Cheerful Rebel
Peter O'Toole emerged during Hollywood's glittering golden age - acting, and partying wildly, alongside legends Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Now, at 74, his performance as a lecherous old actor in Venus has placed him among the favourites to win the Oscar he has been denied seven times.
Gaby Wood Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer
Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.
The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.
Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')
You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.
His face lights up at the mention of What's New, Pussycat?, a madcap caper which was Woody Allen's first script and (depending on your sense of humour) possibly O'Toole's most appealing role. He is as proud of his comic roles as he is of his epic, tormented heroes. 'There's a line I had to say in a film once,' he grins: '"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Which had been said by Edmund Kean. And it is, it's bloody difficult to get it right. I've never known a good actor who couldn't play comedy, and I've never known any actor who found it easy.'
He speaks in a purring, plummy voice, his diction elegantly clear yet fluid enough to suggest the years of nocturnal slurring to which it must have been subjected. He is dapper yet mischievous, a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his white shirt, the electric white wisps of his hair fighting the smoothness of their renowned style. He is charming, but not shy of correcting you with a glowering, sidelong look, or of swearing his heart out to punctuate a point. When he laughs, it is a hoarse, chesty laugh from which you imagine he might not mind if he didn't recover: however frail he says he feels, he approaches every tale with aplomb.
There is something mysterious about O'Toole: from this vantage point, he seems to have been an old-school successor to Gielgud or Olivier, yet when he first came on the scene he was lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism. I ask him whether, when he was at the Bristol Old Vic or at the Royal Court in the 1950s, he was aiming to shatter a tradition or defend one. The response comes slowly, deliberately, accompanied by dramatically hooded eyes.
'One of the enduring myths of our time,' says O'Toole, 'is the Fucking Royal Court. George Devine was a third-rate mummer who couldn't act for toffee. He was a nice old stick, George, but surrounded by these bloody gruesome young amateurs. I found it deeply overrated, but the myth continues. The revivals of Look Back in Anger have been execrated. Well, it was never very good. I went to see it - dreary little production, drearily done. It's all PR. A PR put out a flyer and referred to John Osborne as an "angry young man". It was one of those phrases, everybody used it - I was called an "angry young actor". God!'
Weren't you a rebel? 'I had a rebellious nature, of course. But I wasn't particularly angry about anything. I was quite cheerful!'
O'Toole's first London success was The Long and the Short and the Tall, a Second World War play put on at the Royal Court in 1959 (the part had been written for Albert Finney, a classmate of his at Rada, but Finney developed appendicitis during rehearsals). The all-male cast made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. It was partly their carousing offstage behaviour, and partly the fact that most of these new young actors had come from the provinces (they were the unwealthy beneficiaries of Clement Attlee's postwar reforms), that made them right for the kitchen-sink age.
Yet O'Toole was always a traditional actor - the fact that he's listed alongside Finney, who kept his northern accent, Richard Burton, always inalienably Welsh, the Irishman Richard Harris and the famously cockney Michael Caine, is perhaps an accident of timing more than a true description of his impact. O'Toole was brought up in wartime Leeds with an Irish bookie father ('I'm not working-class,' the self-described 'slum Mick' once said, 'I come from the criminal classes.'); but he was not on stage to flaunt his lower-class roots, and on film he lived up to the aristocracy of his breathtaking looks.
The looks themselves, though, were a kind of mask: in 1960, after a stunning few years at the Bristol Old Vic and that run in London, O'Toole was advised by certain film-makers to fix his nose (Joseph Losey was against it, Nicholas Ray was in favour). The nose, which was then long and - O'Toole claimed - wonky as a result of a rugby game during National Service in the Navy, was surgically straightened in time for a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. ('I thought, well, fuck it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy little heap,' he later said.) It was this picture that David Lean saw when he was casting Lawrence of Arabia
There were those who said the pretty boy we have come to know was a sell-out compared to the rugged man of the stage. But he went on to give some historic performances in the theatre - as Shylock at Stratford that same year, as Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963, in Waiting for Godot in Dublin in 1970 (Beckett once told him he thought no decent film could be made with dialogue - it had all been downhill since the silent era). And he more than made up for the prettiness with his behaviour: there was an undercurrent of (as was said of his character, TE Lawrence) 'insubordination', a choice of brilliant, 'difficult' men as mentors, and a dashing flair for being banned from every drinking establishment he set his sights on.
Michael Caine was O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall; considering he never went on stage, Caine later said, it was incredible he was so exhausted at the end of the run, but waiting anxiously in the wings every night as O'Toole swung in at the very last minute was enough to give any man a coronary. Once, the pair went out drinking and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole, 'What fucking day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.
'I do not regret one drop,' O'Toole now says of his long nights, most famously spent with Richards Harris and Burton. 'We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public!'
I wasn't wondering about the regrets so much as the pleasures, I explain, and urge him to recall particular nights. 'Oh, well there were so many, darling, so bloody many,' he replies, with a look of contented defeat. He claims he really did once go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica.
What percentage of his life, would he say, has he woken up in places he didn't recognise? 'Oh,' O'Toole says, shaking his head at the incalculable number, 'the one to ask was Harris. He literally would say to Elizabeth, his third wife: I'm just going down to the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes. And a month later he didn't know where he'd been. But don't forget, we weren't morose. It was just a fuel, it was in addition to what we were doing, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? It was a fuel for various adventures ...'
They would play snooker or watch rugby together; sometimes, in a jazz joint, O'Toole would find Burton draped over the bass player, beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to a picked out iambic accompaniment. Burton, he says, was 'bursting with life'. One of O'Toole's party pieces was climbing - climbing the wall of Lloyd's bank in Covent Garden, for instance, in the early hours, just for fun. Walls people now climb with ropes, he adds, they used to scale 'in our Sunday shoes'. Did they ever think they'd die? I ask. 'No,' he says with a smile, 'we enjoyed the climb.'
Meanwhile, he had a family in Hampstead. The actress Sian Phillips, to whom he was married for 20 years, has written of their relationship in terms that almost make it rival that of Burton and Taylor. O'Toole, a 'dangerous, disruptive human being' in her description, would disappear for days, or pick fights that quickly escalated to shattered glass. But, as with many of his onscreen incarnations, she suggested, he was so charismatic all was routinely forgiven. (The alcoholic matinee idol he plays in My Favourite Year has a line O'Toole delivers inimitably. Wandering into the wrong loo, he is reprimanded by a stern old woman. 'This is for ladies only!' she grumbles, to which he replies, unzipping his fly: 'So is this, Ma'am, but every now and again I have to run a little water through it.') In the end, it was Phillips who had an affair and left. They have two daughters, Kate O'Toole - named after Katharine Hepburn and now an actress herself - and Pat. O'Toole has a 23-year-old son, Lorcan, from a later relationship with an American model called Karen Brown (Lorcan is Lawrence in Gaelic). As a result of a very public custody battle some years ago, Lorcan primarily grew up with his father, and now he is an actor.
About many of his friends and acquaintances, O'Toole is discreet to the point of looking injured at the mention of their name. 'I don't want to be rude - if you don't mind,' he says when Elizabeth Taylor comes up in conversation. But assuming he's happy to offend the dead, I ask him about an incident in which he reportedly roughed up Kenneth Tynan, this newspaper's celebrated theatre critic. I imagine this to be just another entertaining brawl, a mythical, whisky-fuelled fistfight, but O'Toole seems terribly saddened by the memory.
'Oh, all right, since it's come up ...' he says, and tells the story. It was the summer of 1974. He was making a film in Paris with the noir master Otto Preminger, about a kidnap by Palestinian terrorists. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: 'To Peter O'Toole, the so-called Irishman ... we have planted a bomb in the building.' It was signed by the IRA, and the terrified crew cleared out. 'This was the height of the bombings,' O'Toole says now, 'Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.'
Eventually, word was sent that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag - by Tynan. O'Toole couldn't believe it; he marched off to find him. 'He was sitting in the room, looking un-Ken-like, smoking cigarettes over and over again. He said: "But I thought you'd see through it!" And' - a look of sweet regret comes over O'Toole's face - 'I'm afraid I punched him. Very hard.'
That was the last time they spoke, an awful result, since Tynan had been such a champion of O'Toole, whom he called an 'insomniac Celtic dynamo'. 'You'll find there's a bit cut out of Ken's diaries because I wouldn't tell the story,' O'Toole explains. 'Well, I didn't want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls ... I may have done. And so that was the end.'
Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O'Toole for Playboy magazine, and they'd had this wonderful exchange:
Tynan: 'Are you afraid of dying?'
O'Toole: 'Petrified.'
Tynan: 'Why?'
O'Toole: 'Because there's no future in it.'
Tynan: 'When did you last think you were about to die?'
O'Toole: 'About four o'clock this morning.'
O'Toole has said goodbye to certain things he loves - the drinking, of course, is dramatically reduced, and he no longer plays cricket, a game to which he has been devoted all his life, and which he also used to coach. He doesn't mind - he went out in style. His favourite cricket field is in Devon, a place near Dartmoor called Lustleigh, and that was where he batted for the last time, several years ago. 'The grounds are behind a church - they're beautiful - and there's a river. The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river. I knew I was finished - I could hardly see the bloody ball - but I went bang! And the ball went boom, into the river, in my favourite little cricket field, and I said: Pedro, get out now. And I did.'
All this has left time for other pursuits, however. One thing the bad-boy persona always veiled was a scholarly man of letters. Loitering With Intent, O'Toole's autobiography, of which he has published two volumes, is richly written and Irishly eloquent. He is working on a third volume now, and has a theory about Shakespeare's sonnets he may yet put to paper.
Reminiscing about his mentor, the renegade actor-film-maker Kenneth Griffith who died just six months ago, O'Toole tells me about an episode that cemented their friendship. In the mid-1950s, Griffith and O'Toole shared a dressing room in Manchester with George Formby. Formby, they found, kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys, and they asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find it very difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick up another ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite - whenever anything would go wrong, they'd say: 'pick up another ukulele!' and roar with laughter, as if that were the solution to every problem in life. Even now, wheezing with pleasure in the telling, O'Toole gives the impression that his survival instinct is so strong he won't ever really disappear; he'll just shift into another key.
--
Vintage O'Toole
by Laura Emerick (Chicago Sun Times)
Behold "Venus," a meditation on longing and desire; youth and beauty; death ... and death. In what feels like his valedictory, Peter O'Toole, that still mellifluous but physically ravaged Lion in Winter, gives a tour de force that summons the glorious ghosts of performances past.
As an elderly thespian enjoying one last lark before the the final curtain descends, O'Toole reminds us of his own real-life dramatic triumphs: "Becket," "Lion in Winter," and of course, "Lawrence of Arabia." In "Venus," which trades on themes from "Pygmalion" and Lolita, he's the septuagenarian Maurice, who becomes infatuated with the 19-year-old grandniece of his equally doddering comrade Ian (British veteran Leslie Phillips). Maurice views the sullen, untutored yet somehow beguiling Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) as his last chance of recapturing his lost youth.
British icons Vanessa Redgrave and Richard Griffiths ("The History Boys") also appear in supporting roles, with Redgrave as Maurice's forgiving ex-wife Valerie and Griffiths as a fellow grumpy old thesp. Both are fabulous, as is Whittaker in her debut.
But "Venus" orbits around the splendor that is Peter O'Toole. Nominated seven times for the Oscar but never victorious, O'Toole deserves to take home the gold for "Venus." When he received an honorary Oscar in 2003, he almost refused it, claiming he'd like a chance to win "the lovely bugger outright." So far this season, O'Toole has picked up Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations, and an eighth Oscar nod seems to be a lock. But will the Academy please give him his just reward -- before he goes to his own just reward?
Directed by Roger Michell ("Notting Hill") and written by Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"), "Venus" might repel some viewers with its "dirty old man" mentality. Maurice, who admits that "here I am, near the end, and I realize I have no idea who I am," regards Jessie hungrily not so much out of lust but out of self-affirmation. Yes, he's randy yet harmless, because prostate surgery has rendered him impotent.
Though Ian regards Jessie as "pure evil," Maurice immediately decides to make her his reclamation project after she arrives in London to care for her ailing relative. They set out to see the sights, with stops at the Royal Court Theatre and the National Gallery, where Velasquez's "Rokeby Venus" is hung (and which inspires Maurice's nickname for Jessie). The Velasquez masterpiece comes to symbolize Maurice's and Jessie's growing bond. After all, as New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted in a recent review, "The writer Ortega y Gasset got it right. Velasquez's work 'isn't art. It is life itself perpetuated.' "
With her rough edges and tart manner, Jessie embues Maurice with her lifeforce. Though she initially manipulates him into giving her gifts and other material favors, she begins to appreciate his wisdom and worldly experience. Gradually, she allows Maurice a chaste kiss "as long as you don't slobber" and other limited physical liberties. When Maurice leaps at the chance to sniff her neck, his ardor for human contact surprises her. "There really isn't anything else," he responds.
Later, when "Venus" is at her bath, Maurice recites Shakespeare's 18th Sonnet ("Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?"), and the callow Jessie finally realizes the depth of his longing.
That scene and many others reaffirm O'Toole's stature as a giant of the cinema. Everything flows trippingly off the tongue, and his eloquence continues to disarm. Witness his appearance last week on "Late Night With David Letterman," when he flummoxed the usually garrulous host with his first line: "Congratulations on your ... Harry." The awestruck Letterman never regained his composure and just basked in O'Toole's magnificence.
Throughout "Venus," we catch glimpses of his former cinematic selves. There's his leering charm from "What's New, Pussycat?" (1965): "Pussycat from the sky, I can't resist you." The echoes of his grandiloquence in "The Ruling Class" (1972): "I am the electric messiah, the AC/DC God!" And reminders of his greatness, as "Orrence" admits in "Lawrence of Arabia" (1962): "All right! I'm extraordinary! What of it?"
Kureishi's witty, intelligent script gives O'Toole his best vehicle since "My Favorite Year" (1982), and he embraces it with every fiber of his being. He's the last of a dying breed, whose ranks included Richard Burton, Peter Finch and Richard Harris, and that bestows a special poignance upon "Venus."
In one scene, Ian and Maurice visit St. Paul's (aka the Actors' Church) and pay tribute to fallen comrades such as Robert Shaw and Laurence Harvey. Then they dance a slow waltz that serves as an elegy to and celebration of their existence.
Later, Maurice wanders out to an amphitheater where he once performed; while he reflects on his past, Michell fills the soundtrack with dialogue snippets of O'Toole's film roles as he pans the camera around the actor in a majestic yet funereal swoop. It's a moment of utter heartbreak.
Though death hangs over the movie, "Venus" does not believe in tears. Throughout, Michell relies on long shots and subdued lighting as if distancing the action from any hint of sentimentality. He also uses songs by British pop singer Corrine Bailey Rae, especially "Like a Star," to help strike the right emotional tone. Meanwhile, Kureishi's script offers brisk observations and clever asides, as when Ian confesses that "I cried like Antigone" so that Jessie would leave. Later, the always gloomy Ian tells Maurice: "I'm going to die." Maurice retorts: "God will be glad to see you. He liked your Polonius but he thought your Caesar was a bit ... fruity."
Still, intimations of mortality abound. As Maurice reminds Valerie (and Redgrave is luminous in this scene), "We won't live forever. This is my farewell to you."
His bittersweet resignation recalls the last lines from "The Lion in Winter":
Henry II: I hope we never die.
Eleanor: So do I.
Henry II: Do you think there's any chance of it?
With wonderful testaments like "Lawrence," "Lion" and now "Venus," O'Toole will always live on.
ESSENTIAL O'TOOLE
Peter O'Toole was nominated for the Academy Award for the following films:
'LAWRENCE OF ARABIA'
The restored full-length version of David Lean's 1962 masterpiece is a great visionary epic. Peter O'Toole stars as the eccentric Lawrence, who led the desert tribes against the Turks with a combination of flamboyance and charisma. (PG) 4 stars Roger Ebert
'MY FAVORITE YEAR'
Peter O'Toole stars in a tale about an alcoholic British matinee idol who is asked to accept the most terrifying challenge of his career -- an appearance on live television. O'Toole is completely charming, doomed, funny and pathetically invincible. (PG, 1982) 3 and a half stars Ebert
'THE LION IN WINTER'
Grand historical drama set on a Christmas Eve when England's Henry II (Peter O'Toole), eager to choose his heir before he dies, calls a Christmas court. Peter O'Toole's performance is of Oscar quality. (PG, 1968) 4 stars Ebert
VENUS (R)
Critic's rating: 3 and a half stars
-----
Tottering with a flourish
By Liam Lacey (Globe and Mail)
Starring Peter O'Toole, Jodie Whittaker and Vanessa Redgrave
Classification: 14A
By outlasting his peers, 74-year-old Peter O'Toole carries the torch for the whole blazing, hard-living, between-the-wars generation of British Isles actors. No doubt some of the praise for his performance in his latest movie, Venus, is for mere survival, but the part is also his best showcase in years. In what surely isn't a stretch, O'Toole plays Maurice, a rakish once-famous actor now frail and in declining health who can't resist the lure of a last chance at an erotic entanglement.
O'Toole is an actor who, no matter how ravaged, is still so dandyish and ironic he can even totter with a flourish. His performance is the centrepiece for one of those familiar English mentor comedies in the Pygmalion tradition (The History Boys and Driving Lessons are this past year's other examples) where the mentor gains vitality and courage, and the protégé learns about confidence and Art.
Aimed at crowd-pleasing, Venus is often funny, particularly when Maurice and two of his old acting colleagues (Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths) meet for lunch and bitchily count the obit columns for their various colleagues. Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish, particularly when O'Toole's character visits an abbey where the actor's real-life former colleagues, Laurence Harvey and Robert Shaw, are buried.
Fortunately, there is also a secondary layer to Venus that is slightly more dangerous and disquieting. As you might expect from screenwriter Hanif Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, The Mother), sex and power are also themes here. A girl, Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), has been kicked out of her home and sent to care for Maurice's friend Ian (Phillips), but they can't abide each other. She's common, lazy and ignorant, and steals his booze. But when Maurice catches a glimpse of her midriff as she licks the crumbs of a bag of potato chips from her fingers, he decides that he might be of assistance.
He uses not only his charm, but the imbalance of money and power to win her companionship. Now frail beyond his years, O'Toole looks rheumy-eyed, with grey skin and nicotine-stained teeth, and, no matter how sensual and self-mocking he is, there's something of the vampiric in watching him press his lips to this young woman's pink shoulder. Because Maurice is impotent from prostate surgery, Jessie is saved from further indignities, but he still negotiates which body parts he can touch, which he can kiss. As the balance of power teeters, she gets things -- presents, a job as a nude model and awe at the power of the old man's passion.
As the mythically inspired title suggests, this is a movie about those forces that are usually in capital letters: a late encounter with the force of Desire. Maurice takes the girl to the museum, to the theatre, and quotes Shakespeare to her. Through his gaze, she becomes gradually transformed from a non-entity into someone with a link to Beauty.
Maurice isn't completely exculpated by his late-in-life emotional generosity. In the movie's best scenes, he visits his former wife and mother of his three children, played by Vanessa Redgrave. He drops in periodically to give her a handful of cash, a tribute for having abandoned her and their three children years before. In a few economical moments of screen time, Redgrave shows, beneath Valerie's affectionate mockery, a lifetime of hurt and disappointments.
Venus is a movie that comes alive in its performances, and Redgrave's subtlety is its defining grace note, a turn that allows O'Toole's acting to shine that much brighter.
---
Other reviews:
Boston Herald: The ladies' man: O'Toole is master of his game in 'Venus'
Washington Post: O'Toole's 'Venus', a Romance for the Aged
Toronto Star: 'Venus': Still in the Game
San Francisco Chronicle: His favourite years behind him, a Don Juan refuses to act his age
National Post: Still in the Game
"If you haven't read it yet, I recommend to you checking out 
