From Lord Jim to Lord God
Stephen Watts. New York Times, March 6, 1966; 10:11

Where--we asked Peter O'Toole one evening last July--did he feel he stood career-wise at the moment? The scene was his dressing room at the Piccadilly Theater, and he was running late. He took a gulp of champagne, made some terse, cogent statements about life and work, swallowed several eggs mixed in milk, and was then called to his nightly chore of two-and-a-half almost unbroken hours on the stage in "Ride a Cock Horse," a play the critics were not too kind about but which the public was packing when it had to be withdrawn because of the illness of O'Toole--an illness which had in fact already begun at the time of our meeting.

After his illness, recuperation, some months' absence for a movie in Paris ('How to Steal a Million'), O'Toole was prepared to pick up the discussion just before leaving for Warsaw to begin shooting "The Night of the Generals."

The original question was how O'Toole, known in England as a serious character actor, felt about his image--a word he very properly hates--when international film audiences had seen him only in the glamour-boy trappings of "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Lord Jim."

"By now," he said, "they've also seen me in 'What's New, Pussycat?' And how are they going to adjust the image when they see me as God in John Huston's 'The Bible'? That should throw them." More seriously, he added, "The matinee idol tag was inevitable after 'Lawrence.' But now, surely, after 'Pussycat' and 'How to Steal a Million,' I have shed the 'romantic twit' image. I am a character actor. That used to mean a lot of makeup and costume. But I mean playing characters, which is what I've always done."

Looking at him, rugged, bespectacled, with untidy, brown (natural) hair, it was easy to believe that the fair-haired, "beautiful" hero of "Lawrence of Arabia" was far away.

Just ten years ago this tall, voluble Yorkshire-Irishman first walked on a stage at the Bristol Old Vic as a cab-man in Thornton Wilder's "The Matchmaker." He made no sudden leap to fame. He stayed at Bristol till 1958, playing roles ranging from King Lear to Alfred Doolittle in "Pygmalion," from Hamlet to Jimmy Porter in "Look Back in Anger." And even after he made his impact on London as a Cockney soldier in "The Long and the Short and the Tall," he chose to go to Stratford-on-Avon and play a memorable Shylock and Petruchio. He left the Royal Shakespeare Company for "Lawrence"--and fame--in 1960.

"Lord Jim" he thinks was an error of judgment. He should have played the part James Mason played but of course at that time nobody would have let him; it was not the star role. Has star status affected him? Yes, he says vehemently. "I am a serious actor. I ache for the stage. Also I am a film star. Both are simply statements of fact. But in films you spend so much time trying to get them to let you do what they employed you to do. I tear my guts out in fights about this--which seems so elementary. Sometimes I win, but one has only so much strength and you begin to concede small points to save your strength for the big, important fights you know have yet to come."

As a "serious actor," he points out that, far from deserting the theater, he has ventured into two unconventional plays and a "Hamlet" in London in the last five years, in addition to all his film work. His "Hamlet" was the opening production of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre, and its informal genesis still makes him chuckle.

"It all began on the film of 'Becket,'" he said. "Mind you, I'd have done that film anyhow, because it was all Anouilh and practically every thing the script-writer put in I took out again and got back to Anouilh who, incidentally, approved. But I also had in mind that it gave me a chance to readjust that Lawrence 'image' for a world audience. It couldn't have been more unlike Lawrence and it is one of my few real satisfactions in films. I was happy because I was miles away from that blue-eyed, golden-haired, suspect homosexual that Lawrence had apparently made a lot of people think I was.

"One day Richard Burton and I were in a pub near the studios." O'Toole wags his fingers across the table and makes the point that they were not behaving in their much-publicized toss-pot personas; but he adds, "We were neither of us entirely sober." They got around to discussing "Hamlet."

"We had both played it and been called the best in living memory or the worst in history. We agreed we both hated 'Hamlet,' then one of us--I think it was Richard--said, 'Let's be masochists. Let's do Hamlet again and get it out of our systems."

They discussed their common admiration of Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, then fell to arguing which they would like to direct them. In the end, they tossed a coin. Fortunately, as O'Toole tells it, before they had recovered their sobriety, they telephoned the two Older Masters and, to cut it short, O'Toole played Hamlet in London under Olivier's direction and Burton in New York under Gielgud's.

O'Toole will not have it that he has made films just because a star must. He explodes over the criticisms of "What's New Pussycat?" which called it "unwholesome." "To me," he said, "it had echoes of Feydeau, Moliere and the old Aldwych faces, in a new idiom." He agrees wholeheartedly with a letter in The New York Times which said the film was about a generation the critics simply didn't know. He frowns, pulls at a French cigarette and suddenly says, "What the hell does 'indulgent' or 'self-indulgent' mean? I was accused of that in my acting in 'Pussycat.' The director is in charge. How can I indulge myself? It's one of those criticisms I find meaningless. When I read the script, I thought it was very funny, wonderfully anarchistic, and I still think so. My part was written as a steaming tomcat of a man, but I saw him as a man who couldn't resist girls--vulnerable, with a sort of shy diffidence. An awful lot of people seem to have agreed with me that it was funny and that's all that matters."

In a sudden total non sequitur he looked at the half-eaten wiener schnitzel on his plate and said, "I must learn to eat lunch. It's a good thing." Then, as if to get rid of the subject of himself as rapidly as possible, he flowed on to a recollection of his start in movies. "When Peter Finch suggested me for a one-day part in 'Kidnapped' because he knew I could play the bagpipes and do a Scots accent, what interested me was the £175 for the day's work." Had he intended to try to break into films? "Of course, I wanted everything, the whole acting banquet, but if I had thought I was mediocre, I'd have got out and into something else." He grins. "I admit it never occurred to me I'd be mediocre. When I saw the rushes of that scene with Finch, I thought, 'I can do this.' When "The Day They Robbed the Bank of England' came along, it wasn't the part I was offered that interested me but the Guards Officer who is reluctantly forced to learn to think. Again I saw the rushes and thought, 'I can do this.' I've never seen rushes--or a completed film of my own--since then.

"I decided that so-called film technique was like rehearsals for a stage performance--chopped up into bits and so long as you kept your voice down to what you'd use on the telephone, you were all right. It was 'The Day They Robbed the Bank of England' that decided David Lean that I was right for the part of Lawrence."

After "The Night of the Generals," O'Toole has plans reaching well ahead in films--Wellington in "Waterloo" with Richard Burton as Napoleon, and a production with his own company in which he will play Will Adams, the first Englishman to go to Japan. But he has stage plans too. He will do O'Casey's "Juno and the Paycock: later this year. "I'm lucky enough to be able to pick what I want to do and somebody will put it on."

So back to the original question. How does he see his career now? The short answer is that he is not dissatisfied or frustrated, and can cope with the exhausting "star" problems in his own way. He has enough security to take chances on what he believes in, to fight against what he calls "blackmail"--agreeing on a screenplay and then finding it all being changed.

"Words are golden," he said earnestly. "That's what the man meant when he wrote it and I don't want a foot-high pile of colored alteration pages by semiliterates and businessmen who know what's 'box office.' I want to do what I've undertaken to do and, I repeat, it's amazing how difficult that is to achieve."

Has success changed him? "No-o," he answered slowly. "I like having money. I like to know I can take care of my wife and kids. I've had enough of poverty. I once wrote a poem with the line 'My thighs are bruised by poverty . . .' meaning that pennies are heavy, not like that crisp paper stuff which is what you want. But, of course, success changes other people toward you." Then, on a note of finality, "I think that at 33 I am self-aware but not self-conscious or self important."

His car, modest in size and with a driver he calls by his first name and who tries to keep his master's wayward timetable in order, has now been waiting a couple of hours. O'Toole runs his fingers through his hair as he talks, so now the tall, tousled-headed figure in the casual corduroy jacket strolls off to a fitting for his German general's uniform in "The Night of the Generals" and he has is own ideas about that too.