More laughter than tears

A LARGE propeller ceiling fan is gently rotating. There seem to be palm trees swaying in the breeze, but perhaps they are only imagined. Finally he appears. A beautiful ghost. As he slouches gracefully towards the small corner table, he could well be a character living in India during the closing years of the British Raj. Wearing a short, white jacket and a colourful scarf, knotted cravat-like, and gesturing with a cigarette in a black holder, actor Peter O'Toole is a slightly surreal study in apologetic charm.

Folding one thin leg over the other, he looks far taller than his 6'2" - having been a robust 5'10" at 19, he then stretched in his early 20s to his present elongated form. His cadaverous appearance is the result of a wilder, earlier life. At 63, the long haggard face with the large ivory teeth is pale and remains strikingly handsome in a slightly unearthly way.

Long hands caress the air, just as the slow, soft, melodious voice caresses the words chosen with deliberation. The delivery is mesmeric, dramatic, vaguely aristocratic with vast pauses for emphasis. Even his clean, floppy hair is graceful.

Hugely amused at the idea of life's habit of continuing, he blames his lateness on having soaked his head in a bucket of tea. "It's supposed to restore one. Joan Crawford always swore by the healing power of tea-bags for," pause, "under the eyes."

For all the fey charm, the grace, the child's smile and the concern for the barking cough I greet him with, his intelligence quickly slices through the atmosphere. He may be theatrical, but he stresses his style of writing is literary.

Pouring tea and sugaring it, he says "this will cure you". He sees everything. Well used to being studied by observers who have then run off to decide who or what he is - "Something which I've never really found out myself" - O'Toole has taken the writing of Loitering With Intent. The Apprentice, his second volume of memoirs, very seriously. A chorus of voices, largely O'Toole's, it is literary, singular, alternating personae, time scales, history and memory with a magician's sleight of hand and shaped by a continuous stream-of-consciousness technique. Something of an elusive memoir, but more the history of a time centring on his year at the Royal Academy of the Dramatic Arts, his approach is atmospheric rather than merely factual. But he has researched his subject, the references, the date and especially the poignant sub-plot concerning the 19th-century actor, Edmund Kean. "I plot my books very carefully - I love emblems," hence Hitler in the first book, and Kean in the second, - "the room around me will be littered with torn balls of paper, before I might have two or three satisfactory pages to be sent off to the typist."

He has always been interested in writing. "I was always watching. People used to say to my father, `Pat, what's that boy looking at?' Later others less kindly would ask `wotcha looking at?'" His cockney accent is suitably menacing. O'Toole is a fine mimic; the Katherine Hepburn he later produces when discussing the movie The Lion In Winter (1968) is superb. He is a vivid, engaging talker and seems a loving character. Very good humoured, direct, funny and oddly touching. When he speaks of his parents - Captain Pat was a bookmaker and character of Elizabethan flamboyance, while mother Constance was one of life's natural stoics - he smiles and says he adored them, referring to them as "Mummy and Daddy". Yet he doesn't want to discuss his father's life.

When asked what part of Connemara his father came from, he replies: "Ah, leave him be, he's gone. Both of them lived into their 80s.

The first volume, The Child (1992), is sustained by random observation. Facts are relatively incidental. A secondary plot concerning the life and times of Adolf Hitler runs through it. O'Toole admits he was obsessed by the war: "Many of my generation still are. Obsessed by Hitler, obsessed by that terrible evil." But if randomness was the dominant mood of his first book - and the self-critical O'Toole comments "that randomness was a weakness of the writing" - the second one is far more deliberate. "I was invited to write my autobiography, and although I had already thought about it, I wasn't interested in writing a linear one and said no. I was interested in taking scraps of my life." Ask him a question and often he says: "Wait. I can be specific."

And indeed he can be. Most questions are treated with care and deliberation. O'Toole may not appear to take himself overly seriously and has no time for prima donnas, nor for those actors who make a cross out of their drinking" but he is very serious about the art of acting. "I remember Hugh Miller telling us it takes 15 years to become an actor. I won custody of his son Lorcan. O'Toole raises him with the help of a nanny. Although he says "I never talk about my son", they are known to have a remarkable relationship. O'Toole even resurrected his useful cricketing skills in order to be able to bowl to the boy. He is a natural father because he has never lost a child's relentless sense of fun and wonder.

His own story ripples along like a wayward brook. Why bother with facts? His conversation is thematic and colourful. It is definite that O'Toole thought to myself, `I'm 23 now, so it's going to take me until I'm 38.' But I later found out what he meant. I know it was when we were making The Lion In Winter, that I realised, `yes, I'm an actor.'"

"When I'm writing I can't do it unless I see pictures in my head. Writing is a visual art, acting is different, it is auditory. I have to hear to act. I have an auditory imagination."

HE is a man who makes a policy of saying he has no regrets. There are no forbidden areas. Even the subject of the disastrous West End production of Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1980, which had the audiences rocking with laughter. "Yes, well, it is a famously ill-omened play. Everything went wrong. But we were determined to get it right, and we kept on trying. The harder we tried, the worse it got. A lot of it happens in the dark - and as you know, things tend to go wrong in the dark. Wonderful Brian Blessed was Banquo. You know the scene where he appears covered in blood? Well, just at that moment, as he appears on stage, down the street outside, an ambulance came roaring along, its siren screaming.

Everyone started laughing. Brian and myself looked at each other and we just fell about. It was hysterical."

Another work which was critically dismissed was the disorganised but hilarious film The Ruling Class (1972). O'Toole again recalls it fondly. "I think of a group of pals getting together to make something. It was fun." Fun remains one of his favourite topics. Of his drinking days, he says he enjoyed them and speaks about his pals, Richard Harris, and the late Richard Burton and Robert Shaw. "Strong men, but dead before their time. But have I killed Harris off? He's not dead." O'Toole's drinking ended in 1975. Not because he was advised to. "I just got fed up with it. And that was that."

There have been triumphs as well: My Favourite Year (1981), the only film he shot in the United States, an experience he did not enjoy. "I'm a stage actor because I believe in the Holy Trinity of author, actor and audience." More recently there have been two successful West End productions of Keith Waterhouse's Jeffrey Bernard is unwell, at the Apollo in 1989 and two years later at the Shaftsbury Theatre. "It was marvellous to get a play like that. Poor Jeffrey is still unwell. He's lost a leg. Jeffrey Bernard is legless."

In the first volume of Loitering with hi tent, he refers to his former wife, the outstanding actress Sian Phillips, as "my widow". He laughs on being reminded of this. They have two daughters, both involved in theatre. "We were married for 16 years and then it ended." He doesn't drop the subject. It merely evaporates. It is his business. Later, after another relationship failed, at 50, he fought for and was born in 1932. Where exactly appears to be an irrelevance, at least to him. As he wrote in The Child: "The family version of my date and place of birth is June, 1932, in Ireland; the same event is recorded as August of the same year at an accident hospital in England; my baptism was in November, 1932, also in England." It is all a wonderful joke and the uncertainty does not appear to bother him. "I have two sets of birth certs and I was born."

Joining the navy at 19 caused his national service to seem more of a pleasant lark than obligation. It was while at sea, having served two years, his parents told him the RADA audition he had done had earned him a scholarship. He decided to give acting "a go". It was not as a result of a long-burning ambition. "Oh no. But once I had done a bit, I thought, `well, here is something I might be able to do and I liked it, I could do it."

He had begun his working life on the Yorkshire Evening News. "I was 15 when I started. I was good at finding odd stories, the type of thing that no one else seems to see", and then moved on to photography. "I went completely off it, lost interest. I found after a while I was looking at everything through a lens - I mean, as if through a lens. It was too selective. I began thinking `here I am looking at this, but what else am I missing? what's happening over there?'"

The public view of Peter O'Toole continues to be dominated by images of him as the utterly eccentric maverick Lawrence in David Lean's romantic epic Lawrence of Arabia (1961). Many actors would merely shrug off that early film by now. His first screen starring role, Lawrence was his fourth film, only a few years after beginning his professional career with the Bristol Old Vie Theatre Company. But it was the one which made him famous.

"I look on it with great affection. I remember David Lean saying to me, `well, Pete, we're off on a great adventure'. And it was great, most of the time. Two years in the desert. Not completely in the desert, the interiors were shot in Spain. But the heat," very long pause, "sometimes it hurt, you felt defeated by the heat of that wretched place. You would find yourself thinking `I can't bear this, I hate it, I can't take any more of it.'

Then there was the camel: "Have you ever ridden one? It is like nothing you can ever have experienced. It's not at all like riding a horse. They are monsters," he demonstrates the jerky, three-part movement which takes a camel from its knees to a standing position. "Then they're off, flying along. Bloody uncomfortable, you sit side saddle." As he speaks about that movie and the "wonderful sense of history all around us out there; we worked for 21 days and then had six days off. So you could look around. You were aware of history, the routes taken by the Crusaders, religion, Jerusalem, Jesus himself," traces of the manic beauty which shaped his portrayal of Lawrence return to his face.

From Lawrence to his two portrayals of Henry II, in Beckett (1963), The Lion In Winter and the crazed Jack, Earl of Gurney in The Ruling Class, O'Toole's character-type seemed to have quickly become something of a stock romantic misfit.

Is he a romantic? "If, as I once asked and was told, that `romantic' means of the imagination, I am." Observers have frequently decided he is eccentric, "I'm not eccentric at all." No kidding. Not all of his characters were aristocratic, romantic misfits. "No I played some working-class parts on stage - I was in Osborne" as well as appearing in Alun Owen's The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court in 1960.

He did suffer for a while from being too pretty. "We used to toughen ourselves up." He mentions another actor who began his career along with O'Toole at Bristol's Old Vie. "We shared a dressing room and used to plaster ourselves with make-up. We were unrecognisable." Another wild laugh. His memories appear to cause him more laughter than tears.

Having launched his book in Galway before moving on to Belfast and Dublin signings, he faces a two week-long promotion tour across Britain. Does he enjoy giving readings? Frail and bewildered for a moment, he seems like a schoolboy facing an exam. "I'm an actor. I would have liked to have learnt the entire 400 pages - but I know the bits I'm going to read." Multiple voices, multiple personalities, he inhabits several worlds, but is ultimately a 19th-century man caught out of his preferred era.

The prematurely-ruined beauty, the glorious acting careers of highs and often farcical lows; the myths. real and attributed, the relationships - did the non-complaining O'Toole really enjoy it? Huge, slow smile, the schoolboy professes: "not half".