'Reckless, courageous and a little bit crazy'
As he prepares to receive an honorary Oscar, Peter O'Toole tells Peter Manso about racing camels, stealing cigars - and working with the greats

Wednesday March 19, 2003
The Guardian

Peter Manso: Early on, when you got out of the navy, you joined that amazing group of actors - Michael Caine, Albert Finney, etc, at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art - who transformed British cinema.

Peter O'Toole: Accurately, in 1953 at Rada in London, there was Albert Finney, Alan Bates and countless others. I always miss people out, so they get very upset. But we all moved into the theatre as well as the cinema. A number of us are still alive, which is even more amazing.

PM: Was there a sense of competition, or was it more as if you were all in it together?

PO: No actor worth his salt doesn't know what competition means. In the older days, the 1800s, theatre was on a par with present-day boxing. It had as much excitement, as much fancy. Junius Booth, Edmund Kean together at Drury Lane in 1816, whatever it was, competing, playing Iago in Othello... Yeah, there has always been a healthy sense of competition and this is what makes it interesting.

PM: You've spoken of the time you first saw Burton doing Hamlet at the Old Vic and having the epiphany: "I belong here." How conscious were you of being blessed with fortunate timing, coming into it during the 1950s, when art was somehow purer?

PO: Had I begun 10 years earlier, the timing would have been perfect. Yes, certainly for the first decade - of stage acting, anyway. I mean, who were my contemporaries, the people I came up with? Richard Burton, Claire Bloom, Fay Compton etc. And the et ceteras are very important, too. Rosemary Harris, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike. These are all extraordinary veterans.

PM: But it was more than just talent that set that world apart?

PO: Yes, it was a continuation of what had been the case since the 17th and 16th centuries. It all ended in the late 1960s.

PM: You were a particularly good friend of Katharine Hepburn's. You must have had a great challenge in that performance.

PO: I was in a play in London called The Long and the Short and the Tall, and there was no lavatory in my dressing room. After the show, I was pissing in the sink - which one does - and the voice said: "Hello, my name is Kate Hepburn and I've got round everywhere!" And then we met... and it was a joy, as you say, and indeed a challenge. If, as many of us were, you were a bit tired in the mornings, she'd give you about 60 seconds in which to recover and if you weren't there - "Zip!" - cut your head off. Kate's still alive, she's in her 90s, a great, great beautiful woman. I adore the girl.

PM: Every time I've seen Lawrence of Arabia, I'm just bowled over: the length of the film, the ambition of it, the breadth of it, the fact that it had the patience to tell its story without having to blow something up every five seconds. It's a masterpiece.

PO: One's life did tumble before one's eyes, watching that on the screen. When Lawrence is taking the boy into the bar, the shot of the load of officers watching - one of the officers was Robert Bolt, the author. Another was John Fulton, the only non-Spaniard ever to win a full alternativa [to become a fully fledged bullfighter], from Philadelphia. So you can imagine. Yes, it is a beautiful film. I never tire of it. But the script demanded all those things you mention, the circumstances demanded all those things. David [Lean, who directed] had the courage to do them. We were the right people to do all those things, and we took two years. And I don't think there was one boring second.

PM: I read that Albert Finney was considered for the role.

PO: That's right. So was Marlon Brando. I think probably Groucho Marx and Greta Garbo...

PM: David Lean had to find you when you were essentially unknown as a movie star, then trust you for two years with this great undertaking. It must have been a leap of faith on both your parts.

PO: I had a phonecall at Stratford-upon-Avon where I was playing Shylock, and it was David Lean, and would I be able to come to London to have a chat with him? So I did, and I'd grown my own beard and long hair, which I'd died black. David smoked with a cigarette holder: "Peter, what do you look like underneath all that stuff?" I said: "Well, I'm quite fair-haired, really." He said: "Uh, uh, uh, we'd need... I've seen a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, in which you play a young, uh, English army officer and you didn't put a foot wrong. And I really want you to do it." I said: "Well, who's the producer?" He said: "Sam Spiegel." I said: "Not a chance." Because Sam Spiegel and I didn't get on at all. And David said: "Well, look, you're going to hear that everybody in the world is about to play this, but please have faith, please trust me, and you'll do it." And come, oh, three or four months after the end of the season at Stratford, Spiegel said: "No, you can't have him, that awful man, that dreadful actor." But David stuck to his guns and, indeed, that's what happened. And two years later, we finally finished the film.

PM: Initially, did you have any sense of how big it was going to be? Two years, including months and months out on the desert?

PO: First of all, Omar Sharif and I spent nine months in the desert - day after day for nine months. In Arabia, on the spot where it all took place. We were 400 miles away from water. We lived in tents ... But to answer your question, I thought it was going to last for five months. That's what I was told ... Omar and I worked with Claude Raines, Joe Ferrer, Anthony Quinn, Patrick Kennedy, Jack Hawkins. These are among the best actors in the world. Joe and I become close, close friends. Jack Hawkins and I became inseparable. I hadn't known either man before the production, not at all. And we all knew we were on to something very special.

I saw it not long ago on a big screen, and you can imagine: two years of one's life ... The man who taught me to ride the camel was the grandson of the chap that Anthony Quinn played, his grandson. There's a shot where the guy playing a bedouin says to me "Tomorrow, good riding" and David yells out "Cut!" A huge, huge vista in the desert, the reds and blacks, the great Sahara, and there's two figures galloping. Watching this, tears shot out of my eyes. The man died.

PM: You all right?

PO: Yeah.

PM: What did he die of?

PO: He was shot during the Six-Day War ... I'd forgotten, he would get me involved in camel races.

PM: Everyone keeps coming around to My Favorite Year.

PO: Yes, I love it.

PM: Your swandive is one of your great moments. And your shock when you find out that the TV show is live: "Live? I can't go out live. I'm a movie star, not an actor!" But you are a movie star and also an actor. Does it take different kinds of volume, projection, imaging skill for the two mediums?

PO: Ah, louder is about all ... No is the short answer.

PM: You've talked about your relationship with John Huston...

PO: There was a marvellous moment when I was staying with John in Ireland. Came the morning, there was John in a green kimono with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. He said: "Pete, this is a day for gettin' drunk!" We finished up on horses, he in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it - but with a shih-tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound, who are of course incapable of doing anything. And John eventually fell off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!

PM: With Lawrence of Arabia, did your relationship with Spiegel get any better?

PO: Not at all! He turned up at one point on his yacht when we moved to Spain and summoned me onboard. He'd seen the rushes from the nine months we'd done in the desert. I left the yacht feeling dreadful. Just as ever, destruction was his game. I couldn't bear that man. And I came off the yacht and there was a little bar. I wandered into the little bar and there was the artistic director, John Box, who's alive and well, and I was about to tell him what had happened "I was there for an hour before you!" he said. So we helped ourselves to the wine and - this is so hopelessly boyish - well, we climbed up the anchor chain onto the yacht and we stole all his cigars!

PM: How was it working with [Otto] Preminger on Rosebud?

PO: Hilarious. We were in Berlin, filming, and Otto, as you know, fled the Nazis ... and he was fine for a few days, and then he got more and more and more depressed. And he wouldn't even get out of the car when we were filming. All he'd do was wind down the windows and go: "Action! Cut!"

PM: He was said to be the worst of all directors...

PO: I found him enchanting!

PM: A quote from David Thomson: "Peter O'Toole has not always been himself the best guardian of his own interests. He is reckless, courageous and a little crazy, like Orson Welles." How do you respond to that?

PO: I'm 70 years of age. How do I look? You must understand, I've been very, very athletic in my life. I played every sport when I was a boy. I was a champion swimmer, a semi-finalist boxer at bantamweight, a cricketer. I played rugby when I was in the navy.

PM: How does this relate to the question?

PO: I was born fit. My dad was the same. And I've kept it up. I mean, I still play cricket.

PM: Have you had a battle with cigarettes, tried to stop smoking?

PO: I stop from time to time. I didn't smoke for months until last week. I couldn't see myself at a film festival without a cig in my mouth. I'd feel foolish.

PM: Speaking of which, this film festival, Telluride [where this interview took place and where O'Toole was honoured with the festival's gold medal]. The day after you'd received your award, you really went shooting up in the hills?

PO: Up the mountain, yeah.

PM: Shooting at what?

PO: Vermin usually. That's all I ever shoot. I fired pistols, I fired shotguns, I fired an M14 and an M16 at one point. Fully automatic.

PM: What fun.

PO: Oh, boy. I can't tell you how much fun that is.

PM: Final question. Lawrence of Arabia, Beckett, The Lion in Winter, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man, My Favorite Year ... you were nominated for an Academy award for all seven and have not yet won an Academy award. Isn't it time for an honorary Oscar for Peter O'Toole?

PO: Thank you very much. However, I'm not dead yet!

PM: If you were, they wouldn't give it to you.

PO: Posthumous Oscar!

PM: Never been done.

PO: We could be a first!

·Peter Manso is the author of Norman Mailer: His Life and Times, and Marlon Brando: The Biography. His most recent book is Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape.