Peter O'Toole : chronical

Anecdotes regarding Peter O'Toole - personal recollections, chance meetings, autograph sessions, openings, etc. - all go here.. Please feel free to contribute! Submissions should be sent to hame@realitymouse.com.
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The Young O'Toole - Episodes From the Life. (added June 5/00)
stories from O'Toole's naval service in the 50's. By John Howard, EGG and the Remnants of Nan 12.

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From the Web:

"Tipping the Glass to Mr. O'Toole" - Meeting Mr. O'Toole at the stage door...
May 17/95 appearance on Letterman - Report from two audience members.
Peter O'Toole's opinions on smoking - in Cigar Afficionado Magazine

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From Marie Shively:

"Frances Tomelty played Lady Macbeth opposite Peter O'Toole. The production caused enormous controversy, with the critics uniformly blasting O'Toole's production and the public loving it."

1. 2.
Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version.

Sting:"I'm not going to miss a night. It's the most exciting thing I've seen. I love Peter O'Toole. I love him dearly. I think he's a great star ...I don't know much about 'Macbeth' but I do know about charisma - and he's got it."

Copeland, Miles. The Police:A Visual Documentary.
Omnibus Press 1981

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I just wanted to relate my brush with greatness. I was attending a convention in Toronto several years ago and had some time to kill so I went to a mall shopping. I saw a line coming from a bookstore, and without knowing who was signing books,I got in line. When I got to the front, who was signing, but Peter O'Toole! That's how I received my autographed copy of his autobiography, quite by coincidence.

Dan Wood
Milwaukee, WI
USA

From John M. of Hermosa Beach, California: (added March 24, 1999)

About 8 years ago, I was working at the Hilton at Short Hills (in Short Hills, NJ) and it was there that I met Peter O'Toole. I was a host at the restaurant there and he approached the podium and asked for a table for three in the smoking section. I was absolutely amazed. There, standing before me, was a Hollywood legend! Since the age of 12, I have been a fan of his, so this encounter was amazing for me (I was 20 yrs old at the time). Back to my story, I seated him and two people from Drew University (one of the better Shakespearian acting schools in the US) at the table.

As they left, I said "I'm sorry to disturb you but may I have your autograph?"

He said, "No need to be sorry...it's no insult."

He put his autograph down and now I have it framed in my room. The next day I saw him again and, boy, was he drunk...as well he should be. Flynn, Burton, Harris, and O'Toole are/were unique...they just don't make actors like them any longer.

I have a friend who saw him in a train station in London. He was sitting at a bar waiting for a train...I'd imagine he was drunk. Anyway, he was just sitting at this bar looking as if he wanted to talk, when the friend she was travelling with just asked Peter how he was doing. Apparently, Peter looked at both of them and said "I feel like a Sheffield dog shitting pen knives." After that, they enjoyed a very charming conversation. No kidding...what an off the wall thing to say. I believe this story and I could see O'Toole saying something like that.

From Alfonso Formet, Miami FL: (added March 14, 1999)

When Peter O'Toole did "Uncle Vanya" at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. I had the great good luck to see him give a beautiful and richly textured performance of one of my all time favorite pieces of theatre. I was fortunate enough to have a seat three rows from the stage. As I sat in the darkness with my legs crossed and my playbill on my lap Mr. O'Toole approached the front of the stage almost directly in front of me to deliver a rather long and emotional passage. As the emotion rose to a dramatic pitch his voice did also and with it the spit began to fly. At one point a drop of spit landed on the program on my lap. That was the closest I have ever come to this screen legend.

From John M.:

From The Detroit News

O'Toole: Pays price for excess

For Peter O'Toole, giving up drinking was not so much a case of shouldn't, but couldn't. "My health was affected and it was actually more difficult to go on drinking than to give it up," the star of Lawrence of Arabia told The Sunday Express in London. In an interview published Sunday, O'Toole, 63, said he stopped drinking in 1977 when his excesses landed him in the hospital, close to death. As to the critics who say hard living ruined his promising career, O'Toole sees their point. "Regrets, ah," he said. "Only French singers don't have regrets."

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From the August 8th 95 People Magazine Daily on Pathfinder.com.

Clash Of The Thespians

Michael Caine and Richard Harris trade abuse

If they were American, they'd be at the "yo' mama" stage already. But they're British, and film stars to boot, so Michael Caine and Richard Harris fight as only highbrows can - by exchanging choice insults in the pages of London's respected Sunday Times. The flap started with a feature on Caine in last week's Sunday Times Magazine, in which the actor claimed that the other top British actors of his generation - including Richard Burton, Peter O'Toole, and Richard Harris - "were all drunks." Caine also deemed himself "a British Gene Hackman, the star character actor with a lot to teach the younger generation."

Harris shot back with a 1,200-word letter, printed in this week's Sunday Times, calling Caine "an over-fat, flatulent 62-year-old windbag" with "vast limitations." Caine was foolish to compare himself to Hackman, said Harris, who, as English Bob, was viciously beaten by Hackman's Oscar-winning Little Bill Daggett in 1992's "Unforgiven." "Hackman is an intimidating and dangerous actor," wrote Harris from his home in the Bahamas. "Mr. Caine is about as dangerous as Laurel or Hardy, or indeed both, and as intimidating as Shirley Temple."

Nor should Caine fancy himself among the best British actors, Harris wrote: "Any suggestion that he has eclipsed the names of Finney, O'Toole, Burton, Bates, Smith and Courtenay is tantamount to prophesying that Rin-Tin-Tin will be solemnised beyond the memory of Brando." Harris also stated that Caine's "drunk" comment insulted the memory of Richard Burton. Harris' drinking sessions with Burton and O'Toole were "a voyage most great actors embarked on where, on accasion, they might touch the Gods to ignite their craft." If Caine had "indulged in a few trips to his local boozer via a taxi, rather than breezing by the common man . . . in his fleet of chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces, he might have achieved a modicum of immortality in his career."-Samantha Miller

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Peter O'Toole: a poem by Peter Schuyff

Peter O'Toole just now was being interviewed mostly
about some facination he has with Adolf Hitler. He's so beautifully skinny,
wearing some pastel and striped get up and he's dipping his tongue down out
of his mouth just past his lips, not like there's a crumb on his chin, not
because of any appetite but rather like a snake, like his mouth is dry and
cotton from too much codein, like he's kidding about something deep and secret.
I'm watching only his mouth, not really listening but then he describes the
smell of flashlight batteries baking in an oven. It's a childhood memory.
Seems that if we bake flashlight batteries in the oven, some extra life can
be squeezed out of them. A European wartime thing. It really floored me,
the way he talked about what I imagine he remembers as a sinister smell.
I've forgotten the exact words he used. I want to hear him say that baking
batteries smelled like copper. That's how those hard boiled pulp writers
described the smell of blood. Copper. For a few seconds that smell of baking
flashlight batteries seemed natural and creepy like after a bath pruned fingers
at bedtime or steamed up windows between me and a cold night.

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Peter on riding a camel: "A few years ago, during an interview, I asked actor Peter O'Toole what it had been like to ride a camel pell-mell across the desert in making the film Lawrence of Arabia. "It was ferocious," said O'Toole, who is a former boxer and navy rugby player. In studying for the role of Lawrence, O'Toole had spent agood deal of time with the Bedouins who had been hired to appear in the film. "Getting to know the Bedouins," said O'Toole, "was one of the better things in my life." Many of them, as it turned out, were descendants of men who had actually ridden with Lawrence. The grandson of Auda, the fierce Howeitat chieftain who had been Lawrence's sometime ally, took O'Toole under his wing and taught him how to ride. O'Toole's co-star Omar Sharif had also found camel riding rather arduous. To explain, O'Toole told a story about Sharif, who was once asked to make a film about skiing. "Omar was very athletic. He had played soccer for Egypt; he had run the 100-yard dash. But he didn't fancy skiing. They put him on skis, and he wobbled about. He told them, 'I may not be able to ski, but I can ride a racing camel.' That's sort of how I felt about it, too." (Source)

On being turned down for work (pre-LOA) by Sam Speigel: His rages we're the stuff of legend. He told Peter O'Toole that he would never be allowed to work for him, ever, because during a screen test, O'Toole turned to face the camera and ad libbed, "It's all right, Mrs. Spiegel, your son will never play the violin again." (The producer could forgive when he had no choice: O'Toole ended up starring in the immensely successful Lawrence of Arabia.) (Source)

How O’Toole Came to be Cast as Lawrence of Arabia

from “Lawrence of Arabia:The 30th Anniversary Pictoral History”
by L.Robert Morris and Lawrence Raskin 1992 an Anchor Book Published by Doubleday
ISBN 0-385-42478-7/0-385-42479-5 (paperback)

pg.40:
“Lean recalled, “When (Albert) Finney tuend it down, I went to every cinema in London. I used to go to three shows a day, watching actors. And then one day I saw this film, The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, and there was Peter. On the screen, I saw this chap playing a sort of silly-assed Englishman, with a raincoat, casting for trout. And I said, ‘That’s it. I’m going to cast him.’
Asked what it was that attracted him to O’Toole, Lean remarked, ‘One of the firs things about movie acting is a screen presence. Now don’t ask me what a screen presence is. You know, you can put somebody up on the screen, and some people come -VOOM- out of it.’
In 1960, Peter O’Toole-at twenty-seven years of age-was playing at Stratford-upon-Avon in three roles: Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and Thersites, in Troilus and Cressida. Previously, in 1954-55, O’Toole had studied at London’s world-famous Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. He then joined the Bristol Old Vic, a repertory company. In the next three years, he played some seventy-five roles, finally making his London debut in the Bristol Company’s West End productions of Oh, Mein Papa in 1957 and Hamlet in 1958. O’Toole achieved his greatest stage success when he won the London Critic’s Award for Best Actor in the year, 1959, in The Long and the Tall and the Short, presented at London’s Royal Court theatre. It was this play, seen by Sam Spiegel, which had prompted O’Toole’s disasterous Suddenly Last Summer screen test.
In London, O’Toole also met and, in late 1959, married Welsh actress Sian Phillips. Their first child-Kate-was born the next year. The O’Tooles formed a production company, Keep Films Ld. It was their American business advisor, Jules Buck, who then convinced O’Toole that his nose should be altered if all avenues toward international stardom were to be kept open.
For Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence screen test, David Lean-in contrast to the Finny extravaganza-set up a relatively modest one-day affair. O’Toole had dyed his hair blond and shaved off the beard he word as Stratford’s Shylock. In his ‘Arabian scene,” he wore brown Arab robes, with a gold brain, supplied on short notice by Anthony Nutting. They had been given to Nutting by King Saud, and had also been used in Finney’s test. Never worn by Nutting, the robes were eventually cut into squares by his wife for their dog to sit on.
David Lean recalled the test: “We went onto the set at Elstree, with some sand and desert backing, and Peter put on the clothes, and soon as he came on, he was wonderful.” Halfway through the test, Lean stopped the cameras, saying, “No use shooting another foot of film. The boy IS Lawrence.”
On November 20, 1960...Sam Spiegel and Columbia announced to the press that, finally, the star role in their epic was cast: Peter O’Toole was the man for the job.”