Peter O’Toole with Omar Sharif in the film “Lawrence of Arabia.”
Peter O'Toole | 1932-2013
Peter O'Toole | 1932-2013
Charismatic Star of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’
By BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE
Peter O’Toole, whose performance in the film “Lawrence of Arabia” put
him on the road to becoming one of his generation’s most acclaimed
actors, died Saturday at 81.
Peter O’Toole, Star of ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ Is Dead at 81
Peter O’Toole, an Irish bookmaker’s son with a hell-raising streak whose
magnetic performance in the 1962 epic film “Lawrence of Arabia” earned
him overnight fame and put him on the road to becoming one of his
generation’s most accomplished and charismatic actors, died on Saturday
in London. He was 81.
His daughter Kate O’Toole said in a statement that he had been ill for some time.
A blond, blue-eyed six-footer, Mr. O’Toole had the dashing good looks and high spirits befitting a leading man, — and he did not disappoint in “Lawrence,”
David Lean’s wide-screen, almost-four-hour homage to T. E. Lawrence,
the daring British soldier and adventurer who led an Arab rebellion
against the Turks in the Middle East in World War I.
The performance brought Mr. O’Toole the first of eight Academy Award
nominations, a flood of film offers and a string of artistic successes
in the ’60s and early ’70s. In the theater — he was a classically
trained actor — he played an anguished, angular tramp in Beckett’s
“Waiting for Godot” and a memorably battered title character in
Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya.” In film, he twice played a robust King Henry
II: first opposite Richard Burton in “Becket,” (1964), then with
Katharine Hepburn as his queen in “The Lion in Winter” (1968). Both
earned Oscar nominations for Best Actor, as did his repressed, decaying
schoolmaster in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” in 1970 and the crazed 14th Earl of
Gurney in “The Ruling Class” in 1973.
Less successful was his Don Quixote in “Man of La Mancha,” Arthur
Hiller’s 1972 adaptation of the Broadway musical, but it emphasized that
his specialty was increasingly becoming the outsider or misfit: dreamy,
romantic, turbulent, damaged, or even mad, but usually larger than
life.
Mr. O’Toole threw himself wholeheartedly into what he called “bravura
acting,” courting and sometimes deserving the accusation that he became
over-theatrical, mannered, even hammy. His lanky, loose-jointed build;
his eyes; his long, lantern-jawed face; his oddly languorous sexual
charm; and the eccentric loops and whoops of his voice tended to
reinforce the impression of power and extravagance.
Burton called him “the most original actor to come out of Britain since
the war,” with “something odd, mystical and deeply disturbing” in his
work.
Some critics called him the next Laurence Olivier. As a young actor, Mr.
O’Toole displayed an authority that the critic Kenneth Tynan said “may
presage greatness.” In 1958, the director Peter Hall called Mr.
O’Toole’s Hamlet in a London production “electrifying” and “unendurably
exciting” — a display of “animal magnetism and danger which proclaimed
the real thing.”
He showed those strengths somewhat erratically, however; for all his
accolades and his box-office success, there was a lingering note of
unfulfilled promise in Mr. O’Toole.
It was no surprise when Olivier chose Mr. O’Toole to inaugurate
Britain’s National Theater Company in 1963 with a reprise of his Hamlet.
But the first night left most critics unmoved and unexcited and the
actor himself lamenting “the most humbling, humiliating experience of my
life.”
“As it went on,” he said, “I suddenly knew it wasn’t going to be any good.”
A production in 1965 of David Mercer’s “Ride a Cock Horse,” in which he
played an adulterous alcoholic, was booed at its London opening.
In the movies, he continued to be a marquee name, though he drew only
mixed reviews for a subsequent run of performances: as the cowardly
naval officer seeking redemption in “Lord Jim,” Richard Brooks’s 1965
adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel; as a playboy in “What’s New,
Pussycat?,” a 1965 comedy with Peter Sellers that was written by a young
Woody Allen; and as the Three Angels in “The Bible: In the Beginning,”
John Huston’s 1966 recreation of Genesis. And his sadistic Nazi general
in Anatole Litvak’s “Night of the Generals” (1967) was panned outright.
His carousing became legend, particularly in the 1970s. As he himself
said, he had long been “happy to grasp the hand of misfortune,
dissipation, riotous living and violence,” counting Burton, Richard
Harris, Robert Shaw, Francis Bacon, Trevor Howard, Laurence Harvey and
Peter Finch among his drinking companions. He lost much of his
“Lawrence” earnings in two nights with Omar Sharif at casinos in Beirut
and Casablanca.
Though he won many lesser awards during his career, triumph at the
Academy Awards eluded him, perhaps in part because he had made no secret
of his dislike of Hollywood and naturalistic acting, which he
considered drab. He was nothing if not ambitious, but success would come
on his own terms, not the movie industry’s. He had made that plain at
18, when an acting career was already in his mind. In his notebook he
made a promise to himself: “I will not be a common man. I will stir the
smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my
soul to opportunity.”
Peter Seamus (some sources say Seamus Peter) O’Toole was born on Aug. 2,
1932, in the Connemara region of the West of Ireland, the son of
Constance, a Scotswoman who had been a nurse, and Patrick, an itinerant
Irish bookmaker whose dandified dress and manner earned him the
nicknames Spats and Captain Pat.
Mr. O’Toole liked to tell interviewers that his background was “not
working class but criminal class.” The father was left with a bad right
hand after all its knuckles were systematically broken, presumably by
creditors.
When Peter was a baby, the family moved to England and settled in a tiny
house on a black-cobbled street in an impoverished section of
industrial Leeds with a “reek of slag and soot and waste,” as he
described it in an autobiography.
Peter was an altar boy at the local Roman Catholic church and displayed a
gift for creative writing, but he left school at 13 and became a
warehouseman, a messenger, a copy boy, a photographer’s assistant and,
eventually, a reporter for The Yorkshire Evening News. A poor journalist
by his own admission, he was fired by the editor with the words, “Try
something else, be an actor, do anything.”
It was a constructive nudge. (He had already tried his hand at amateur
dramatics.) After an obscure debut as a rum-swigging seafarer in a
melodrama called “Aloma of the South Seas,” Leeds’s well-regarded Civic
Theater cast him in the lead role of Bazarov in an adaptation of
Turgenev’s “Fathers and Sons.”
Though military service intervened, his aspirations came to fruition
quickly. At 20 and almost penniless, he went to Stratford to see Michael
Redgrave as King Lear.
By his own account, he spent the night in a field filled with hay and
manure, hitchhiked to London and ventured into the lobby of the Royal
Academy of Dramatic Art. There he chanced to fall into conversation with
the principal, Sir Kenneth Barnes, who encouraged him to apply for an
audition. He did, and received a full scholarship. Albert Finney, Alan
Bates and Brian Bedford were among his fellow students.
After graduating in 1955 he was invited to join one of Britain’s premier
repertory companies, the Bristol Old Vic. He performed with the troupe
for three and a half years, and it was there that his Hamlet so
impressed Mr. Hall. It brought Mr. O’Toole, at 27, national attention,
and Mr. Hall induced him to join his newly founded Royal Shakespeare
Company. In Stratford his Petruchio in “The Taming of the Shrew” and
Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” won critical acclaim and the
admiration of Mr. Lean, who was casting his screen biography of
Lawrence.
At six feet two, Mr. O’Toole was not an obvious choice for the role of a
five-foot-four scholar-soldier, and the producer, Sam Spiegel, had
found him bumptious in a meeting. But after Marlon Brando turned down
the role, Lean lobbied for Mr. O’Toole and won the day.
His casting led to a mesmeric yet meticulous performance that brought
world renown and an Oscar nomination to an actor whose only notable
screen appearance to date had been as a priggish young officer in “The
Day They Robbed the Bank of England” in 1960.
Whatever his later reputation as a roisterer, Mr. O’Toole was
conscientious when it came to preparing for a role. In the two-odd years
it took to shoot “Lawrence,” he read all he could about the man,
studied Bedouin culture, lived in a Bedouin tent, taught himself the
essentials of Arabic and learned to ride a camel. His acting method, he
wrote in his autobiography, was a process that blended “magic” with
“sweat,” a matter of allowing a text to flow into his mind and body
until he fully inhabited the character — “that simple, that difficult.”
Mr. O’Toole admitted to being “a very physical actor.”
“I use everything — toes, teeth, ears, everything,” he said.
After his triumphs of the 1960s and early ’70s, he entered his most
troubled period. His earlier binges had led to arrests for unruly
behavior; now they caused memory loss and debilitating hangovers. In
1975, he developed pancreatitis and had part of his intestines removed.
Then his much-loved father died, and Sian Phillips, whom Mr. O’Toole had
married in 1959, left him for another man, explaining later that her
relationship with an egoistic star had become too tempestuous and “too
unequal.” Divorce followed in 1979.
Though Mr. O’Toole said he essentially gave up alcohol in 1975, his
career continued to sputter. The universally panned 1979 film
“Caligula,” in which he played the Emperor Tiberius, was followed in
1980 by one of the most derided theatrical performances of modern times:
a Macbeth at the Old Vic who attempted to exit through a wall of the
dark set on the first night and, according to The Guardian, delivered
every line “in a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of
deaf Eskimos.”
Yet there was evidence of recovery, too. The ABC mini-series “Masada,”
with Mr. O’Toole as a Roman general resisting freedom fighters in Judea,
brought him an Emmy nomination in 1981. He also impressed with a
galvanically garrulous Jack Tanner in Shaw’s “Man and Superman” in the
West End in 1982.
The flamboyant charm of the autocratic movie director he played in the
film “The Stunt Man” brought him a sixth Oscar nomination in 1981, and
his playing of Alan Swann, the swashbuckling, Errol Flynn-like thespian
of “My Favorite Year,” a seventh in 1983.
The 1980s also brought him unwanted publicity in the form of a long
court battle with his second wife, Karen Brown, an American actress with
whom he had a son, Lorcan, in 1983. The eventual judgment allowed Mr.
O’Toole, already the father of two daughters by Ms. Phillips, to look
after the boy while he went to school in England and his mother to have
custody during vacations.
Partly as a result, Mr. O’Toole’s professional engagements became fewer.
In 1987 his restrained performance as the court tutor in Bernardo
Bertolucci’s “Last Emperor” was widely called the strongest in a strong
movie. But onstage his Professor Higgins in Shaw’s “Pygmalion” proved
more controversial. In 1984, many London critics were admiring; The
Observer described him in the role as “monstrous, eccentric, secretive,
arrogant, asexual, childlike, cross and vain”; but in 1987, the New York
critics were less impressed, and he was not nominated for a Tony Award.
Mr. O’Toole once wryly admitted that he continued to accept roles in
inferior films, like “King Ralph,” because “it’s what I do for a living
and, besides, I’ve got bookies to keep.” But in the 1990s he displayed
his old strengths again and even discovered fresh ones.
He gave a hilarious performance as the erratic Lord Emsworth in a
television adaptation of P. G. Wodehouse’s “Heavy Weather” in 1996 and a
touching one as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the film “Fairytale — A True
Story” in 1997. Most striking was his humorous yet poignant playing of
an old Soho drinking-buddy in Keith Waterhouse’s biographical play,
“Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell,” in 1989, ’91 and ’99. He also reprised the
role in a 1999 television movie.
In 2003, he played President Paul von Hindenburg of Germany in the
CBS-TV mini-series “Hitler: The Rise of Evil,” and in 2004 he was Priam,
father of the doomed Hector, in Wolfgang Peterson’s screen epic,
“Troy.”
“I’m a professional,” he said in one interview, “and I’ll do anything — a
poetry reading, television, cinema, anything that allows me to act.”
Mr. O’Toole earned his eighth Best Actor nomination for “Venus” (2006),
in which he was a lecherous old actor relegated to playing feebleminded
royals or men on their deathbeds.
Mr. O’Toole’s personal life, meanwhile, calmed. Though he made regular
trips to Ireland, and occasional ones to the racecourse, he came to
prefer a settled, reclusive life in his North London house. He published
the first two volumes of a projected three-volume autobiography,
“Loitering With Intent,” in 1993 (subtitled “The Child”) and 1997 (“The
Apprentice”), impressing reviewers with the verve with which he evoked
his early years as well as disorienting them with the overblown prose
and chronological jumps of what he himself described as “a nonfictional
novel.” Apart from his three children — Kate, Pat and Lorcan, who
survive him — cricket was Mr. O’Toole’s most lasting love. Indeed, he
took a diploma as a professional coach when he was 60, the better to
instruct his son and train a London boys’ team. He is also survived by a
sister, Patricia Coombs.
But in 1999 he told an interviewer that his only exercise was now
“walking behind the coffins of my friends who took exercise.” His
once-stormy love life appeared to be over, too. “George Eliot is my only
steady girlfriend,” he said. “We go to bed together every night.”
Yet the man Johnny Carson described as perhaps his most difficult guest
ever was not wholly changed. Mr. O’Toole could be prickly, especially
when interviewers asked if he had squandered his talents, or when pet
dislikes came up. These included what he called “di-rect-ors,” who he
felt had gained too much power over actors; Britain’s National Theater,
which he called a “Reich bunker”; and Broadway, which he said was run by
“pigs.”
In his later years, he cut not only a raffish figure, continuing to wear
green socks in honor of his Irish ancestry and smoking unfiltered
Gauloises from a long cigarette holder, but also a gaunt, somewhat
intimidating one, too.
Yet his friends knew him as a kindly, generous, responsive man. He
claimed that off the stage he sometimes wept with such intensity “that
the tears fly out horizontally.” And in the theater his emotional depth
was apparent when he played the alcoholic journalist and gambler Jeffrey
Bernard. The third and last time he took the role, many felt an
essentially comic performance had darkened, deepened and grown in
pathos. It was as if Mr. O’Toole were meditating on past loss and waste —
as if he were offering a rueful elegy to himself.
In 2000, he was honored with the Outstanding Achievement citation at the
Laurence Olivier Awards in London. In 2003, one nomination away from
setting a record among actors for the most Oscar nominations without
winning — he received an honorary one for lifetime achievement.
At first reluctant to accept, fearing it would somehow signal the end of
his career, Mr. O’Toole eventually agreed to agreed to the honor as
well earned and started his acceptance speech
by saying, not without a note of triumph: “Always a bridesmaid, never a
bride — my foot. I have my very own Oscar now to be with me til death
us do part.”
COPY http://international.nytimes.com/
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