He has been nominated for an Oscar seven times without actually winning one but, at 70, Peter O'Toole is still in the game, writes Michael Dwyer
When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences informed Peter O'Toole in January that he had been chosen as the sole recipient of an honorary Oscar this year, the 70-year-old Irish actor responded with characteristic candour. He was "enchanted", he said, but swiftly added that as he is "still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright, would the Academy please defer the honour until I am 80?"
The president of the Academy, Frank Pierson challenged O'Toole's apparent perception of the honorary award as a consolation prize for people who had never won an Oscar and were at the end of their careers.
"The board unanimously and enthusiastically voted you the honorary award because you've earned and deserved it," Pierson wrote. "As to being 'in the game', nobody ever thought you were out of it. The award is for achievement and contribution to the art of the motion picture, not for retirement."
He cited Henry Fonda and Paul Newman as examples of actors who won competitive Oscars after receiving honorary awards from the Academy.
Having made his point, O'Toole relented and is now set to turn up at the Oscar ceremony in Hollywood tomorrow night to accept his honorary award. All the publicity generated by his initial snubbing of the award will inevitably focus greater attention on the content of O'Toole's acceptance speech. No stranger to controversy throughout his colourful and turbulent personal and professional life, O'Toole will relish the attention. It has always been thus.
In 1984, at the ceremony to mark the reopening of the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin, O'Toole was invited to recite a two-minute piece of his choosing, and he proceeded to read Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal in its entirety.
It is a measure of O'Toole's resilience that he was entirely unperturbed by the shouts of "boring" and "skip two pages" from the audience, most of whom had fled for the bars before O'Toole finished his monologue 17 minutes later. RTÉ pulled the plug on the live transmission of the show and went to an ad break.
"I quite enjoyed it all," he said with a hearty laugh when I interviewed him a few years later. "I don't think that thing has ever been read without causing a stir. Poor Swift!"
O'Toole was born in Connemara on August 2nd, 1932, the son of a bookmaker and his Scottish wife who had met at the 1929 Epsom Derby. The family moved regularly before settling in Leeds. Their son, who had been baptised Seamus Peader Padraig O'Toole, quit school when he was 14 and found work as a copy boy at the Yorkshire Evening Post, graduating to cover cricket, soccer, films and theatre during his four years with the paper.
His blatant disregard for conformism, inherited from his father, allied to his mischievous sense of humour, became apparent during his two years' national service as a signalman with the Royal Navy. He referred to the deck as the floor, the portholes as windows, the funnels as chimneys. He was arrested several times, for taking an extra ration of rum "because it was a cold day", or for being insubordinate.
At the end of his naval service in 1952, O'Toole resumed his interest in acting, which had started with some amateur appearances in his teens, and he talked his way into an interview at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), was accepted and given a scholarship to cover his fees and board. His fellow students included Richard Harris, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Ronald Fraser and Roy Kinnear.
He went directly from RADA to join the Bristol Old Vic repertory company, demonstrating his energy and range in 73 roles over the course of three years. It was there that he first acted in Waiting For Godot, to which he was to return often, notably in the 1970 Abbey production in Dublin. Shortly after his 1957 triumph in Hamlet, he worked on a touring show with Sian Phillips, a divorced Welsh actress, whom he married in a Dublin registry office. They had two daughters, Kate and Pat.
O'Toole had made his mark in London's West End and was gaining a foothold in movies when director David Lean spotted him in the 1960 film, The Day They Robbed The Bank of England, and catapulted him to international stardom when he cast him in the title role of Lawrence of Arabia.
Shooting was scheduled for five months and eventually lasted for two years, but O'Toole's patience paid off when Lean's magnificent epic finally opened to rave reviews and huge commercial success, earning the handsome blond, blue-eyed O'Toole his first Oscar nomination for his intense and sensitive portrayal of its conflicted hero.
Offers of work poured in, and he chose to play Henry II twice in four years - opposite Richard Burton in Becket, and with Katharine Hepburn in The Lion in Winter, which was shot in Ireland and France. O'Toole received Oscar nominations for both films. However, the producers of The Lion in Winter deducted over $200,000 from his fees, claiming that the actor's behaviour during production "reflected adversely" on the film.
In an affidavit, they alleged that O'Toole "became exceedingly drunk, used obscene language, engaged in a fight, and was evicted by the hotel management". When the case was heard before Manhattan Supreme Court in 1972, O'Toole's lawyer stated that his client's professional conduct before the cameras was what counted and that it had contributed to the film's success. O'Toole won the case, and the producers were ordered to pay him the outstanding fees.
The next 30 years of O'Toole's life were marked by extreme highs and lows. In 1973 he underwent major abdominal surgery, which nearly killed him. In the same year his father died, his marriage broke up and his film career went into decline.
He had collected two further Oscar nominations - as the gentle schoolmaster in the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), and as the messianic aristocrat at the heart of The Ruling Class (1972) - but he began to choose his roles most unwisely, more likely drawn by the salary than the scripts of the humdrum thrillers, Rosebud and Power Play; the tedious musical, Man of La Mancha (as Don Quixote), and even Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's porno movie, Caligula, in which a bemused O'Toole and John Gielgud were the only cast members not to disrobe.
In 1980 O'Toole made a glorious comeback, playing a megalomaniac film director with terrific panache in The Stunt Man, and following it three years later with a hilarious study in swaggering flamboyance as a vain, washed-up movie star in My Favourite Year. He received Oscar nominations for both movies, bringing his total to seven, the same as his old friend and co-star, Richard Burton - with whom he still shares the distinction of being the actor who has received the most Oscar nominations without winning one.
O'Toole made one of his frequent home visits in the winter of 1987, to star in Neil Jordan's haunted house farce, High Spirits. A year later, when I interviewed him, while he chain-smoked Gauloises through a black cigarette-holder, he recalled the experience of shooting that film, declaring: "Limerick in December is no place for man nor beast."
He was deservedly acclaimed for his performance as the English tutor in Bernardo Bertolucci's epic, The Last Emperor (1987), and again in the 1990s for the uproarious stage show, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, in which he delivered an outsized yet perfectly judged portrayal of the regularly inebriated Fleet Street journalist. Critics inevitably seized upon the parallels between the actor and his subject, in yet another example of how O'Toole's drinking excesses often obscured his talent.
Now, as ever, O'Toole suffers neither fools nor from illusions. "Of course one has to consider the commercial prospects of a film," he observed. "Film-making is not a temple of the arts. It's a corn exchange."
Asked why he never opted for method acting, he replied, "Psychological veracity? What on earth is that? I joined so I could say beautiful words spoken by extraordinary people on the stage."
He continues to work, most likely because he enjoys the process so much, and he has just signed on to play Priam, the king, in the new historical epic, Troy, which stars Brad Pitt and is planned for release in the summer of 2004. Perhaps it will finally win him the competitive Oscar he so clearly covets.