Battle for domestic supremacy

It is salutary to turn first to the back of this autobiography and look up SiΓn Phillip's acting credits. From 1959, when our story begins, right up to 2001 and publication, not one single year is missing in terms of stage, TV and screen appearances. The woman either has a core of steel or a multiple personality. One thing is clear however, it was never a question of young actress hitches her wagon to rising star.

When they fell for each other, two of the beautiful people, SiΓn Phillips and Peter O'Toole, both hugely talented and with glittering careers beckoning, there was no reason on earth to imagine it wouldn't work wonderfully even though Kenneth Griffith her Welsh compatriot does tell her in no uncertain terms that he isn't "normal" and asks if she can really sustain being Mrs Edmund Kean?

Later during a severe marital crisis after the birth of their first daughter SiΓn's mother takes her aside and says: "If you want this to work and for Kate's sake you must make it work - from now on you're going to have to stand in a very small space."

Somewhere between that rushed registry office wedding in Dublin with Marie Kean acting as best man and the birth of their first daughter in Stratford the seeds of destruction were sown. Her survival is testament to the fact that it didn't work, or maybe it did, because her subsequent career though hugely respectable never quite attained the giddy heights promised and that's squarely down to her battle with a man who whether unconsciously or not didn't want it to.

Throughout her life thwarted career opportunities abound that would have defeated anyone without the iron will and relentless self-discipline that SiΓn, maybe thanks to her Welsh upbringing, obviously possesses.

Other women in the same position have ended very messily indeed. SiΓn consistently blames her own stupidity but I'm not so sure.

Aided and abetted by Jules Buck, the wily American film producer who was instrumental in making O'Toole a star, I suggest she was a victim of highly sophisticated tactics of which she appears to have been blithely unaware.

Buck was heard to say: "It's all right for her to work so long as it doesn't get in Pete's way and so long as he isn't embarrassed by her." Given her beauty, talent and moral fibre the fact that she succumbed almost cravenly to O'Toole's will in all things, even her leaving of him, infers something very odd indeed. Was she in some sense in thrall, her spirit demanding some sort of abnegation of the Self so it could grow? Not my will but thine (O'Toole's) be done? Who knows only there's much fodder for psychological speculation in the study of their pairing.

When they first meet, O'Toole as she refers to him throughout as though he is an unstoppable force of nature with which she has to contend, is mercurial, delightful, dangerous, entertaining, spontaneous and possessed of "an invincible drive towards joy and life".

He is also domestically incapable, oblivious to the mundane, and very often drunkenly AWOL for days at a time. Copious quantities of alcohol are lowered on every conceivable occasion.

So what's new? Many a woman has had to put up with a man who goes out for a packet of cigarettes and doesn't come home for a week.

The early chapters are littered with pissed actors behaving badly but as Marie Kean (who manages to remain a life-long friend to both) whispers in suitably submissive fashion, "sure you can't be taking anything said by Irishmen in drink seriously".

Clever women don't nag and never refer to the excesses of the night before. Endless bouts of relentless criticism and verbal abuse are to be excused and forgiven. However I don't think drink, though it fuels the demon, is at heart the issue.

The clues are there right from the start. One night early on in the relationship O'Toole throws all SiΓn's good clothes out the window. All . . . shoes, bags, gloves, frocks, hats and suits. Thousands of pounds worth (and this is 1959 remember) end up on the wet street below.

He hugs her insisting they will share a wardrobe of "his" cotton trousers and lumberjack shirts. Imagine Madonna buying that. Deliriously in love she still doesn't understand why her friends are worried.

Later in Stratford, pregnant and working and with O'Toole rehearsing Shylock for the RSC (in which part aged a mere 27 he was by all accounts magnificent) SiΓn's torment begins.

Night after night she is subjected to the before-you-met-me syndrome or as she puts it: "O'Toole suddenly found it intolerable that he was not the first man in my life and found my past beyond pardon. I found it intolerable that I should be blamed for having a previous life and then came to blame myself for it as well. Was that really what made our lives so dangerous and hideous?"

That's the Hell of the marriage, the struggle for Supremacy over the Other, a struggle drunk or sober O'Toole was never going to lose. Well there's no victory in subjugating a weak woman is there? More rewarding by far to take a strong spirit and bend it to your will. He's not the first and won't be the last to indulge in that game.

Although the marriage does take centre stage the book featuring a classy cast spills over with incident and anecdote.

Katherine Hepburn tells her "You let him push you around - stop it. I'm spoiled. Get spoiled."

Sam Beckett "exquisitely dressed in cashmere polo necks and soft tweed" is, she says boldly, an opinionated bigot in some ways. As he and O'Toole get drunker and drunker she hears Beckett say that Godot can never be filmed. "No film with dialogue has ever succeeded. Buster Keaton is the only film actor worth considering." She leaves bored to death by a great playwright talking rubbish about the movies.

A bitchy Edith Evans snidely refers to her as "mother of two", Donal McCann sets his hair alight and Jackie McGowran fries up two goldfish for breakfast.

There were heavenly interludes too of course.

She waxes eloquent on the harmony and sheer delight they found in each other's company usually when abroad. After Lawrence of Arabia (both Finney and Brando turned the part down) O'Toole becomes a major star and they could soon afford to live like veritable Princes of the Desert travelling widely and well together.

They keep an apartment in the poshest hotel in Paris, she falls in love with Connemara and they collect first-rate art. Tellingly her two favourite paintings are titled "False Morning Promise" and "Little Hope" the latter a gift from O'Toole when one Christmas he misses six planes from Orly to Heathrow. In all fairness she says "the distance from the bar to the gates was, in those days, enormous".

SiΓn goes about creating a glorious home in Hampstead for the family though I'm not sure parenting rated high on either list of skills.

Their two daughters appear to have lived on the fifth floor with nannies in attendance brought down on occasion for photo-opportunities but otherwise neglected, benignly one trusts.

SiΓn's mother comes to live with them, a woman she says who would see the good side of Ghengis Khan and it is Mamgu who, one feels, makes the house a proper home.

O'Toole did keep on reminding SiΓn that it was his house not hers which must have rankled hugely.

In the end she cracked as he knew full well she would. According to her, and it is at this stage one starts to long for his side of the story, the household is rather pompously assembled and he has her tell her mother and daughters that she is "exhausted" and in need of a "rest". No one speaks.

O'Toole says "Well that's that then" and humiliated she goes upstairs to pack. Echoing Ibsen she then walks downstairs and out into the street.

"The house was sweetly scented, shining and quiet and, like water, the air closed behind me as though I had never been there."

And you'll hardly believe this, but three years later, the very day her divorce becomes final she marries again.

Jeananne Crowley is an actress and writer