Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  It was a straightforward birth, a nun administered some chloroform and within seconds Siân was with the fairies. When she woke a baby girl was handed to her and there was a room full of peering faces, some familiar, some not. O’Toole was there, smiling and holding a bottle of champagne, so too Peter Finch and Jules Buck and his wife Joyce. For Siân the celebration was all over in a blur, and O’Toole had vanished, too, back to England to finish Becket. But he’d left a gift, the offer of a job on the film. It wasn’t a great part, Glenville needed an actress who could speak Old Welsh and sing. Siân was happy to do it.

  O’Toole went on record that Becket was amongst the happiest professional experiences of his career. ‘We laboured like lunatics, but I never laughed so much in my life.’ Clearly the bond he developed with Burton over the course of filming greatly enhanced the on-screen friendship between Henry and Becket, with both actors bringing homoerotic undertones to the relationship that was missing between Olivier and Quinn on stage. O’Toole had by far the showier role, full of histrionic colour, while Burton’s performance is calm and restrained. O’Toole is like an incendiary bomb turning the King, in the words of the New York Times review, ‘into a petulant, frightened neurotic’.

  Tolerant of their drinking, Glenville called O’Toole and Burton’s approach to the film ‘sophisticated, well informed and hard working. Each welcomed and admired the expertise of the other.’ No wonder he and so many of his fellow directors preferred classically-trained actors, thought Glenville: ‘Would there were more of them!’ Glenville himself came from the world of acting and the theatre and had decided to shoot the film in sequence, a method rare in cinema but one which O’Toole particularly found helpful for his performance. It was work ‘the disciplined old-fashioned way’. For example, the complicated scene where Becket and Henry meet on horseback on a desolate beach was rehearsed as if it were a play, solidly all morning. When they broke for lunch the studio executives were pulling their hair out that Glenville hadn’t shot a single frame of film. Returning to the set Glenville shouted action, and the five-minute scene was wrapped up in a single take.

  When Becket opened jointly in New York and London it was politely received and did well at the box office. This thinking man’s epic was awarded an impressive eleven Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. In the end only Edward Anhalt’s screenplay merited a prize. Ironic since O’Toole claimed, ‘Practically everything the scriptwriter put in I took out again and got back to Anouilh who, incidentally, approved.’

  Again, O’Toole was rewarded with a Best Actor nomination, as was Burton, but he thought it unlikely either would win. ‘I think we’ll knock each other off in the voting. Perhaps they could cut an Oscar in half.’ In the end they lost out to Rex Harrison for My Fair Lady. O’Toole did, however, win a Golden Globe as the Best Motion Picture Actor in a Drama.

  Back in Hampstead, the O’Toole residence had increased in number significantly, not just the two girls but Siân’s mother Mamgu, who had come to live with them. Just days before the London opening of Lawrence of Arabia Siân’s father died. She received the news late in the evening when O’Toole wasn’t there. She’d no idea where he was, a not uncommon situation. That’s the way O’Toole liked to live, he hated to be contactable and never took a front-door key. Many was the time when Siân would be woken in the early hours by O’Toole hammering on the door to be let in. ‘I wasn’t sure if this was a pose or a genuine wish to maintain a measure of liberation in a life that was becoming more and more constrained by approaching fame.’

  Leaving Kate with her nanny, and a note for O’Toole, Siân took the train back home. Realizing what had happened, O’Toole dropped all publicity duties and hired a cab to drive him to Wales. His sheer presence seemed to lift the gloom and when things had calmed down it was decided that Mamgu would come and live with them in London. It was a beneficial arrangement all round, Mamgu looked after the children and reigned over the kitchen. She also adored O’Toole and often stayed up late with him talking or playing Scrabble. She’d make midnight snacks for him or cook breakfast for the drunken refugees from the previous night’s party.

  At this stage Mamgu was oblivious to O’Toole’s sporadic drunken rages. Siân never feared for her own safety during these episodes, ‘but the noise and the destruction terrified me’. Determined that her mother, and above all the children, never heard them, nor the rows, she had green-baize-lined double doors put in to act as a form of sound-proofing. Siân didn’t need anyone telling her these were extraordinary measures, but perhaps recalled the recent words of Kenneth Griffith, ‘Do you really think you can sustain being Mrs Edmund Kean?’

  ELEVEN

  ‘If you want to know what it’s like to be lonely, really lonely,’ O’Toole told a reporter once, ‘try playing Hamlet.’ Burton hadn’t much enjoyed the experience either, and over a boozy lunch one afternoon on the Becket set announced, ‘Let’s be masochists. Let’s do Hamlet again and get it out of our systems.’ They drew up an audacious plan, one of them would perform it on the London stage, the other on Broadway. They flipped a coin: O’Toole got London. Next their choice of director, Gielgud or Olivier. Again the decision was made on the toss of a coin. Burton won and chose Gielgud.

  In order to fulfil his end of the bargain O’Toole set up a meeting with Olivier at his Mayfair offices. Larry wasn’t interested at all in directing O’Toole in a short West End run of Hamlet, he had something much bigger in mind. In the last few months he had been chosen as the first artistic director of the National Theatre, an institution a hundred years in the making. Since the late 1800s cultural and political figures from Dickens and Churchill to George Bernard Shaw had bemoaned the fact that Britain had no National Theatre of its own and something really ought to be done about it. In 1962, after several false starts, a board was constituted to run a National Theatre Company and a derelict scrap of land on the South Bank next door to the Royal Festival Hall was earmarked as a perfect site. Nobody was surprised when Olivier was chosen to spearhead the enterprise, given his status and international reputation, combined with the fact that he was the last of the great ‘actor-managers’, a breed that stretched back to the likes of Kean, Garrick and Henry Irving.

  It was also assumed that Olivier himself would headline the company’s inaugural production, but snaring O’Toole was too good an opportunity to miss. He would direct O’Toole as Hamlet not amidst the bright lights of London’s West End but to launch the new National Theatre. Recognizing the historical import of what was being suggested, O’Toole readily agreed and they shook hands on the deal.

  With construction of the new theatre on the South Bank years away (that was officially launched in 1976 with a production of, yes, Hamlet, with, guess who – Albert Finney), the governors of the Old Vic in Waterloo, scene of some of Olivier’s early stage triumphs, agreed to offer their theatre as a temporary base. Olivier immediately set about making renovations, including putting in a revolving stage and taking out the first two rows of the stalls so that the stage could be extended beyond the proscenium arch. Into this building-site chaos came the Hamlet rehearsals. Max Adrian, cast as Polonius, remembered starting work while ‘the whole place was still littered with rubble and mortar and there was a bloody enormous hole in one wall which allowed the wind to blow straight in from the Waterloo Road.’

  As rehearsals got underway it became clear that O’Toole and Olivier did not share the same artistic vision. ‘Peter was like the young buck and Sir Laurence the old bull,’ recalls Rosemary Harris, who had been cast as Ophelia. ‘Peter had played a very successful Hamlet at Bristol and must have thought, oh I’ll just polish it up a bit and do it again, but Sir Laurence seemed to have different ideas about it so they did cross swords a few times. It was clear that they were tolerating each other. But both of them couldn’t have been under more pressure.’

  One battle was over whether O’Toole, as he’d done at Bristol, should play the role in full beard: ‘Why should I be the only man in Elsino
re with a razor blade?’ Olivier baulked at the suggestion and made his star perform not only clean-shaven but in bleached blond hair and dressed in what O’Toole derogatorily called his ‘little Lord Fauntleroy suit’. Olivier also insisted on the uncut version, five bloody hours on stage, as opposed to the cut version O’Toole had so much success with previously.

  While O’Toole held Olivier in the highest reverence (‘I mean, he’s done it. He’s sat on the top of Everest and waved down at the Sherpas’) he simply refused to bow down and bathe in his living legend-hood. More than anything he resented Olivier’s belief that because ‘I know my way about the map of Hamlet much more than you possibly do’ this entitled him to dictate every nuance of his performance. As William Gaskill, who worked under Olivier at the National, observed, ‘He tried to make O’Toole act Hamlet as he, Olivier, would have done.’ Well, O’Toole was having none of it and fought his corner through sheer bloody mindedness. ‘Peter wasn’t too keen on changing his performance,’ observed Rosemary Harris. ‘And I got the feeling that Peter pretty much stuck to his guns and did what he was comfortable with and Sir Laurence in the end sort of shrugged and gave up and realised that there was no point. I thought Peter was giving a wonderful performance, really.’

  Years later O’Toole labelled Olivier ‘a tiny, strange, vain fucker. He used to lecture me: “Do you think it’s a good idea to have a drink after the show?” For fuck’s sake!’ It’s true Olivier could be overbearingly rigid when it came to direction, but he was also capable of kindness and encouragement and had much of the cast eating out of his hands from the get go, simply because he exuded such massive self-confidence from the mere fact that he had nothing to prove to anyone. He was, however, more than capable of coming up with his fair share of crackpot ideas. On Hamlet, he wanted the ghost to be a dummy which flew on wires. ‘So the actors came on and then this thing would fly across the stage,’ recalls Gaskill. ‘And we said, “You can’t do that, Larry. It won’t work.” ’

  In that inaugural company, Olivier had cleverly sprinkled experienced players such as Michael Redgrave amongst a largely unproven group of young thoroughbreds bristling to make an impact: Robert Stephens as Horatio, Frank Finlay as the gravedigger and Derek Jacobi as Laertes. As a lowly spear carrier was twenty-three-year-old Michael Gambon, who described O’Toole as ‘a God with bright blonde hair’. Terence Knapp, fresh from the very first Chichester Festival, where Olivier had plucked much of his cast, recalls the general reaction at the news O’Toole was to play Hamlet. ‘People were very excited at the thought of what kind of Hamlet he would be. He was already recognized as a very, very distinguished actor, and despite the titled actors like Olivier and Redgrave and Guinness there were many of us who thought that O’Toole was the most exciting actor of the day.’

  Hamlet opened at the Old Vic on 22 October 1963. Just as the curtain began to rise Olivier grabbed O’Toole as he waited expectantly in the wings. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘For what?’ O’Toole replied.

  ‘For them. They’re out there with their machine guns. It’s your turn, son.’

  It was the critics he was talking about and their opinion of O’Toole was decidedly mixed. ‘I don’t understand why Peter was criticized,’ says Peter Cellier, who played Rosencrantz. ‘Because I thought he was a very good Hamlet, most excellent. It was a clear cut, interesting and vital performance. And the audience reaction was ecstatic.’ Derek Jacobi has gone on record as saying, ‘O’Toole was a smashing Hamlet. There was one rehearsal run-through where he was, I thought, the definitive Hamlet, just wonderful.’ In the end O’Toole perhaps fell between two styles, trying to appease Olivier while doing his own thing. Siân, who sat in the front stalls racked with nerves, had to admit that this Hamlet was ‘a pale shadow’ of the one in Bristol.

  As for the production, while not heavily criticized, it was deemed to be lacklustre. ‘I think the critics felt, we mustn’t knock this new venture too much, we’ve waited so long for a national theatre we can’t kill it at birth,’ says Gaskill. ‘But I don’t think anybody thought it was very good.’ Only the set design by the celebrated Sean Kenny was seen as a triumph. Positioned on a revolve, it had the appearance of a snail’s shell, beginning life as battlements facing the audience, quite high, before the whole thing slowly turned around to reveal the royal court. ‘It was a very clever idea when it worked,’ says Rosemary. ‘One night it seized up and refused to budge and there was dear Terence Knapp in his pumpkin hose manually pushing this set around and of course it got gales of laughter from the audience.’

  The stress of performing the uncut Hamlet six blasted nights a week and two sodding matinees was punishing on O’Toole. At a party, feeling depressed having to play ‘the Moody One’, a cast member gave him a green pill. ‘I was on the ceiling for forty-eight hours. I was cuckooing and crowing from chimneys, hurtling about and gambolling and skipping – and I never stopped talking. I wept at weather forecasts.’

  This exhaustion might excuse an amusing lapse that occurred one matinee, at which the cast had been informed that Noël Coward was out front. When it came time for the famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, O’Toole was discomforted to hear a bout of guffawing emanating from the front stalls. Undeterred, he carried on. ‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind . . . ’ – snigger – ‘ . . . to suffer the slings and arrows . . . ’ another laugh, louder this time. What’s going on, he thought. On came Rosemary, and O’Toole put his hand to his forehead and realized he was wearing horn-rimmed spectacles. Just minutes earlier he’d been in the wings with the stage hands picking winners in the Sporting Life and had walked on totally oblivious to the fact they were still on. It had been Coward hooting like mad. Now, how to get rid of them. Turning to Rosemary, O’Toole spat the lines, ‘We will have no more marriages,’ and flung the specs at her.

  Luckily for O’Toole’s mental and physical well-being, Shakespeare had obligingly provided a lengthy period in the play where Hamlet is not required on stage. Usually O’Toole took this opportunity to visit Rosemary in her dressing room, who having gone mad and died as Ophelia was now just waiting for the curtain call. ‘We used to have lovely chats about all sorts of things, but during that time he did drink quite a bit and so he was pretty wild when he came back on stage.’ The person who bore the brunt of this was poor Derek Jacobi, who lived in dread of the famous sword fight. During rehearsals O’Toole had voiced his dissatisfaction with the duel as planned and grabbing Jacobi one afternoon said, ‘Let’s work out our own fight.’ He wanted it more ‘swash and buckle’, jumping up on tables, a touch of the Errol Flynns. So the pair of them came up with a new routine, but during one rehearsal instead of jumping O’Toole ducked and the sword went straight across his face. Clamping his hand to the wound he ran to his dressing room mirror. Luckily Jacobi had caught him with the flat of his sword and there was only a slight mark where there might have been blood. Indeed it was Jacobi who was the more shaken and O’Toole poured him a large brandy to quieten his nerves.

  The next day Jacobi was summoned to Olivier’s office and told that if he did that again it would cost the company tens of thousands of pounds in insurance money as the makers of O’Toole’s next film would be unable to shoot on his face. This did nothing to lessen Jacobi’s nerves, nor did the knowledge that O’Toole never stuck once to the agreed routine. ‘I was fighting, literally, for my life at the end of the show every night. Peter wasn’t always at his most sober, and he’d wink at me across the stage and I knew I was in for it.’

  Two of his old RADA classmates, Gary Raymond and Malcolm Rogers, came to see a performance. Since leaving RADA everyone had tried as much as possible to support and attend each other’s shows, and there was a sense of real camaraderie. Neither man, however, had enjoyed the evening. ‘It was very long and Peter wasn’t very good,’ recalls Rogers. ‘And we weren’t looking forward to going to see him in his dressing room. We thought, what on earth are we going to say.’ This was always a problem, what to say to
a friend after a particularly poor performance. What O’Toole always did on the first night, he would never criticize an actor’s performance, it was too sensitive an issue, he’d simply go in and say, ‘Spun gold!’

  Fortunately, or rather unfortunately, this was the evening of the Kennedy assassination. ‘So we didn’t have to discuss his performance,’ remembers Raymond. ‘Peter was in a great state. I’m amazed, actually, that he didn’t make some sort of declaration at the curtain call. But he didn’t, so when we got backstage we knew nothing about the Kennedy thing, and Peter was in his dressing room anxiously listening to the radio and the news coming from America.’

  During all this, the young company looked to O’Toole as a rock to cling to and he gladly led from the front. ‘This was the beginning of the National Theatre so we were all very conscious that we were making history,’ says Peter Cellier. ‘And we would have done anything, we’d have died for one another to make it a success, there’s no question.’ That O’Toole coped and didn’t appear, at least on the surface, to be affected by it all was extraordinary. He even indulged in a few practical jokes, such as the time he filled the main dressing-room showers with ice. ‘I must say I took to Peter enormously,’ says Terence Knapp. ‘It was great fun as well as being a privilege to be on the same stage with him. He was amazingly modest off stage. On stage it was different, he had a tremendous, vibrant, dynamic personality. But off stage he was a quieter, simpler, nicer man.’

  Knapp remembers there had been a disaster in Yugoslavia where a beautiful old theatre had burned down. British Equity organized an appeal to rebuild it and as one of their deputies it was Knapp’s duty to go round backstage at the Old Vic asking for donations. ‘One night after the performance I went into Peter’s dressing room and asked if he would contribute and he called for his cheque book and he signed it and gave it to me – and it was blank. I said, “Peter!” He said, “Just round it off, OK.” ’