man" and "My Favorite Year," in which he spoofed himself and played a jaunty, alcoholic movie star. He's still busy, with parts in two coming films.
For decades he was renowned for his carousing, often with famous buddies like Laurence Harvey, Peter Finch, and Richard Harris, now all dead. Along the way, he married and divorced the actress Sian Phillips, sired two daughters with her, and another son with girlfriend Karen Brown. In the mid-'70s, he nearly died from stomach cancer.
Asked if he ever regretted the drinking, O'Toole looks incredulous. "No. Not at all. It was a kind of added fuel. A booster. No, no, no the last thing it ever did was shape my bloody life."
PLAYING THE PART
WHILE some might want to see parallels between his "Venus" character, Maurice, and himself, both aging actors watching their friends die off, O'Toole insists there are none. What he doesn't deign to say is that he, unlike his character, is and was a movie star. The only Maurice characteristic he cops to is the penchant for the grand gesture that he can't always deliver on. In the film, Maurice takes Jessie, whom he calls "Venus," shopping for a little black dress but neglects to bring any money. "I have borrowed money from the hotel manager before to pay the bill," he says with a laugh.As the afternoon wears on, O'Toole seems to tire, and eventually he puts on his long overcoat and leaves, tipping the hotel staff generously on his way out the door. A smiling, middle-age woman picks him up in a white Subaru station wagon. It's not his wife, because he's "unattached" right now. It's a little deflating to see Lawrence's chariot now and to hear the doorman try to figure out who the tall, aged man was, and why he's famous.
It's better to remember O'Toole just before he left, pondering if he, like Maurice, is still capable of love. "I am sure of it," he says, the voice at first emphatic. "I am human. All too bloody human." He's full of temporary, private recrimination.
"Yes. What to do about it is another question. I think it would be a very shallow life for me if I couldn't."
For a gallery of images from Peter O'Toole's career, go to latimes.com/otoole.