Rolling Stone Magazine, November 25, 1982
By Cathleen McGuigan

Peter O'Toole doesn't wear the look of a man who has slipped comfortably into middle age. His face has been ravaged by time--it is, as one director put it, a map of pain. Its essential topography hasn't changed in the twenty years that have passed since LAWRENCE OF ARABIA made him a household name: the high cheekbones are there, the long jaw, the graceful nose (nicely crafted by a Royal Navy surgeon long ago after one brawl too many had destroyed its perfect symmetry). The eyes are the startling blue that gave rise to the rumor that he must have been wearing tinted contact lenses as Lawrence. Red patches blotch his chalk-white skin, and a web of fine lines branch around his eyes, tributaries of deeper creases. This face has suffered.

O'Toole turned fifty this summer. Two decades ago, he was hailed as a great theatrical hope who, along with a brace of other young British actors--Richard Burton, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates--promised to fill the shoes of the Oliviers and Gielguds. LAWRENCE OF ARABIA was O'Toole's first major movie role, and it brought his first of six Oscar nominations. His next picture, BECKET (1964) brought the second. These films were huge in scope and rich in pageantry--Lawrence may be the longest speaking part in movie history--and O'Toole's physical energy and extravagant acting syle filled the screen. Small moments were full of nuance: in BECKET, his petulant Henry II would flash from bemused to hurt in an instant. But O'tool's movie career after that had more valleys than peaks. LORD JIM was a well-intentioned failure. WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT?, Wood Allen's first movie script, was a box-office hit, but it was panned by the critics. O'Toole made more than twenty films in as many years, but--except for THE LION IN WINTER in 1968 (his third Oscar nomination) and THE RULING CLASS in 1972 (his fifth)--most were clunkers. Everyone may have forgotten ZULU DAWN, but how does one forget CALIGULA?

He never stopped acting on the stage, but movie audiences began to lose track of him. And privately, his paradise was in serious trouble. He was a notorioius carouser, a glamorous ruffian who brawled in chic watering holes as well as in ordinary pubs and liked to boast of his capacity to drink. He was a mercurial bad boy who once told an interviewer, "There's something in me that after I build something, I knock it down--just for the hell of it." In the mid-Seventies, his twenty-year marriage broke up. Then doctors told him he was dying from an abdominal illness. The glitter had turned to dust. Everything seemed lost. "Even the dog died."

"I've been in the long grass," he says, explaining his absence from the public eye. As he recovered his health, he continued acting, mostly on stage. It was his performance as the megalomaniacal movie director Eli Cross in the film THE STUNTMAN that brought him renewed recognition and his sixth Oscar nomination last year. Then, some 50 million viewers saw his critically acclaimed portrayal of the Roman genearl Silva in the extravagant ABC TV miniseries MASADA. More scripts began to come his way. He made MY FAVORITE YEAR, which recently opened around the country, and critics are ecstatically comparing him to John Barrymore. He is back, bloodied maybe, but unbowed.

In the film, O'Toole plays Alan Swann, an elegant swashbuckling Hollywood star in the Errol Flynn mold, whose career is awash in alcohol. It is 1954, the early days of television, and he has come east to New York to appear on a live show when , suddenly gripped by terror and insecurity, he takes to the bottle. In one climactic scene, O'Toole, dressed in a velvet doublet and tights, weaves and lurches past a line of waiting limos outside Rockefeller Center, clutching a fifth by the neck. He is a funny and convincing drunk.

O'Toole does great physical comedy in MY FAVORITE YEAR--somersaults, pratfalls, knocks on the head-- but it's not slapstick, it's subtler. He was always famous for the preparations he made for a role--he read Jewish law for weeks on a lonely Welsh mountaintop before playing Shylock in MERCHANT OF VENICE; he spent time with Arab nomads in the desert before making LAWRENCE. For one short sword-fighting scene in MY FAVORITE YEAR, took a one-hour lesson every day in using a broadsword and insisted that his coach be flown in from Calfiornia for the few weeks of location shooting in New York. He did all of his own stunts, including those on horseback.In one scene, he falls, dead drunk and rigid, against a bathroom wall so that his forehead strikes the tile. He did the take twenty times without complaint, thumping his head against the tile again and again.

"I wasn't prepared for his comic sense, which is so astute," says director Richard Benjamin. "He would want to take a laugh line out of the script and instead do something that would be deeply funny. He never went for an easy laugh. He's like a great comedian in this."

"There is always an element of self-parody in comedy, " says O'Toole. To draw too much of a parallel between Peter O'Toole and Alan Swann woudl be a great mistake, but they do share on quality: they are both stars. Somehow, people defer to them--they dominate any group, they captivate, they mesmerize. In the movie, during a scene in the Stork Club, Swann is asked to say hello to an adoring middle-aged fan. Instead, he sweeps the lady onto the dance floor, and as he glides with her--his eyes glued to hers, the race of a smile crossing his face--he possesses all the urbane charm of Cary Grant. At one point, a misty-eyes Swann confesses, "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star." O'Toole is that rare creature who is both.

"Peter is a star," says Benjamin. "He's a star in a room, and he's a star on the screen."

After O'Toole finished filming MY FAVORITE YEAR last winter, he took just a short break before he was back in the United States to shoot SVENGALI, a TV movie that will be broadcast next year on CBS. It is an update of George Du Maurier's novel TRILBY. O'Toole plays Anton Bosnyak, a great operatic voice coach--complete with a Hungarian accent--who takes on a young rock-singer pupil, played by Jodie Foster. She, of course, falls in love with him. O'Toole scoffs at the notion that television is beneath his dignity as an actor. "You go where the work is," he says. At the moment, work has taken him back to England and the stage: he is touring in Shaw's MAN AND SUPERMAN, playing Jack Tanner, one of his all-time favorite roles.

O'Toole can only credit his genes for his stamina, "All my athleticism is from Daddy," says O'Toole of Captain Patrick "Spats" O'Toole, who bequeathed to his son his tall, lean frame. He was a "very famous" Irish bookmaker, and after O'Toole's birth, the family (he has one sister, two years his senior) moved frequently, following the racing circuit all over Ireland, then England. They finally settled in a working-class district called Hunslet ("It's since been bulldozed," he says) on the outskirts of Leeds, in Yorkshire, when O'Toole was ten.

With a bookie father and a slum upbringing, it seems safe to assume that O'Toole's roots are working class. This is a great mistake. "Working class?" he asks, incredulous. "The one thing I am not is working class. The one thing my family has never been is working class." How, then, would he describe it? "Upper class," he says firmly. Spats O'Toole, you see, was the black sheep of an Irish Catholic family of great cultivation, a man who preferred sports to the family business. "If you ever wanted to see a lordly man, you should have seen my old man," says O'Toole, leaping to his feet to demonstrate his father's walk--a strut with chin up, chest puffed out. His mother was from an aristocratic Protestant Irish family, he says. His parents met at the running of the 1929 Epsom Derby in England. "My father was known as the king of the Silver Ring in the Twenties," says O'Toole, of his father's career on the racing circuit. "Until I was thirty, I was known as Patrick O'Toole's son."

His birthright may have been silver spoons and the silver ring, but the Leeds neighborhood where he grew up was rough. "I grew up on the streets, though I used to go to school on the other side of the city. The bravest thing I ever did in my life was to walk through that district at the age of eleven, when I was a Little Lord Fauntleroy in a kilt," he says. Three of his playmates grew up to be hanged for murder: one strangled a girl in a lover's quarrel; one killed a man during a robbery; another did in a warden in South Africa with a pair of shears. It was, he says, a heavy bunch: "I learned to box with
gentlemen, but I learned to fight with them."

The boys played rugby, but they had no playgound--they played on cinders--and had no ball. "We'd used a loaf of bread, but you couldn't drop it. A loaf of bread was a lot. One learned to pass it at fingertips, so the bread was never damaged and never dropped. You had to be nimble on your feet, for if you fell or were tackled on cinders, you knew about it."

Like a lot of good Catholic children, O'Toole was an altar boy and flirted with the notion of the priesthood. He recalls a favorite Jesuit tutor he had who peppered his speech with the word bloody and said that there was more faith in honest doubt than in reciting a thousand Our Fathers. Once, on a weekend retreat, he saw the priest walking alone in the garden, saying his breviary and smoking a cigarette. O'Toole worked up the courage to ask him, "Forgive me, Father, but is it all right to smoke while you're doing your breviary, while you're involved in the mysteries of Christ?" The Priest replied, "Oh, dear, you don't know how to phrase a question. If I had asked the same question when I was your age, I wouldn't have said, `Is it all right if I smoke while I pray?' I would have said, `Is it all right to pray when I smoke?" O'Toole smiles.

Now he is a retired Catholic, a faithless man. And yet, he goes to church quite a lot. "I love to pop in on odd days," he says. "I'm quite sure that some awe is still inside me, though it has a great deal to do with childhood and how I used to find peace and solemnity. Churches are usually quiet, lovely places where one can sit for a minute--and smoke a cigarette."

O'Toole had a stab at journalism and a stint in the Royal Navy before he enrolled in the Royal Academy. "I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when I went into RADA," he says. His classmates included Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford, but when O'Toole is asked to name the greatest actors of his generation he lists John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Alec Guiness--all twenty years his senior. "They are my contemporaries, really," he insists.

He had a solid five years onstage--at the Bristol Old Vic, London's Royal Court and Stratford-Upon-Avon--before he started doing movies. He was in London, doing a play called THE LONG AND THE SHORT AND THE TALL, for which he won the drama critics actor of the year award in 1959. "Robert Shaw had the dressing room with the loo and I didn't," he explains. "I had the one with the big sink." One night after the performance, he was standing in his dressing room, peeing in the sink, when he heard an unmistakable voice behind him. "Hello," said the voice. "my name in Katherine Hepburn..."

Hepburn was in London filming SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, and she commended the performance of this young actor O'Toole to the movie's producer, Sam Spiegel. Spiegel called O'Toole and asked him to take ascreen test. A silver Jaguar arrived--driven, O'Toole recalls, by a particularly surly chauffeur--to ferry him to Shepperton Studios. There, a makeup man asked him if he wanted to darken his hair--no, he did not--and a wardrobe mistress brought him a white coat. He was puzzled, then realized the set was a doctor's office. Holding an X-ray as a prop, O'Tool's screen test consisted of his own impromptu wisecrack: "Mrs. Spiegel, your son will never play the violin again." The producer was not amused. He had wanted O'Toole to stand by for a weekly fee, ready to take over Mongomery Clift's role as a doctor in the film; he apparently doubted that the oft-ailing Clift would be able to finish it. The unfriendly driver who had fetched O'Toole worked for Clift and realized a coup was in the making. But O'Toole did not stand by, and later, the chauffeur took him to meet Clift. "He was lovely," says O'Toole. "We laughed a lot."

Two years later, he was cast as Lawrence--after Marlon Brando and Albert Finney had turned the part down--and before the film was even released, word had spread of O'Toole's brilliant performance. Next, he went into production for BECKET with Richard Burton. In the film, Henry II recalls the early days of his friendship with Thomas Beckett: "As usual, we'd been drinking and wenching about town..."; the publicity mills were eager to churn out parallel stuff about the supposed off-set carousing of O'Toole and Burton.

All through the Sixties, O'Toole's antics made the news. He scuffled with he paparazzi in the wee hours on the Via Veneto in Rome. He punched a French count in a chic Paris bistro. After the filming of THE LION IN THE WINTER, when O'Toole sued because he had not been paid the full amount due him, producer Joesph E. Levine retorted that O'Toole's "discraceful conduct" had added to the film's costs, and that he'd been booted out of two hotels when he became excessively drunk." (O'Toole won the suit.)

He like to tell of a visit he once paid to John Huston at the director's home in Ireland. The two had planned to spend the next day on horseback, but when O'Toole woke up, it was pouring rain. Looming over his bed was the figure of Houston, wrapped in a green kimono, muttering, "Day for getting drunk, kid." For breakfast, they had a bottle of whiskey and ended up on horse anyway, still dressed in their pajamas, tearing through the countryside in the torrential rain, trying to get a good shot at a hare.

By the time O'Toole was approaching forty, things had begun to sour. Besides the abuse heaped on his body by hard work and hard play, he had a string of commercially unsuccessful films: GOODBYE MR. CHIPS (his fourth Oscar nomination), COUNTRY DANCE, UNDER MILK WOOD, MAN OF LA MANCHA.

"I was the golden boy," he says, trying to explain what went wrong. "From the age of sixteen, I couldn't put a foot wrong, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried. I had a lot of bumps. I look at it now, and it's almost as if it were inevitable. Funny. Lots of things came easily. Into the best repertory company on earth. And into the best Shakespearean stuff and the best of cinema. And luck. Noel Coward used to say there's no such thing as a star. You've got to have the right part in the right play at the right time, and you've got to be good at that."

"I began to reconsider lots of things," he says. "I found I was at my worst physcially, emotionally, professionally--and I didn't care for it. I found it difficult, as an actor, to retain the freshness."

So when he turned forty, he decided to give up everything and go to the west of Ireland, where his family had some property. He did nothing put plant trees and sewer pipes for a whole year. After his sabbatical, he assembled a repertoire of plays and performed them at the Bristol Old Vic. "The work was better than ever," he says, but fate wasn't finished with him.

He had always had pain in his gut, ever since his early twenties; at various times, he'd been diagnosed as having ulcers or kidney trouble--a whole gamut of stuff--so he was used to it. This time is was different. The doctors said he had "a sort of form of malignancy." It was 1975. He was forty-three years old. He was told he was going to die. Somehow, he recovered after surgery and says he is now completely cured: "It proved inconvenient to a few people, but
there you go."

Two years later, there was another scare--this time, it was a strange blood disorder. He refused to believe it was fatal, and he was right.

While he was battling illness, he was losing on other fronts. His wife, the Welsh actress Sian Phillips (she played the evil Queen Livia in the MASTERPIECE THEATER series I, CLAUDIUS), left him. Their daughters, Kate, now twenty-two, and Pat, now nineteen, continued to live with him--as did his mother-in-law, whom he affectionately calls "the old Welsh cow." He and Sian were formally divorced in 1979, and though he never sees her, he is gallant in speaking of her. "Of course, there were agonies of bitterness," he says, "but that's irrelevant. All that is important is that for sixteen years, I had an extraordinarily good wife and splendid mother for my daughters, and that ended. The rest is boring."

O'Toole once said in an interview that Sian had understood his need to be alone and had never taken offense. "I've always been a loner," he says. "I love company. I'm very gregarious. But I love to be alone. Always have." Now, he sees remarriage as possible but unlikely: "It's very difficult. It would take an exceptional woman." Pressing the question makes him testy. "Look," he says, "I have an open pair of arms and an open mind--and low expectations."

He also lost both his parents: his adored father died in 1974 at a hearty eighty-six, struck by a car. His mother died last year.

"In the last seven years, everything that could happen has happened. My father, my mother, my wife, everything," he says and laughs a low, black laugh. "It was biblical, hilarious."

SVENGALI director Anthoney Harvey sees a striking change in O'Toole since he first directed him in THE LION IN WINTER over fourteen years ago. "Peter's much more mellow," he says. "The anger is still there, of course, but there's a gentleness, an inner strength. You can sit and have long talks with him. You couldn't do that before."

Always a larger-than-life performer, O'Toole now seems to have a new depth, a greater edge. Maybe because he has been to a place where there is nothing left to lose, he can take the deepest plunge into a role, tackle it with abandon. "He takes great chances," says Harvey. "But he's saved by his own sense of the ridiculous. He's not afraid to make an ass of himself."

When filming, O'Toole conserves his energy with great care, rarely socializing with the cast or crew or hanging about the set between his scenes. He will eat a solitary lunch on a tray in his dressing room, and it will be a meal for an athlete in training: soup, steak, vegetables, milk. Afterward, he always sleeps for twenty minutes.

He says he doesn't drink at all anymore. He stopped voluntarily, fearing that he might one day become addicted and not be able to stop; he has watched that happen to so many others.

One day on the set of SVENGALI, a shot was being set up for a dinner scene between O'Toole and Jodie Foster: two places were set, candles lit, a bottle of wine put on the table. Someone asked the prop man if he was sure the wine bottle had been thoroughly rinsed before the colored water was poured in. A few months before, during the filming of MY FAVORITE YEAR, O'Toole had been shooting a scene in which he wakes up to find himself in bed with a stewardess and immediately downs one of those airline-size bottles of Scotch. A whole case of little bottles had been prepared for the scene, each one emptied of liquor, filled with colored water and carefully resealed so that the seal would crack open. Somehow, a real bottle got in whith the surrogates, and during one take, O'Toole drank it. It made him so ill he had to leave the set for several hours.

O'Toole never apologizes for the rowdy behavior of his salad days. "What we did then is what everybody does now," he says, holding a cigarette in his long fingers, the nails bitten to the quick. "In those days, one didn't say, `fuck' or wear long hair or roister about in pubs. It wasn't done. And where Finchy [Peter Finch] and myself and Richard Harris and Burton were reared, our behavior is the norm." He maintains, too, that they didn't drink while they worked. "Our hours as actors are absurd, be it stage or cinema. It's impossible to be drunk or stoned and perform at high definition. It's impossible. So the carousers that I knew--Fincy, Bob Shaw, Richard, any of them--were practically monkish during the week. Then came what we used to call collier's night out. And we went whoopee. And if we weren't working, we went whoopee, whoopee, whoopee. Yes, we had a ball."

He says he can still have a jolly good time, stay up late and carry on, but he will likely be ordering tea. He feels at home in bars, and when staying in Manhattan, he enjoys slipping into a little pub around the corner from his favorite hotel on the Upper East Side. But the old drinking cronies have mostly fallen away, many of them men who scarcely survived into their second half-century. For O'Toole, there have been more and more losses.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

[Sung in CYMBELINE, IV.ii.2 58 ff.]

"We've been popping up and down a lot in the pulpit of St. Paul's, the actor's church, in London, with that little bit of Shakespeare," says O'Toole, drawing on a cigarette. It makes a nice eulogy. O'Toole has seen his friends die like flies, as he puts it, in the last five years. He ticks them off on his fingers: "Robert--one of my closest friends--Robert Shaw. Finchy--I mean, I can't believe that Finchy's not going to walk through that door now. I just cannot believe that Finchy's dead. I refuse to accept it. Larry--Laurence Olivier. My closest friend on earth was a doctor of medicine who died choking on a crumb. From our dressing room at Stratford that we all shared, I'm the only living member. Max Adrian, Jack Gregson. All gone.

He is still chums with Richard Harris, but he hasn't been close to Richard Burton in years. "All of us adored Richard," he says, recalling the latter. "He was the least publicity-conscious, the least film staresque, the least entourage-cluttered." O'Toole didn't realize anything was amiss in his friendship with Burton until he was in Rome about ten years ago and discovered that Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were staying in his hotel. He tried to telephone Richard but couldn't get beyond the bodyguard or secretary who answered the phone, for by then, according to O'Toole, Burton and Taylor carted quite an entourage around whith them. For two days, Burton didn't return his call, and then one of the retainers came with a message and led O'Toole to a clandestine meeting in the corner of a dark bar tucked in the back of the hotel. Elizabeth, said Burton, did not apparove of their racing around together. That was it. "Goodbye. I didn't see him again for many years," says O'Toole with a sigh. "Poor soul."

So O'Toole has survived. Stopped drinking. He still smokes his unfiltered Gauloise cigarettes, one after the other, but he puts each one in a long black holder, equipped with a filter, as one concession to health.

You would not expect to find a star, a great actor, waiting for Godot, but in a way, he is. Beckett's play is a touchstone for O'Toole. He finds the most amazing example of courage in the character of Pozzo, the brutalizing squire making his journey with his serf Lucky. Pozzo is blind, Lucky is dumb, and the character named Vladimir (whom O'Toole has played in several productions of the play) asks Pozzo, "What do you do when you fall far from help?" And Pozzo says, "We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!"

"On!" says O'Toole. "That's all I know."

At the age of eighteen, O'Toole wrote in a notebook, "I will not be a common man because it is my right to be an uncommon man...I do not crave security." He has certainly fulfilled his adolescent prophecy: he is an uncommon man playing uncommon men, and he lives the insecure life of a true trouper--traveling from London to New York to Hollywood to Ireland to the desert and other locales, not all of them exotic. He will turn up on Hartford Connecticut, on a Sunday afternoon to narrate PETER AND THE WOLF with a local symphony. Or he will suddenly appear on a television screen, paddling a dugout canoe down the Okavango River in Africa, the ubiquitous black cigarette holder clamped firmly in his teeth, as Curt Gowdy gives America another chapter of THE AMERICAN SPORTSMAN.

When he travels, he is not entourage-cluttered. He is accompanied by an old Irish friend, and perhaps one of his daughters will join them. He doesn't have managers or press agents hovering about. He packs a few books--for someone brimming with odd bits of knowledge, he actually reads erratically--but he always carries a copy of H.L. Mencken. He will pick tapes for his Sony Walkman--at the moment, he favors Pagannini violin concertos performed by Henryk Szeryng--and packs of Gauloises and several tins of Valda pastilles, little black eucalyptus candies to suck on when he's not sucking on Gauloises.

O'Toole still keeps the rambling eighteenth-century house in Hampstead in London that he bought with the first windfall of stardom. But when he wants to hide, he goes to his house in Ireland, on a spit of land on the coast of Connemara. It is strange country: an hour away is terrain so heartless that only peat can grow there, yet the warmth of the North Atlantic Drift makes the coast hospitable to lush flowers and palm trees. From his land, O'Toole can see the strand that John Synge had in mind when he wrote the last part of PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD, a play in which O'Toole has starred during his long association with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. He counts on the people in the nearest village to protect his privacy. If a stranger stops in the butcher shop and asks where Peter O'Toole lives, Paddy Mahon will wipe his bloodied hands on his apron, scratch his head and say something like, "Would he be a young fellow?"

Still, there are the demons. "There isn't a day of my life," says O'Toole, "not one day, not one, that I don't wake up in the morning with such a sense of futility. Every single day. It lasts for about ten minutes, that's all. I think it's a little bit like immunization. It's built-in. I'm immune to the great failures and defeats. I think one should keep one's expectations low." Returning to WAITING FOR GODOT, he explains why Samuel Beckett called the character Lucky: "I suppose he's lucky because he's got so few expectations. Or maybe he's lucky because he's got nothing to say in the second act."

O'Toole would reason that happines is strictly coincidental with what is going on at the moment. The word makes him think on one of Al Capp's creations. "Remember the Shmoos?" he asks. "Those sort of protoplasmic, pear-shaped things that wobbled and bobbled about? They died of laughter. They ate each other. And they could change sex at any time. They were happy, I would say."

One late winter day, O'Toole was standing on the end of Pier 50 on the Hudson River in New York in a mean wind to shoot a scene for SVENGALI. He was wearing a greatcoat and a Russian-style hat made of Persian lamb. The film crew was shivering, but he seemed impervious, ready to endure endless tasks. As Anton Bosnyak, he stared deep into the icy river, alone in thought. Surely the character was thinking of jumping.

O'Toole says he himself has never contemplated suicide, despite bouts of depression, the "black dog," as he calls it. He's tried psychiatry--"I've tried practically everything"--but if he is withholding the key to an imprisoned soul, he doesn't see it. When asked if anyone in the world really knows him, he laughs his high laugh and is silent for a long moment. "I think probably my mother and father had a better hint of the plot than anyone else," he says. "My sister once turned round to the very famous actress I was about to work with for a lot of months and said to her, `At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is?'" O'Toole laughs again. "`What goes on in there, in the fucking thing he calls a mind?'

"I assure you it is not a guardedness, in any sense at all. It isn't. For I am unguarded. I embellish a bit...If I am intensely private, it is so built-in that I am not conscious of it." That is the real enigma of the Irish. They don't know how else to be. Tennessee Williams called it solitary confinement for life in one's own skin.

O'Toole offers as one clue to himself a notice that was pinned to a jacket of his when it came back from the cleaners. "I'm going to put it on my tombstone," he says. It was from the Sycambre Cleaners, and it said, `It distresses us to return work which is not perfect,'" This time he laughs very loud.