The Unofficial Peter O'Toole Pages!

By ROBERT SELLERS
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-566034/Last-man-standing-How-Peter-OToole-outlived-cinemas-biggest-hellraisers.html#

Another excerpt here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-565177/Born-raise-hell-The-reckless-passion-drove-Britains-extraordinary-film-stars-on.html#

As a teenager, Peter O'Toole scribbled a pledge in his notebook: "I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony."

How right he was. Now 75 and still going strong, even he could surely never have predicted quite how uncommon his life would prove to be, or how churned up those smooth sands might become.

A natural eccentric, Peter O'Toole's legendary love of drinking only accentuated his off-beat behaviour, leaving the world agog at his escapades when fame threw a spotlight on them.

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Two of a kind: O'Toole as a legendary drinker Jeffrey Bernard

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Born to raise hell: The reckless passion that drove four of Britain's most extraordinary film stars on
This was a man who travelled the world yet never wore a watch or carried a wallet. Nor, on leaving his house, did he ever take his keys with him.

"I just hope some bastard's in," he'd say.

More than once, when someone was not in, O'Toole found himself having to explain to the police why he was breaking into his own property.

Peter O'Toole was born in 1932 in Connemara, Ireland, for which he retained a lifelong affection, although he moved to Leeds at the age of just one.

The neighbourhood where O'Toole grew up was rough, and three of his playmates were later hanged for murder. "I'm not from the working class," O'Toole liked to say. "I'm from the criminal class."

Although it was his mother, Connie, who instilled in O'Toole a strong sense of literature, by far the biggest influence in his young life was his father, Patrick, a bookie who was often drunk.

One day, Patrick stood his young son up on the mantelpiece and said: "Jump, boy. I'll catch you. Trust me."

When O'Toole jumped, his father withdrew his arms, leaving the boy splattered on the hard stone floor. The lesson, said his father, was "never trust any bastard".

Later, father and son often got plastered together, such as the occasion in London when Patrick came down from Leeds in 1959.

The O'Tooles got slaughtered and as everyone retired to bed, Peter lay spread-eagled on the floor, "not asleep, but crucified", as he later said.

Patrick tried lifting his flagging son to his feet, but to no avail. Instead he opened another bottle and joined him on the floor. That's where the pair were found the following afternoon.

O'Toole's childhood was dogged by ill health, and although he could read by the age of three, he did not attend school regularly until he was 11.

He left two years later with no qualifications and one ambition: to sell second-hand Jaguars.

When this failed to materialise, he landed a job on his local newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening News.

Starting as a tea boy, O'Toole did a stint as a reporter, covering stories with the likes of future columnist Keith Waterhouse and author Barbara Taylor Bradford.

He quickly concluded, however, that this was not the career for him, a view shared by his editor.

"I soon found out that, rather than chronicling events, I wanted to be the event," he said.

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Hellraisers to the end: Richard Harris with Peter O'Toole

To help achieve this, he landed a scholarship at RADA in a class that include future stars Alan Bates and Albert Finney.

In 1959, O'Toole was cast as a Cockney sergeant in the play The Long And The Short And The Tall at the Royal Court Theatre.

His understudy was a young Michael Caine, and one Saturday night after the show O'Toole invited him to a restaurant he knew.

Eating a plate of egg and chips was the last thing Caine remembered, until he woke up in broad daylight in a strange flat.

"What time is it?" he inquired. "Never mind what time it is," said O'Toole. "What f***ing day is it?"

It turned out that it was five o'clock in the afternoon two days later. Curtain-up was at eight.

Back at the theatre, the stage manager was waiting for them with the news that the restaurant owner had been in and banned them from his establishment for life.

Caine was about to ask what they'd done when O'Toole whispered: "Never ask what you did. It's better not to know."

Most evenings after the show, O'Toole would enjoy a long walk around Covent Garden. Sometimes if he was in the mood, he'd scale the wall of Lloyds bank.

The first time he took his future wife, the actress Sian Phillips, on one of these nocturnal jaunts, she was startled when he began his ascent of the north face of the building.

But after a few nights she came to accept that, by O'Toole's standards anyway, it was quite normal.

It was the sheer unpredictability of the man that had attracted her to him in the first place.

He once showed up in a sports car yelling: "Get your passport, we're off!" Heading for Rome, they took a wrong turning and ended up in Yugoslavia.

By the end of the trip, Sian's nerves were in shreds as a result of O'Toole's manic driving.

After he'd once taken a friend to Amsterdam, the unfortunate woman later confided to Sian: "He should never drive anything. He's lovely, but I thought we were going to die."

Over the years, cars and O'Toole have never been the best of friends. One woman who accepted a lift from him swore afterwards that she would never do so again.

During the journey, he had ignored a Keep Left sign on the grounds that it was "silly", and also narrowly avoided driving down a flight of steps.

O'Toole's first proper film credit was a small role in Walt Disney's 1959 movie Kidnapped. Amazingly, on his very first day he overslept, and the angry film company had to phone the home of the actor Kenneth Griffith, where O'Toole was staying, to find out where he was.

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Extraordinary quartet: Richard Burton, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole

Griffith popped his head round O'Toole's bedroom door - he was fast asleep. "O'Toole," he shouted. "You're 45 minutes late."

Lifting his bedraggled head off the pillow, O'Toole asked if his car had arrived.

"No," said Griffith. O'Toole's head crashed back onto the pillow. "No car, no me," he said.

"From that day to this, there has been a Rolls-Royce waiting for him," Griffith once revealed. Even on his first day, O'Toole was behaving like the star he would later become.

The star of Kidnapped was the Australian actor Peter Finch, a mighty drinker. Not surprisingly, he and O'Toole became great friends.

During one of their legendary boozing sessions in Ireland in the Sixties they were refused a drink because it was after closing time.

Both stars decided that the only course of action was to buy the pub, so they wrote out a cheque for it.

The following morning, after sobering up, the pair rushed back to the scene of the crime. Luckily the landlord hadn't cashed the cheque and disaster was averted.

O'Toole and Finch remained friends with the pub owner, and when he died his wife invited them to his funeral.

Both knelt at the graveside as the coffin was lowered in, sobbing noisily. When Finch turned away, unable to stand it any more, O'Toole saw his friend's face change from a look of sorrow to one of total astonishment.

They were at the wrong funeral; their friend was being buried 100 yards away.

In his late 20s, O'Toole became the youngest leading man ever at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, where he took the opportunity to seal his growing reputation as a hellraiser.

At one after-show party O'Toole held court on stage sitting on a throne, sustained by two pedal bins on either side of him, one full of beer, the other containing hard liquor into which he would alternately scoop two pint mugs.

But his tearaway existence was taking its toll, and O'Toole's doctors warned him that he needed to cut out the booze.

For the rest of the season, O'Toole made a great show of downing large quantities of milk, although he remained sceptical.

"I get drunk and disorderly and all that, but I don't think it's true that there is any danger of me destroying myself," he said.

When director David Lean was casting the lead in Lawrence Of Arabia in 1959, he favoured O'Toole, but producer Sam Spiegel had reservations because of his reputation.

Having seen his screen test, however, he had to admit they'd found their Lawrence.

Lawrence Of Arabia occupied O'Toole for two years, filming in seven different countries.

By the end of it, he'd lost 2st, received third-degree burns, sprained both ankles, torn ligaments in both his hip and thigh, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, sprained his neck and been concussed twice.

But his extraordinary performance made him a star. Lawrence Of Arabia was a world-wide smash when it opened in 1962 and was hailed as one of cinema's true masterpieces.

"I woke up one morning to find I was famous," he said. "I bought a white Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the Queen Mum.

"Nobody took any f***ing notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it."

His family life, however, was suffering. When one of his daughters was ill, he paid her a visit in the nursery. Days later, the child asked Sian: "You know that man who came to see me, Mummy - who is he?"

After that, Sian made a point of pinning up stills of O'Toole's current film or stage guises to avoid any misunderstandings.

The filming of the 1968 historical drama The Lion In Winter, in which O'Toole starred with Katharine Hepburn, was notable for a series of bizarre incidents.

Shooting a scene on a lake one day, O'Toole trapped his finger between two boats. "Bloody agony it was," he said. "Took the top right off."

O'Toole carried the tip of his finger back to shore, dipped it into a glass of brandy to sterilise it and then pushed it back on, wrapping it in a poultice.

Three weeks later he unwrapped it and there it was, all crooked and bent.

"I'd put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank," explained O'Toole.

Another time, he awoke at 4am to discover that his bed was on fire.

"At first I tried to put the thing out myself, but I couldn't read the small print on the fire extinguisher," he said.

"By the time the first fireman arrived, I was so glad to see him I kissed him."

O'Toole didn't have much luck with fires. During a cottage holiday in Wales with Sian, he had decided to cook, although she had never seen him do so before.

"I can make the best French toast," he told her. Minutes later the stove exploded into flames.

They tried to extinguish the fire, but it was impossible, and they were driven out into the garden, where they watched in the rain as the kitchen burnt down.

Meanwhile, O'Toole's film career was hardly going from strength to strength. One of his commercial flops was the 1968 movie The Great Catherine, a moribund historical effort that hardly got a cinema run.

During filming, O'Toole's habit was to go back to his dressing room when not required, ostensibly to rest and learn his lines.

In reality, he opened a bottle of champagne and chatted to his minder, who drove him around and got him home safely after a night on the sauce.

One afternoon, director Gordon Fleming sent an assistant to fetch O'Toole.

The assistant found the dressing room empty, with a TV showing horse-racing from Sandown Park, not far from the studio.

Suddenly, the TV camera zoomed in and there, in the crowd, was O'Toole cheering on the horses.

A car was dispatched to bring the errant actor back to the studio. O'Toole arrived all smiles, thinking it was one big joke.

During the Sixties, O'Toole had blazed a mighty trail of hell-raising, but as the decade came to a close he was approaching his 40s and some wondered if he was getting tired of lugging around his reputation as a drunkard and general crank.

"The damage has been done," he lamented. "There is a legend, there is a myth: to protest is daft."

In 1975, when he was 43, matters were taken out of his hands. An abdominal irregularity he'd persistently ignored (he hated doctors) finally erupted and he was rushed into hospital for a major operation.

For years, O'Toole refused to say what the problem was. "My plumbing is no one's business but my own," he said.

In fact, O'Toole came as close to dying as you can without doing so. "It was a photo-finish, the surgeons said," he said.

There was so little of his digestive system left that any amount of alcohol could prove fatal. Having come so close to death, O'Toole was determined to live each day to the full.

"The time has come to stop roaming," he said. "The pirate ship has berthed. I can still make whoopee, but now I do it sober."

That was more than 30 years ago. Now, in his mid-70s, Peter O'Toole has outlived all his fellow hellraisers and is still very much in the game.

In 2004, he played Priam in the epic Troy, which also starred Orlando Bloom, Brad Pitt and Sean Bean, a self-confessed O'Toole aficionado.

"The first time I met him on the set," recalled Bean, "he was in a robe with a cigarette holder and he said: 'Sean, how are you, dear boy?' He was just how I imagined him to be."

Last year, O'Toole notched up his eighth Oscar nomination for his performance in Venus, the story of an almost wholly platonic romance between an elderly thespian and a 21-year-old girl.

O'Toole was delighted at the script and at his casting.

"No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young woman," he said. Sadly, the coveted Oscar still eludes him, although he remains hopeful.

So O'Toole is the last surviving British reprobate. "The common denominator of all my friends is that they're dead," he said.

"There was a time when I felt like a perpendicular cuckoo clock, popping up and down in pulpits saying: 'Fear no more the heat o' the sun.' They were dying like flies."

But like all the other hellraisers, he has never once regretted the mistakes he made.

"I loved the drinking, and waking up in the morning to find I was in Mexico," he said. "It was part and parcel of being an idiot." Long may he continue.

EXTRACTED from Hellraisers: The Life And Times Of Burton, Harris, O'Toole & Reed by Robert Sellers, published by Preface on May 29 at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.30 (p&p free), call 0845 606 4206.

Posted by Hamish at 12:24 PM | Permalink

Peter will be appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno to promote his role as Pope Paul III in the March 30th episode of "The Tudors". I'll tape the appearance and post it here.

Update: Here's the interview in Quicktime .mov and .m4v formats.

Posted by Hamish at 08:39 AM | Permalink

Bertolucci's masterpiece biopic, "The Last Emperor", in which Peter O'Toole starred as the young emperor Pu Yi's tutor, is due to be re-released in a 4-disc Criterion Collection edition at the end of February. This is one of my favourite of O'Toole's many roles, I'll definitely be picking this one up!

See http://www.movieweb.com/dvd/news/95/26195.php for more details.

Posted by Hamish at 08:55 AM | Permalink

(from the New Zealand Herald)
Following on from 2006's critically acclaimed film No. 2, local director Toa Fraser has turned his hand to another high-profile project, Dean Spanley.

Based on the 1936 novel by Lord Dusanay, the film will star eight-time Oscar nominee Peter O'Toole and New Zealand's own Sam Neill.

Cast and crew are in New Zealand filming the final portion of the picture, after spending six weeks filming in Norfolk, England.

Set in the Edwardian era, the comedy looks at the relationship between master and dog, father and son.

Mark Vette, of TV One's The Funny Farm fame, is helping with the shoot, wrangling the film's furry stars. The New Zealand-British co-production is set for release later this year.

Posted by Hamish at 02:46 PM | Permalink

Marie-Noelle informs us that "Hellraisers: The Inebriated Life and Times of Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed" is due to be released. (from amazon:)

"This highly entertaining biography of four charismatic and much loved actors follows them through five decades of boozing, brawling and braggadocio.

At their career peaks, these four controversial actors had the whole world at their feet and lived through some of the wildest exploits Hollywood has ever seen. But all that fame had a price; Richard Burton’s liver was shot by the time he was 50, Richard Harris’s film career stalled for over a decade. Peter O’Toole’s drinking almost put him in the grave before his 43rd birthday, and Oliver Reed ended up dying prematurely.

This is the story of four of the greatest thespian boozers who ever walked — or staggered — off a film set into a pub. It’s a story of drunken binges of near biblical proportions, parties and orgies, broken marriages, drugs, riots and wanton sexual conquests. And yet these piss-artists were seemingly immune from the law. They got away with it because of their extraordinary acting talent and because the public loved them. They were truly the last of a breed, the last of the movie hellraisers.

About the Author
Robert Sellers is a former stand-up comedian and the author of biographies of Sting, Tom Cruise, two appreciations of the work of Sean Connery, and the definitive book on the Pythons: Always Look on the Bright Side of Life."

Thanks, Marie-Noelle!

Posted by Hamish at 11:29 AM | Permalink

Reader Malcolm informs me that Peter is shooting a new film this November called "My Talks with Dean Spanley"... produced by Alan Harris and Matthew Metcalfe, and directed by Toa Fraser. Not much in the way of details yet - I'll update as I get them.

Peter's got a busy year coming up! According to imdb.com he's involved in at least 5 films that are slated for 2007-2008 release.

Update: Accoridng to the Hollywood Reporter, The castlist for Spanley includes Jeremy Northam and Sam Neill... The film will be set in Edwardian England, "where upper lips are always stiff and men from the Colonies are not entirely to be trusted, [the film] reveals just how deep an Englishman's love for his dog can go."

Posted by Hamish at 02:32 PM | Permalink

Peter O'Toole - Hellraiser - The Biography is due to be released soon in the UK. Written by Carolyn Soutar, who has also penned bios of comedian Dave Allen, ballet star Rudolph Nureyev, this is an unofficial account of O'Toole's life - no doubt because O'Toole himself isn't finished with living and is apparently spending part of this year completing the long-awaited third volume of his memoirs, "Loitering with Intent". I've ordered a copy of Hellraiser and I'll post a review when it comes in.

* side note I wonder if they will change the title of the book for the North American release (if any) due to the title being the same as the successful horror film series "Hellraiser".

Posted by Hamish at 09:04 AM | Permalink

September 18th will see the re-release of MASADA, the epic mini-series, in which Peter starred Silva, a Roman general.

Posted by Hamish at 08:08 PM | Permalink

O'Toole Handed the Baton
(from this article at filmstew)

Back in the 1960’s in Abington, Pennsylvania, the local high school relay team was celebrated for having won a prestigious relay championship. Doesn’t really sound like the kind of material that might overlap with the talents of eight-time Oscar nominee Peter O’Toole, does it? Be that as it may, O’Toole is indeed on board as one of the co-stars of Baton, a fictitious tale taking its cue from that time period; it begins filming in Abington next week and is being associate produced by local boy Jay Staats, a 1963 graduate of Abington High. The drama leaves the Pennsylvania locales when its young protagonist Sean (Thomas Easley) travels to Montreal to live with the leader of the World Peace Organization, played by O’Toole. All against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. The now 75-year-old actor (his birthday was last week, August 2nd) has remained extremely busy since he was in the running for Best Actor with Venus. In addition to voicing the food critic in Ratatouille and playing a king in this week’s new fantasy film release Stardust, he’s got close to half a dozen things in the works or in the can, including an episode of Showtime's The Tudors and the CBC Canadian miniseries Iron Road. O’Toole’s part is no doubt a small one, but still, it is impressive that this indie production was able to score such a name. The film marks the directorial debut of Jeff January, a veteran First Assistant Director, and also co-stars James Brolin.

Religion a key part of portfolio for actor

(from this article at the Columbus dispatch - reprinted from the New York Times) August 1 2007

By Anita Gates

DUBLIN, Ireland -- On a typically drizzly Irish day, protected by a huge green umbrella, Peter O'Toole crossed a movie-studio lot.

He looked elegant in white papal robes and a red cape, with a characteristic glint in his world-famous eyes.

Spotting a new acquaintance, he called out: "Did you see Page 8 of The Irish Times?"

He proceeded to read aloud a report about Protestant leader Ian Paisley and his criticism of Pope Benedict XVI.

O'Toole, 74, had just finished filming his portrayal of a 16th-century pope, Paul III, in the much-discussed Showtime series The Tudors, to begin a second season in the spring.

Even out of character, he seemed happy to discuss religion.

"I am a retired Christian," he announced playfully, relaxing in his trailer at the end of the day.

His costume had been replaced by pants, a sweater, a jacket and an ascot.

Six decades after his altar-boy childhood and subsequent loss of faith, O'Toole said, he looked elsewhere for guidance.

"I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren't bad things on which to ponder a few notions," he said.

Yet he acknowledged a "very strong and very real" spiritual side.

"No one can take Jesus away from me," he said, having just expressed an affection for the Sermon on the Mount ("Blessed are the meek . . .").

"There's no doubt there was a historical figure of tremendous importance with enormous notions -- such as peace."

The character O'Toole plays will spend most of next season in an epistolary battle with Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) over the king's insistence on a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so he can marry Anne Boleyn.

(Some dramatic license was taken: The real pope at the time was Clement VII, played in last season's brief papal scenes by Ian McElhinney; when O'Toole came aboard, producers made him Clement's successor, Paul III, but by that time, Boleyn was dead.)

Few of The Tudors' actors have scenes with O'Toole because the pope is in Rome, but they were on the set to be photographed with him or simply shake his hand.

"He's the only poster I've ever had on my wall," said Meyers, recalling his youthful adulation after seeing Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. "I just hope that I can hold up against him."

Michael Hirst, who has written every episode of the series so far, said he was delighted to have O'Toole speaking his dialogue.

"The pope was extremely cynical, so what I wanted was to hear the character of a man who is spiritual but also worldly," Hirst said. "He says something about, 'The French king has guns and soldiers, whereas we must make do with truth and beauty.' "

Over a glass of wine, O'Toole chatted about past roles, which have included a cardinal in the TV production Joan of Arc, angels in The Bible and a British lord who thinks he is Jesus in The Ruling Class.

He recalled also having played a pope before, onstage when he was 24, filling in at the last minute for an older actor.

Although he reluctantly accepted an honorary Oscar in 2003, O'Toole has never won a competitive Academy Award despite eight nominations.

O'Toole smiled, got up to retrieve a small spiral notebook and revealed inside a tiny, Oscar-shaped piece of golden paper: a bit of confetti, he said, from a party after this year's ceremony.

"So," he said pleasantly, "I've got my own, thank you very much indeed."

Posted by Hamish at 11:55 AM | Permalink

(from the July 26th New York Times)

Papal Robes, and Deference, Fit O’Toole Snugly
By ANITA GATES

DUBLIN — On a typically drizzly Irish day Peter O’Toole crossed a movie studio lot, protected by a huge green umbrella. He was elegant in white papal robes and red cape, with a characteristic glint in his world-famous eyes.

Spotting a new acquaintance, he called out, “Did you see Page 8 of The Irish Times?” He proceeded to read aloud the report about the Protestant leader Ian Paisley’s criticism of Pope Benedict XVI for the “excommunication of all Christendom” by endorsing a Vatican declaration that Roman Catholicism was the only true church.

Mr. O’Toole, 74, had just completed filming his portrayal of the 16th-century pope Paul III in Showtime’s much-talked-about series “The Tudors,” which returns for its second season next spring. Even out of character he seemed happy to discuss religion.

“I am a retired Christian,” he announced playfully, relaxing in his trailer at the end of a hard workday. His costume had been replaced by sweater, jacket, pants and an ascot.

Six decades after his altar-boy childhood and subsequent loss of faith, Mr. O’Toole said he looked elsewhere for life guidance. “I suggest that an education and reading and facts aren’t bad things on which to ponder a few notions,” he said. But he acknowledged a “very strong and very real” spiritual side to his nature.

“No one can take Jesus away from me,” he said, having just expressed an affection for the Sermon on the Mount (“Blessed are the meek,” etc.). “There’s no doubt there was a historical figure of tremendous importance, with enormous notions. Such as peace.”

Mr. O’Toole’s character will spend most of next season in an epistolary battle with Henry VIII (the equally blue-eyed Jonathan Rhys Meyers) over the king’s insistence on a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so he can marry Anne Boleyn. The real pope at the time was Clement VII, but in last season’s brief papal scenes Clement was played by Ian McElhinney. So when Mr. O’Toole came on board, the series made him Clement’s successor, Paul III, instead. (Actually, by Paul III’s time, Anne was already in her grave. But what’s a little dramatic license among friends?

The “Tudors” set can look a bit like the Island of Lost Handsome British Actors. Besides Mr. Rhys Meyers (who turns 30 on July 27 and plays a particularly young, fit Henry), there are, among others, Jeremy Northam as Thomas More, James Frain as Thomas Cromwell and the newcomer Henry Cavill as Henry’s hunky brother-in-law Charles Brandon.

But the presence of Mr. O’Toole caused a stir. Few of the actors have scenes with him because the pope is in Rome, but several managed to be on the set to be photographed with him or simply shake his hand.

“He’s the only poster I’ve ever had on my wall,” Mr. Rhys Meyers said, recalling his youthful adulation after seeing “Lawrence of Arabia” for the first time. “I just hope that I can hold up against him.”

But Mr. Rhys Meyers quickly regained his kingly attitude. “I’d love to have had a scene with Peter,” he said over tea in his own trailer. “It would have been war. It’s war anyway.”

Michael Hirst, who has written every episode of the series so far, said he was delighted to have Mr. O’Toole speaking his dialogue. “The pope was extremely cynical, so what I wanted was to hear the character of a man who is spiritual but also worldly,” Mr. Hirst said. “He says something about, ‘The French king has guns and soldiers, whereas we must make do with truth and beauty.’ ”

Mr. Hirst mentioned another cherished line. It was part of a discussion of Henry’s infatuation with the cunning Anne Boleyn, and it reflected the past of Paul III, who had mistresses and children.

“You and I have done well to escape the craft of women,” the pope tells Cardinal Campeggio (John Kavanagh). “Celibacy is an immense relief.”

Mr. O’Toole, who was married to the British actress Sian Phillips for 20 years (they divorced in 1979), recited the same line during his interview, which ended with a couple of glasses of red wine (a Margaux), one of his current drinks of choice. (The other is whisky.)

He chatted about other subjects: his lifelong avoidance of physical exercise but enjoyment of sports (he professed to be taking up archery), his background (born in Connemara, reared in Leeds, England, the son of a racetrack bookmaker), training (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London) and past roles, which have included a cardinal in a television “Joan of Arc,” angels in “The Bible” and a British lord convinced he is Jesus in “The Ruling Class.”

He recalled having played a pope before, onstage when he was 24 and filled in at the last minute for an older actor. (In “Becket” he was on the other side, playing a king, Henry II, who ordered the murder of the archbishop.)

Ultimately the subject of the Oscar was broached. Although he reluctantly accepted an honorary one in 2003, Mr. O’Toole has never won an American Academy Award and has surpassed the record of his old friend Richard Burton as the actor nominated most often (eight times, most recently for the 2006 film “Venus”) without ever winning.

Mr. O’Toole smiled, got up to retrieve a small spiral notebook and revealed inside a tiny, Oscar-shaped piece of golden paper: a bit of confetti, he said, from a party after this year’s ceremony.

“So,” he said pleasantly, “I’ve got my own, thank you very much indeed.”

Posted by Hamish at 10:02 AM | Permalink

Hamish's Note: Lorcan has worked with Joan Plowright before, as Desmond in last year's "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont"

Hickox thriller rolls in England
By ARCHIE THOMAS (Variety)
LONDON — Brit thesp Nathalie Press will take the lead in psychological thriller "Knife Edge." Anthony Hickox's pic is about a Wall Street trader whose efforts to settle in a rural English idyll with her young son are wrecked by nightmarish visions.

Hugh Bonneville plays a family lawyer whose involvement with Press's character goes beyond the professional.

Also appearing are Joan Plowright, Matthieu Boujenah, Tamsin Egerton, Jamie Harris, Lorcan O'Toole and newcomer Miles Ronayne.

Press came to the fore in 2004's "My Summer of Love" and turned heads last year in Andrea Arnold's critically acclaimed drama "Red Road."

Pippa Cross ("Shooting Dogs") is producing alongside Janette Day and Fee Combe. Exec producing is Shelagh Miller, Peter Graham and Stephen Hays.

The chiller is from an original screenplay by Hickox, Robin Squire and Combe.

"Knife Edge" is a Seven Arts presentation in association with 120dB Films of a Knife Edge Films production. Seven Arts is handling worldwide sales, including the German, Russian and Eastern European rights, acquired by Telepool.

Posted by Hamish at 01:19 PM | Permalink

Peter O'Toole will join the cast of Showtime's 'The Tudors' in the second season of the cable television drama. He's booked for seven(!) episodes, filming in Ireland later this year and airing next spring. He will play Pope Paul III in a recounting of the 16th century showdown with Henry VIII, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers - PPIII excommunicated the King over his divorce from first wife Catherine of Aragon, resulting in the historic break between England and the Roman Catholic Church. This should be interesting viewing, not just because of the talent Peter will no doubt bring to the role, but also because of his history of negativity toward the Catholic school system he was brought up in.

(Post Chronicle) (cinematical)

Posted by Hamish at 09:37 AM | Permalink

Longtime reader Jeff Swindoll has provided a nice review of the (US) DVD release of Venus over at dvd.monstersandcritics.com:

I'm impotent, of course, but I can still take a theoretical interest.

Continue reading "Venus arrives on DVD; Review by Jeff Swindoll" »

Posted by Hamish at 01:20 PM | Permalink

(from this story)

"Ultimately, the surprise nominee did not turn out to be the surprise winner – The Last King of Scotland's Forest Whitaker took home the golden statuette instead, beating Gosling, Peter O'Toole, Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith.

But Gosling got his golden memory.

"I had a great moment with Peter O'Toole, though it's not like he mentioned my film or anything," Gosling says.

"We were both waiting for our cars in the parking lot. He bent down and picked up a piece of Oscar confetti, gave it to me and said, 'I'd like to present you with your Academy Award'," Gosling laughs.

"Then he said 'I have mine' and shook his little Oscar confetti piece in his hand.

"And I thought that was probably the best thing. If that's my only experience of the Oscars, it's the greatest. There's nothing better than losing with Peter O'Toole. I can't think of anything cooler than that.""

Posted by Hamish at 03:58 PM | Permalink

Peter will star as King of Stormhold in the fantasy film, "Stardust", due to be released this August. Michelle Pfeiffer and Robert DeNiro also star.

Posted by Hamish at 01:31 PM | Permalink

Posted by Hamish at 09:43 AM | Permalink

(photo from ew.com)
O'Toole puts Kinkade film on his palette
Hollywood Reporter, April 5, 2007

Peter O'Toole is in final negotiations to star in Lionsgate's "The
Christmas Cottage," a feature based on the Thomas Kinkade painting.

The film will be directed by Michael Campus, and production is
scheduled to begin this month in Vancouver and Whistler.

"Cottage" is said to be partly biographical and based on events that
led American painter Kinkade to become an artist. O'Toole will play a
painter named Glen Weissler, based on one of Kinkade's mentors.

"Cottage" also will be produced by the Firm and Kinkade's Birch label.
Producers are the Firm's Julie Yorn, Michael and Arla Dietz Campus as
well as Thomas and Nanette Kinkade. A holiday release is planned for
the film, which is part of a production deal between Lionsgate and
Kinkade.

O'Toole recently was nominated for his eighth Academy Award for his
performance in "Venus."

(thanks Kevin & Ric for the heads up!)

Posted by Hamish at 02:57 PM | Permalink

(link)

By Barry Paris
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

T.S. Eliot called it "Murder in the Cathedral." Jean Anouilh called it "Becket." Shakespeare would have called it "Henry II."

By any name, in any season, the epic struggle between a 12th-century English king and a courtier-turned-conscience of his realm makes for a majestic movie, currently -- and thankfully-- being re-released for the first time in 40-plus years.

The time: less than a century after the Norman conquest (of 1066). The problem: high-spirited Henry II (Peter O'Toole) is having trouble with still-restive Saxons and church officials. Of great aid in both matters is his beloved drinking-and-wenching pal, Thomas Becket (Richard Burton), a wiser and cooler head than Henry's crowned one. When the troublesome archbishop of Canterbury finally does him the favor of dying, Henry's bright idea for his replacement is Becket, a confidant loyal to Henry, not Rome.

But to the king's chagrin, Becket takes God and the job seriously.

Edward Anhalt took home the 1964 Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for "Becket" and deserved it. His script captures the full power of Anouilh's play, whose language is declaimed by Burton and O'Toole with mesmerizing eloquence.

"I have something far worse than a sin on my conscience," says Henry, with a perfect pause before, "... a mistake."

Few plays have been turned into films with such a love of words intact. Originally produced on Broadway in 1959 with Laurence Olivier as Becket and Anthony Quinn as King Henry, "Becket" contains one significant factual error: Contrary to one of its main plot lines, the real Thomas was a Norman, not a Saxon -- something Anouilh said he discovered only after finishing the play.

But never mind. It brings history to life with magnificent performances by the most exciting actors of the day. Of the two principals, it is O'Toole's dynamic rage rather than Burton's piety that is more riveting. Equally fine in support are John Gielgud as foppish Louis XII of France, along with Martita Hunt as Henry's mother and Pamela Brown as his carping wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, a pair of queens constantly beaten by the king's royal flush.

"Who are you?" shouts the king to his cowering young son.

"Henry III," the boy answers.

"Not YET!" the father retorts, later addressing the boy as "you witless baboon!"

Suffice to say, this is not the most functional of royal families.

"Becket" and its historical circumstances foreshadow the bigger case -- and church-state split -- to come, six Henrys later, with another Thomas immortalized in another epic film. Fred Zinnemann's "A Man for All Seasons" (1966) would pit Henry VIII against Sir Thomas More. Two years later, "The Lion in Winter" (1968) allowed O'Toole to reprise Henry II opposite Katharine Hepburn as a much more formidable Eleanor.

If there's a better British-history trilogy than this trio, I can't name it. It's one of many things to thank the much-maligned '60s for.

While we're doling out retro-thanks, let's thank the gorgeous Panavision cinematography of Geoffrey Unsworth for the look of "Becket." The chance to enjoy it on a big screen again is well worth sharing with your kids. Its 2-1/2 hours fly by, although you'll miss the nicety of an intermission, which was de riguer back in those salad days of its theatrical release.

Director Peter Glenville was a London and New York stage director whose precious few films included a dull 1967 rendering of Graham Greene's "The Comedians," which inspired Bosley Crowther's shortest, cruelest, funniest review: "'The Comedians': Ha ha." After notices like that, you could see why Grenville swore off moviemaking. But "Becket" is the (one and only) gem in his diadem.

The story's only "weak" point is a matter of historical accuracy: That catalytic issue on which Becket took his stand _ a jurisdictional dispute between ecclesiastical vs. civil-court authority _ strikes us as not so terribly compelling in today's world of fast-and-loose creative judicial solutions. Why didn't Henry just declare Becket an anti-crown combatant and let him rot in the Tower of Londtanamo?

Becket and Henry represented nearly identical willfulness on opposite ends of the spectrum. "Humility is the most difficult of the virtues to achieve," wrote T.S. Eliot. "Nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself."

Becket will be released on May 15th. You can pre-order it at the usual venues.

Posted by Hamish at 01:49 PM | Permalink

Peter dances with his daughter Kate after the Academy Awards. (photo credit wireimage)

O'Toole Flashed By Fan
Peter had an enjoyable experience in New York City recently, when a female fan flashed him. The acting veteran, 74, was in a hotel lift when a young lady showed him her breasts. He says, "I said, 'My dear, I thank you. But although I still have the desire, I lack the device.'" (from contactmusic.com)

Another interesting bit of news is that the upcoming Pixar film, "Ratattouile", will feature O'Toole's voice for the part of Anton Ego the food critic. The film is to be released on June 29th. (iesb.com)

Peter is also listed in the cast for the 2007 film, "Stardust", based on the Neil Gaiman graphic novel by the same name.

A lot of good work has been done to Peter's Wikipedia entry.. go check it out!

"The Unfinished Epic of Peter O'Toole" - interesting and well-written blog article at newcritics.com.

pressarchive has a good interview with O'Toole from 2004.

Posted by Hamish at 09:18 AM | Permalink

PR-Inside reports that Alias/Elektra star Jennifer Garner met Peter O'Toole at the Miramax pre-Oscar party last Thursday night in New York City and "found him very attractive."

When asked what she thought about 'Venus' Jennifer said: 'You couldn't imagine that someone would pitch this and the studio would say, 'Yes, let's make this movie about a young girl who is hit on by the man she's taking care of.' 'It sounds so perverse, but they turned it into such a human and real story. 'And he's a very sexy guy.' But Ben didn't appear to be jealous about his wife's secret crush. He spent the evening in deep conversation with the veteran star, laughing and joking. When asked about his preparations for the party, Peter replied: 'I cleaned my teeth, had a wash, put on a shirt, and here I am, baby.'

Posted by Hamish at 02:31 PM | Permalink

In an evening of strange clothes, over-the-top music and back-lit mimes, the question was asked, can O'Toole pull it off? Can he carry the weight? Can he overcome an obstacle that has blocked his path for so many years? And here, tonight, he did it with aplomb. Reese Witherspoon opened the envelope and revealed the answer. Finally, Peter has beaten Sir Richard Burton! Eight Academy Award nominations and no wins. No one else has done it, no one else could do so with the style and flair that Peter O'Toole musters in a fingertip gesture.

Ah well. It was a good go, wasn't it? I'm pleased he was nominated but the juggernaut of Forest Whitaker's incredible performance as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland deserved to win. I'm just sorry we didn't get to hear Peter's acceptance speech.

Now, we look forward to the third volume of Loitering with Intent. Peter is devoting much time this year to focus on finishing work on the memoir, which he said will comprise 'the meat' of his career - stage and screen acting. I'm rubbing my hands together in anticipation!

Posted by Hamish at 12:05 AM | Permalink

Peter O'Toole arrives at the Academy Awards with his son Lorcan and daughter Kate.
(photo credit: A.M.P.A.S.)

Posted by Hamish at 09:59 PM | Permalink

Punters like long odds and a big payoff for O'Toole at the Oscars - Brit bookies William Hills are taking 10/3 odds on O'Toole winning Best Actor just behind Forest Whitaker who's backed at 1/5. Another link.

SkyNews: Is it Chips for O'Toole?

Continue reading "Odds on for O'Toole at Oscars" »

Posted by Hamish at 10:59 AM | Permalink

Photo by Terry O'Neill

Gold Derby: The Envelope: Biggest Oscar upset: Peter O'Toole will win, after all.

Check the link to see all the comments! Jump link below to see the article.

Continue reading "Biggest Oscar Upset: Peter O'Toole will win, after all" »

Posted by Hamish at 10:56 AM | Permalink

Reader Erin Schultz forwarded this to me today... she wrote an awesome story about her experience of seeing Venus for the first time. Thank you, Erin! If you like this story please think about sending me your own story - post it in the guestbook, even! Read on...

Continue reading ""The Venus Experience"" »

Posted by Hamish at 04:05 PM | Permalink

Peter was interviewed back in January on NPR's "All Things Considered." The clips are archived on the NPR website.

Reader Susan pointed me to the NPR piece as well as to an archival interview from April, 1993. Check it out!

Posted by Hamish at 01:50 PM | Permalink

The New York Times has a really nice portrait of Peter in their Oscar Nominee portrait series for this year's Academy Awards.

Photo by Gareth McConnell

Posted by Hamish at 12:17 PM | Permalink

Gold Derby: Peter O'Toole: I win even if I lose the Oscar

"If you haven't read it yet, I recommend to you checking out Susan King's "lovely" chat with Peter O'Toole here at The Envelope — (see below). Most curious: at the end of it, Susan asks the seven-time loser if he'll have an acceptance speech ready in case he actually pulls off a victory this time."My expectations are low," he concedes. "It would be silly for me if I haven't learned from my experience [of losing] But it's fun, dear. It really is fun. I would be delighted to win. If not, I will be the record holder for the one who never won one."Peter's suggestion that he triumphs in an odd way even if he loses again shows a fine appreciation for the nature of his biz — of telling stories about losers struggling with foiled quests to succeed. That's the essence of almost every film, every stage play he's starred in. If Peter fails again in real life to achieve the approval of his peers and ends up reigning for decades ahead as Oscar's biggest loser, the irony is rich. And he ends up winning anyway, because he'll hold a highly notable place in the Oscar history books."

OSCAR VETERAN:

Eight-time nominee Peter O'Toole on "Venus," his early theater days and working with Katharine Hepburn.
Susan King
Contender Q&A
February 8, 2007

Will the eighth time be the charm for Peter O'Toole?The veteran actor, 74, received his eighth Oscar nod for his poignant performance in "Venus" as Maurice, a dying British actor who becomes besotted with a beautiful free spirit (Jodie Whittaker) -- the grand-niece of an actor friend.

O'Toole's released his reaction to the nomination in a simple, funny statement: "You fail the first time, try try try try try try try again. Yoicks!"

The tall, lanky blue-eyed Irish actor received his first Academy Award nomination 44 years ago for his indelible portrait of T.E. Lawrence in "Lawrence of Arabia." He's also received nominations for 1964's "Becket," 1969's "The Lion in Winter," 1969's "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," 1972's "The Ruling Class," 1980's "The Stuntman" and 1982's "My Favorite Year."Four years ago, O'Toole received an honorary Oscar for memorable work.On Feb. 5, the Academy held their annual nominees' luncheon and O'Toole, who was in attendance, received a rousing response from the steller crowd.

It was so lovely to see such a warm standing ovation for you at the Academy Awards luncheon.

Having somewhat presumptuously saying I was still in the game some time ago and to find out I still am in the game and to have been dealt a really lovely hand, I am going to play it for what it's worth, my darling, that is what I am going to doYou and newcomer Jodie Whittaker have such a wonderful chemistry in "Venus."Jodie is a delight and an accomplished young woman. She had such boldness and she was brave. And above all, she was beautifully prepared and we got on. Listen, if you got a good actress and a good part, those are the ingredients you need. I have been more than fortunate in my life with the parts I have had. Good parts make good actors . . .

With just your Oscar nominations -- you have had eight extremely good parts.Some people would love to have one of them.

I saw you on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" and you talked about the fact that Katharine Hepburn was your favorite leading lady. Didn't you have nicknames for each other?

She called me "Pig" or "'Henry" depending on her mood. And I called her "Old Nags."

You did "The Lion in Winter" together shortly after Spencer Tracy died.

The script came my way -- "The Lion in Winter" -- and I was thinking who on earth could possibly play Eleanor. And I could see when I was reading it, Kate all the way through. I had known Kate since the 1950s. She was very kind to me since I was a young actor.

When you were doing theater?

That's right. She was a great encouragement to me. She made of point of telling people to come to see me do things ... Spencer had died and I knew she was alone on Martha's Vineyard. I thought if she wants to do it or not, it might cheer her up. So I sent her the script and about 10 days or so later, the phone rang. It was Kate and she said "Do it before I die." So we did it before she died. Long before she died. She went on over another 30 years,

Is it true that Eric Porter was the actor who influenced you the most? I remember him on the classic BBC TV series, "The Forsyte Saga."

He was the leading man at the Old Vic when I was at the Theater Royal, Bristol [The Bristol Old Vic]. It was my first job. He played Volpone, King Lear and Uncle Vanya. I was his understudy. Here was this young man who was 29. He was only a few years older than I was, but he had fire in his belly.

He had these wonderful black eyes, tall and splendid and this amazing, rapid voice -- that diction! And he was absolutely ruthless [to other performers]. He'd say "she'll never make an actress." "'You're a female impersonator" -- he would say to some actresses. But he took a shine to me and he took a shine to my friend Edward Hardwicke.

Did you ever go on for Porter?

No, I didn't, but I nearly did. You reminded me of something quite terrifying. I was playing Cornwall [in 'King Lear']. And I had done my best to learn [the role of ] Lear, but I was a 23-year-old kid -- what did I know?I was in the dressing room with Edward and I was making up as Cornwall and in comes the manager and he said, "Mr. Porter isn't here and this is the half hour [before curtain]. I think you better come down [to Porter's dressing room]."I sat in his dressing room and I had a little red Temple Shakespeare [version of 'Lear']. I was sitting there putting on the robes, the whiskers and the hair and what was I going to do? Go on and read it? Imagine the storm scene with a child reading fa little book. I was petrified. Suddenly, the door opened. There had been a car crash, but he was fine and he came crashing in just in time. My life was saved.

It must have been amazing to be involved in the theater in England in the 1950s because so much was changing -- new playwrights, directors ...We were no longer at war. We were no longer being bombed. We were children during the war and suddenly we were young men with a little education and we decided to get on with her lives and enjoy it.

Maurice, your character in 'Venus," would have been one of those post-war actors.

He finds his reason to live is not only this girl, which is very important, but he loves acting. He knows he's going [to die]. So he does something he loves, which is to act and he earns a few schillings for it, and he takes a pretty girl to the seaside and buys her champagne and oysters and his life is rounded.

Wasn't the seaside scene the last you shot in the film?

It was.

It must have been freezing.

Oh baby, it was cold.

You made such a lovely acceptance speech when you received your honorary Oscar four years ago. Are you working on another one if you win?

My exceptions are low. It would be silly for me if I haven't learned from my experience [of losing] But it's fun, dear. It really is fun. I would be delighted to win. If not, I will be the record holder for the one who never won one.

Copyright © 2007, Los Angeles Times.

Posted by Hamish at 10:38 AM | Permalink

PR-Inside.com reports "O'Toole Blasts Hollywood Beauties":

Oscar nominee PETER O'TOOLE has criticised Hollywood actresses for their "vacant" personas, comparing them to "unlit lampposts".The veteran actor stars alongside British newcomer JODIE WHITTAKER in new movie VENUS, and has lavished praised on his young co-star.But O'Toole believes the majority of Tinseltown beauties are incapable of having any real depth of character - and would have struggled to fill Whittaker's shoes.He says, "You look into their eyes and there's no one at home."Oh God help us! It's like looking at an unlit lamppost."

In other news, Amelia sent me a link to Liz Smith's recent column in the New York Post where she mentions that Peter is staying in L.A. as the guest of Michael & Jane Eisner, and he did watch the SuperBowl last Sunday (he declined to name a favourite team if he had one). Thanks Amelia!

Posted by Hamish at 09:18 AM | Permalink

Lots of stuff to talk about today.

We have a report in the guestbook from user Doah that Peter is in L.A. - he was spotted attending the Oscar Luncheon today at the Beverly Hilton. The image above is from his arrival. You can see many more recent shots of O'Toole at various Venus-related functions recently on gettyimages.com (search "Peter O'Toole").

Peter is slated to appear on Nightline on Wednesday, Feb 7 and The Ellen Degeneres show on Feb 13... set your PVR! I'll try and get clips online if the appearances do occur. Since he's in LA doing press, he may do Leno as well... keep an eye out - if you see a listing for an appearance I haven't listed here, let me know!

Marie-Noëlle wrote to inform us that Becket has finally been given the star treatment on DVD release. There's even a comprehensive website! Thanks, Marie-Noëlle!

Newsweek has an article on Venus... User Jeff sent us along a PDF scan! Thanks, Jeff!

Posted by Hamish at 09:30 PM | Permalink

Amo was nice enough to inform me that the website for the UK release of "Venus" is online here. It looks great! Check it out.

Posted by Hamish at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Peter has not yet decided whether he will attend the Oscars yet due to his fragile health. "The romantic in me wants to go with my children and have a ball, but the realist thinks it wouldn't be a good idea." Oohh, we all want you to GO, Peter!!! (WENN)

Posted by Hamish at 02:30 PM | Permalink

The nominations for the 79th Academy Awards were announced this morning. As expected, Peter is nominated as Best Actor in a Leading Role for his Maurice in "Venus." He's up against Leo Dicaprio, Ryan Gosling, Will Smith and Forest Whitaker.

When pressed about his Oscar potential at the London premiere for 'Venus' last night, O'Toole was his usual self, responding, "Are nominations tomorrow? I better start getting excited. A nomination wouldn't mean a sausage, though. If I won the fucker, great. If I don't, then tant pis [too bad]. I shan't lurch around in agony and despair." [London Evening Standard]

The Oscar telecast begins 8pm EST, February 25th.

Last of the Hellraisers (London Evening Standard)

Peter O'Toole shuffles into a suite at The Connaught, a grey but immaculate ghost in raffish attire, the 6ft 3in frame somewhat stooped now he's 74, his blue eyes watery but still startling.

"I'm whirligigging," mutters the veteran actor, drinker and icon of ruination. "Film publicity! My body left New York yesterday but my brain and my soul are still scraping the sh** of Nova Scotia off their heels." He gives a great, hacking laugh.

The film that has him haring back and forth across the Atlantic is Venus, which had its premiere last night in Chelsea.

It is a disconcerting but beguiling London-set study of the relationship between a dying actor, Maurice, and newcomer Jodie Whittaker's chavvy, exploiting Jessie.

Written by Hanif Kureishi and directed by Roger Michell, this tender, funny examination of elderly, thwarted sexual desire provides O'Toole with his first leading film role for 24 years.

The most charismatic classical actor of a generation that included the Richards Harris and Burton, Alan Bates and Albert Finney, O'Toole became a matinee idol in 1962 in Lawrence of Arabia, which won him the first of seven inconclusive Oscar nominations (a cruel record he shares with Burton).

But since the late Seventies, when he lost most of his digestive tract to pancreatitis exacerbated by drinking and when his 19-year marriage to Sian Phillips finally broke up, he's mostly been hammy in cameos, apart from honourable exceptions such as My Favourite Year and The Last Emperor.

Venus is a return to form which may, when the nominations are announced later today, put O'Toole in the running to win a Best Actor statuette to go with the honorary Oscar he was awarded in 2003.

"I loved the notion of a dirty old man and a sluttish young woman having a romance," he says, in the voice that critic David Thomson memorably described as "a rapier used to stir cream", "and Hanif and Roger have produced an examination of those sort of casual bloody platitudes that are flung out about oldies and youngies, that touches on age, youth, beauty - all those fine things."

He sounds like he's talking from experience. "Anarchic, arbitrary sexual urges overwhelm every man and woman on this bloody earth, and you have to master them or, if you are very lucky, find an outlet for them," he twinkles.

Maurice is impotent but O'Toole, apparently, is not. "In New York a woman on a chat show asked if I could imagine myself with a 20-year-old girl. I said, I hope I could do more than imagine," he adds wickedly. "Does that answer the question?"

He wasn't looking for a big role. "I really didn't want the burden of a leading part on me again - the hours, the concentration needed to be at concert pitch at five f***ing thirty in the morning is asking a lot - and didn't expect one at my age.

But here it was, not only a leading role for a septuagenarian but a bloody good part in a bloody good script. God, what more could I hope for?"

There were other pleasures. O'Toole is lavish in his praise of Whittaker, of co-star Leslie Phillips and of Vanessa Redgrave, who contributes a moving cameo as Maurice's estranged wife: "So professional and beautifully prepared, Vanessa. Although she could scare the life out of anyone, including me."

I suggest there must have been sly delight, too, in playing a character so close to himself.

Maurice is a drinker and a philanderer, a wreck of his former handsome self whose regular scanning of the obituary columns for dead contemporaries raises the spectre of the fellow hellraisers and Rada contemporaries whom O'Toole inexplicably outlived.

On their first date, Maurice and Jessie walk out of the Royal Court, a theatre O'Toole railed against last year, and on their second he quotes Macbeth, surely a reference to O'Toole's infamous stab at the Scottish play in 1980.

It almost feels like he's bidding farewell to his own career.

This suggestion provokes a sigh that sounds like a death rattle. "Maurice and I do the same job so there is a superficial similarity," he says, "but actors - proper actors, of whom there are few - do not rely on 'experience'. We draw on our well of emotion.

"And this film is not a valediction. When we revived Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell [in which he masterfully played his friend, the titular alcoholic journalist] at the Old Vic in 1999, I could tell on the first night it was going extremely well, and when I took my bow, I was thinking, over and over again, it is now time to say goodbye to the theatre.

"You are never, ever going to get another part which requires such energy and discipline and diction and movement, all the things you used to be good at, and you will not be any good at any more.

"I have no wish to shuffle on as butlers. But I'll carry on doing my films and telly things. I like to work. I'll go on. I'm available."

Venus did bring intimations of mortality, though. On a low-budget £3 million shoot involving lots of London exteriors, whip-thin O'Toole was "permanently bloody freezing", so the producers supplied him with a pup tent with a heater to which he could retire between takes.

Then, on Boxing Day, O'Toole broke his hip. This disgusts him as he claims to have got fit for the first time in his life last year.

"I had the usual thing, doctors and stethoscopes and finger-wagging and so forth, so I signed on at Lord's and trained for six months with professional cricketers, doing the same regime they did," he says.

"So I was fit over Christmas. Normally, waking up on Boxing Day is a gruesome and a horrible time, I'm nasty and I cough, and I move very, very carefully and awfully and horribly towards the bathroom.

But this Boxing Day I jumped out of bed quite cheerfully and tripped over a pair of f***ing shoes and bust my hip! So now I've got a tin one, but I was up and walking again within 48 hours."

He still likes a drink - the pancreatitis "just slowed me down a bit, that's all" - but has finally given up smoking after 60 years. Throughout our talk he pats his pockets, looking for absent fags.

"If I ever get the word that I'm on the way out, the first thing I shall do is light up again," he grimaces. But there's still time for an Oscar. Does he feel cheated at never having won?

"Not cheated, no," he says. "It's a fivehorse race, and the whole history of the Academy Awards is rooted in the culture of Los Angeles, and I've never lived there, unlike my friend Michael Caine, who did win one. And of course I'm desirous of winning.

"To be considered is okay, but it's not enough: it's winning the bloody thing that matters. So if I win the bugger, great. If I don't, then tant pis. I shan't lurch around in agony and despair."

Instead, he'll be spending time with his children - daughters Kate and Pat from his marriage to Sian Phillips and son Lorcan (that's Lawrence in Gaelic) from a brief relationship with model Karen Brown - reading, and watching films, theatre ("on the very rare occasion that it's any bloody good") and sport.

But, looking back, there's little that he'd do differently. "I'm not a French chanteuse," he snorts. "There are things that are regrettable, but to hold a regret? To pick a scab off an old wound? No thank you."

This includes the demon drink. "I do not regret one drop. What is never understood about us so-called hellraisers is that booze for us was simply a fuel for other things."

He mentions the time he went for a drink in Paris and woke up in Corsica; the time John Huston took him hunting, inebriated, in their night clothes in Ireland, and fell off his horse and broke his arm; the wheelbarrow races he and Jeffrey Bernard had through crowded Covent Garden.

"Our idea of Roman gladiatorial sport. That's what it's all about, baby."

This surely, is the point of O'Toole. Not that he's a ruin, but that he's a magnificent one. If Venus, which celebrates the life force and a refusal to go gentle into that good night, proves to be the cap on his career, it will be a fitting one.

---
Other stories:

CBS News Online: Will Peter O'Toole Finally Win an Oscar?

Posted by Hamish at 09:07 AM | Permalink

Cheerful Rebel

Peter O'Toole emerged during Hollywood's glittering golden age - acting, and partying wildly, alongside legends Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Now, at 74, his performance as a lecherous old actor in Venus has placed him among the favourites to win the Oscar he has been denied seven times.

Gaby Wood Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer

Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.

The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.

Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')

You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.

His face lights up at the mention of What's New, Pussycat?, a madcap caper which was Woody Allen's first script and (depending on your sense of humour) possibly O'Toole's most appealing role. He is as proud of his comic roles as he is of his epic, tormented heroes. 'There's a line I had to say in a film once,' he grins: '"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Which had been said by Edmund Kean. And it is, it's bloody difficult to get it right. I've never known a good actor who couldn't play comedy, and I've never known any actor who found it easy.'

He speaks in a purring, plummy voice, his diction elegantly clear yet fluid enough to suggest the years of nocturnal slurring to which it must have been subjected. He is dapper yet mischievous, a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his white shirt, the electric white wisps of his hair fighting the smoothness of their renowned style. He is charming, but not shy of correcting you with a glowering, sidelong look, or of swearing his heart out to punctuate a point. When he laughs, it is a hoarse, chesty laugh from which you imagine he might not mind if he didn't recover: however frail he says he feels, he approaches every tale with aplomb.

There is something mysterious about O'Toole: from this vantage point, he seems to have been an old-school successor to Gielgud or Olivier, yet when he first came on the scene he was lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism. I ask him whether, when he was at the Bristol Old Vic or at the Royal Court in the 1950s, he was aiming to shatter a tradition or defend one. The response comes slowly, deliberately, accompanied by dramatically hooded eyes.

'One of the enduring myths of our time,' says O'Toole, 'is the Fucking Royal Court. George Devine was a third-rate mummer who couldn't act for toffee. He was a nice old stick, George, but surrounded by these bloody gruesome young amateurs. I found it deeply overrated, but the myth continues. The revivals of Look Back in Anger have been execrated. Well, it was never very good. I went to see it - dreary little production, drearily done. It's all PR. A PR put out a flyer and referred to John Osborne as an "angry young man". It was one of those phrases, everybody used it - I was called an "angry young actor". God!'

Weren't you a rebel? 'I had a rebellious nature, of course. But I wasn't particularly angry about anything. I was quite cheerful!'

O'Toole's first London success was The Long and the Short and the Tall, a Second World War play put on at the Royal Court in 1959 (the part had been written for Albert Finney, a classmate of his at Rada, but Finney developed appendicitis during rehearsals). The all-male cast made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. It was partly their carousing offstage behaviour, and partly the fact that most of these new young actors had come from the provinces (they were the unwealthy beneficiaries of Clement Attlee's postwar reforms), that made them right for the kitchen-sink age.

Yet O'Toole was always a traditional actor - the fact that he's listed alongside Finney, who kept his northern accent, Richard Burton, always inalienably Welsh, the Irishman Richard Harris and the famously cockney Michael Caine, is perhaps an accident of timing more than a true description of his impact. O'Toole was brought up in wartime Leeds with an Irish bookie father ('I'm not working-class,' the self-described 'slum Mick' once said, 'I come from the criminal classes.'); but he was not on stage to flaunt his lower-class roots, and on film he lived up to the aristocracy of his breathtaking looks.

The looks themselves, though, were a kind of mask: in 1960, after a stunning few years at the Bristol Old Vic and that run in London, O'Toole was advised by certain film-makers to fix his nose (Joseph Losey was against it, Nicholas Ray was in favour). The nose, which was then long and - O'Toole claimed - wonky as a result of a rugby game during National Service in the Navy, was surgically straightened in time for a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. ('I thought, well, fuck it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy little heap,' he later said.) It was this picture that David Lean saw when he was casting Lawrence of Arabia

There were those who said the pretty boy we have come to know was a sell-out compared to the rugged man of the stage. But he went on to give some historic performances in the theatre - as Shylock at Stratford that same year, as Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963, in Waiting for Godot in Dublin in 1970 (Beckett once told him he thought no decent film could be made with dialogue - it had all been downhill since the silent era). And he more than made up for the prettiness with his behaviour: there was an undercurrent of (as was said of his character, TE Lawrence) 'insubordination', a choice of brilliant, 'difficult' men as mentors, and a dashing flair for being banned from every drinking establishment he set his sights on.

Michael Caine was O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall; considering he never went on stage, Caine later said, it was incredible he was so exhausted at the end of the run, but waiting anxiously in the wings every night as O'Toole swung in at the very last minute was enough to give any man a coronary. Once, the pair went out drinking and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole, 'What fucking day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.

'I do not regret one drop,' O'Toole now says of his long nights, most famously spent with Richards Harris and Burton. 'We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public!'

I wasn't wondering about the regrets so much as the pleasures, I explain, and urge him to recall particular nights. 'Oh, well there were so many, darling, so bloody many,' he replies, with a look of contented defeat. He claims he really did once go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica.

What percentage of his life, would he say, has he woken up in places he didn't recognise? 'Oh,' O'Toole says, shaking his head at the incalculable number, 'the one to ask was Harris. He literally would say to Elizabeth, his third wife: I'm just going down to the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes. And a month later he didn't know where he'd been. But don't forget, we weren't morose. It was just a fuel, it was in addition to what we were doing, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? It was a fuel for various adventures ...'

They would play snooker or watch rugby together; sometimes, in a jazz joint, O'Toole would find Burton draped over the bass player, beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to a picked out iambic accompaniment. Burton, he says, was 'bursting with life'. One of O'Toole's party pieces was climbing - climbing the wall of Lloyd's bank in Covent Garden, for instance, in the early hours, just for fun. Walls people now climb with ropes, he adds, they used to scale 'in our Sunday shoes'. Did they ever think they'd die? I ask. 'No,' he says with a smile, 'we enjoyed the climb.'

Meanwhile, he had a family in Hampstead. The actress Sian Phillips, to whom he was married for 20 years, has written of their relationship in terms that almost make it rival that of Burton and Taylor. O'Toole, a 'dangerous, disruptive human being' in her description, would disappear for days, or pick fights that quickly escalated to shattered glass. But, as with many of his onscreen incarnations, she suggested, he was so charismatic all was routinely forgiven. (The alcoholic matinee idol he plays in My Favourite Year has a line O'Toole delivers inimitably. Wandering into the wrong loo, he is reprimanded by a stern old woman. 'This is for ladies only!' she grumbles, to which he replies, unzipping his fly: 'So is this, Ma'am, but every now and again I have to run a little water through it.') In the end, it was Phillips who had an affair and left. They have two daughters, Kate O'Toole - named after Katharine Hepburn and now an actress herself - and Pat. O'Toole has a 23-year-old son, Lorcan, from a later relationship with an American model called Karen Brown (Lorcan is Lawrence in Gaelic). As a result of a very public custody battle some years ago, Lorcan primarily grew up with his father, and now he is an actor.

About many of his friends and acquaintances, O'Toole is discreet to the point of looking injured at the mention of their name. 'I don't want to be rude - if you don't mind,' he says when Elizabeth Taylor comes up in conversation. But assuming he's happy to offend the dead, I ask him about an incident in which he reportedly roughed up Kenneth Tynan, this newspaper's celebrated theatre critic. I imagine this to be just another entertaining brawl, a mythical, whisky-fuelled fistfight, but O'Toole seems terribly saddened by the memory.

'Oh, all right, since it's come up ...' he says, and tells the story. It was the summer of 1974. He was making a film in Paris with the noir master Otto Preminger, about a kidnap by Palestinian terrorists. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: 'To Peter O'Toole, the so-called Irishman ... we have planted a bomb in the building.' It was signed by the IRA, and the terrified crew cleared out. 'This was the height of the bombings,' O'Toole says now, 'Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.'

Eventually, word was sent that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag - by Tynan. O'Toole couldn't believe it; he marched off to find him. 'He was sitting in the room, looking un-Ken-like, smoking cigarettes over and over again. He said: "But I thought you'd see through it!" And' - a look of sweet regret comes over O'Toole's face - 'I'm afraid I punched him. Very hard.'

That was the last time they spoke, an awful result, since Tynan had been such a champion of O'Toole, whom he called an 'insomniac Celtic dynamo'. 'You'll find there's a bit cut out of Ken's diaries because I wouldn't tell the story,' O'Toole explains. 'Well, I didn't want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls ... I may have done. And so that was the end.'

Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O'Toole for Playboy magazine, and they'd had this wonderful exchange:

Tynan: 'Are you afraid of dying?'

O'Toole: 'Petrified.'

Tynan: 'Why?'

O'Toole: 'Because there's no future in it.'

Tynan: 'When did you last think you were about to die?'

O'Toole: 'About four o'clock this morning.'

O'Toole has said goodbye to certain things he loves - the drinking, of course, is dramatically reduced, and he no longer plays cricket, a game to which he has been devoted all his life, and which he also used to coach. He doesn't mind - he went out in style. His favourite cricket field is in Devon, a place near Dartmoor called Lustleigh, and that was where he batted for the last time, several years ago. 'The grounds are behind a church - they're beautiful - and there's a river. The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river. I knew I was finished - I could hardly see the bloody ball - but I went bang! And the ball went boom, into the river, in my favourite little cricket field, and I said: Pedro, get out now. And I did.'

All this has left time for other pursuits, however. One thing the bad-boy persona always veiled was a scholarly man of letters. Loitering With Intent, O'Toole's autobiography, of which he has published two volumes, is richly written and Irishly eloquent. He is working on a third volume now, and has a theory about Shakespeare's sonnets he may yet put to paper.

Reminiscing about his mentor, the renegade actor-film-maker Kenneth Griffith who died just six months ago, O'Toole tells me about an episode that cemented their friendship. In the mid-1950s, Griffith and O'Toole shared a dressing room in Manchester with George Formby. Formby, they found, kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys, and they asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find it very difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick up another ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite - whenever anything would go wrong, they'd say: 'pick up another ukulele!' and roar with laughter, as if that were the solution to every problem in life. Even now, wheezing with pleasure in the telling, O'Toole gives the impression that his survival instinct is so strong he won't ever really disappear; he'll just shift into another key.

--

Vintage O'Toole
by Laura Emerick (Chicago Sun Times)

Behold "Venus," a meditation on longing and desire; youth and beauty; death ... and death. In what feels like his valedictory, Peter O'Toole, that still mellifluous but physically ravaged Lion in Winter, gives a tour de force that summons the glorious ghosts of performances past.

As an elderly thespian enjoying one last lark before the the final curtain descends, O'Toole reminds us of his own real-life dramatic triumphs: "Becket," "Lion in Winter," and of course, "Lawrence of Arabia." In "Venus," which trades on themes from "Pygmalion" and Lolita, he's the septuagenarian Maurice, who becomes infatuated with the 19-year-old grandniece of his equally doddering comrade Ian (British veteran Leslie Phillips). Maurice views the sullen, untutored yet somehow beguiling Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) as his last chance of recapturing his lost youth.

British icons Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths ("The History Boys") also appear in supporting roles, with Redgrave as Maurice's forgiving ex-wife Valerie and Griffiths as a fellow grumpy old thesp. Both are fabulous, as is Whittaker in her debut.

But "Venus" orbits around the splendor that is Peter O'Toole. Nominated seven times for the Oscar but never victorious, O'Toole deserves to take home the gold for "Venus." When he received an honorary Oscar in 2003, he almost refused it, claiming he'd like a chance to win "the lovely bugger outright." So far this season, O'Toole has picked up Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and an eighth Oscar nod seems to be a lock. But will the Academy please give him his just reward -- before he goes to his own just reward?

Directed by Roger Michell ("Notting Hill") and written by Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), "Venus" might repel some viewers wi