Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Deliberately lightweight, How to Steal a Million’s chief attraction is the double act of Audrey and O’Toole. During the heist sequence, the two actors had to hide in a tight broom cupboard. Waiting for Wyler to call action O’Toole commented, ‘This must be what death feels like when you’re in your coffin.’

  ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ whispered Audrey. O’Toole said it petrified him.

  ‘Why, Peter?’

  ‘Sure, there’s no future in it.’

  Audrey exploded into a fit of giggles, loud enough to concern Wyler, who asked what was going on. In the end Audrey had to retire to her dressing room to lie down in order to compose herself to continue the scene.

  Becker found O’Toole polite and cheery company, also bright and alert. Between set-ups the actor would often sit quietly by himself doing crossword puzzles. Becker was particularly impressed by his astonishing memory. He recalled being in Wyler’s caravan along with O’Toole and co-star Eli Wallach going over a scene the director wasn’t happy with. It just didn’t work. ‘Why don’t we go back to the original,’ O’Toole piped up. ‘We all looked at him,’ recalls Becker. ‘Nobody had the original script any more, we were probably on script number five at that point, and Peter delivered the entire scene by heart. Wyler laughed and said, “That was good, why didn’t we use that.” And it went back into the picture. Peter had memorized the entire first script and despite all the changes that had been made it was all still there, in his head.’

  At O’Toole’s insistence Becker was hired as dialogue coach on his next film, The Night of the Generals, about a high-ranking Nazi who is also a crazed sex-killer. Again shot in Paris, the film reunited O’Toole with Omar Sharif and also involved location work in Warsaw, the first time a Western film unit had been allowed behind the iron curtain since 1945. A less enjoyable reunion was with Sam Spiegel, who acted as producer, but incessantly interfered both with the script and the shooting. It got so bad that Spiegel was even telling his director, Anatole Litvak, where to place the camera. According to O’Toole the script was rewritten and changed on an almost daily basis and he later laid the blame for the inadequacies of the finished film solely at Spiegel’s door, believing that had the original material been left untouched the picture would have been far superior.

  This proved the last time O’Toole worked with Spiegel. Indeed their paths rarely even crossed again. There was a twinge of sadness, however, when O’Toole heard of his death in 1985, especially upon learning of the circumstances. On the set of Lawrence, Robert Bolt had asked how he thought Spiegel would meet his end. Almost without pause O’Toole answered, ‘Spiegel will die in two inches of bath water.’ And such was the case, on New Year’s Eve, Spiegel died from a sudden heart attack, alone in his hotel suite, falling into his bath.

  Halfway through filming in Paris, O’Toole was given permission to fly back to England to attend the bicentennial celebration of his beloved Bristol Old Vic, so long as he promised to be back on the set by at least noon the next day. Bringing Perkins along for the ride, O’Toole chartered a plane and ordered the pilot to land in London, so he could wet his whistle first at the Salisbury. Ordering a crate of champagne, the two men jumped into a hired car and off they drove to Bristol, arriving late for the ceremony. The Duchess of Kent had already been presented on stage along with some hundred and fifty former students, so O’Toole made his silent way backstage and slunk on at the end of the line. Afterwards the throng made their way to Harvey’s Cellars, the home of the famous Bristol sherry, for a private function. There O’Toole held court, and if anyone so much as looked as if they wanted to leave his table, Perkins forcibly sat them back down again. ‘If anyone goes,’ announced O’Toole, ‘he’s a poof.’ It had been a return to his alma mater that those who attended were not to remember with much fondness.

  As for the journey back, only the most optimistic crew member believed that O’Toole would arrive on time. Word reached the film unit at eleven that the plane had indeed landed at Orly airport and that he and Perkins were en route to the studio. Relieved, Litvak began to plan that day’s scene, one of the most crucial in the film, where Sharif arrives to arrest O’Toole’s General. When the car arrived, the news was that O’Toole was in no fit state to work. Becker quickly made his way to O’Toole’s dressing room to find him being helped inside the door by Perkins. O’Toole looked up and saw Becker. ‘He put his arm around me and I was instantly engulfed in all the fumes of all the fetid pubs of England.’ As O’Toole staggered into the room and into the arms of his make-up people Becker was told to come back in half an hour.

  Becker was shocked, he’d never seen O’Toole in such a state before. Apparently he’d been so drunk at the airport that he was manoeuvred from the plane to his car in a wheelchair because he could barely stand upright. Half an hour passed and Becker returned. ‘Come back in an hour. He’s sleeping,’ shouted Perkins.

  Litvak did not take the news well, but decided to press ahead with the scene, making up the time shooting close-ups of Sharif. It would be three hours before O’Toole was in any fit state to perform and five o’clock before he walked onto the set dressed in his army uniform. ‘Everyone went still as he walked up to Litvak,’ Becker recalls, ‘and in almost heart-breaking contrition said, “Tola, I’m so sorry!” Litvak’s anger dissolved instantly, his eyes went moist, and then the two of them embraced. I swear they both were sniffling before Peter broke away and apologized to Omar and the crew.’

  THIRTEEN

  While they never reached the dizzy heights of Burton and Liz Taylor, the O’Tooles were still seen very much as a glamour couple, complete with the obvious trappings of stardom: nannies, au pairs, secretaries, gardeners, cleaners and a chauffeur for O’Toole, who had given up the driving lark, but whose collection of cars now included a Daimler, a Rolls-Royce, an imported American Chevrolet and a Mini Cooper.

  There was the occasional dinner party, and stars such as Peter Sellers or Rudolf Nureyev often dropped in. Burton and Taylor owned a house in the neighbourhood and Peter Cook lived just across the road. The local pub would deliver crates of booze to the cellar at the start of every week and invariably by Friday it was all gone. He was also involved in local politics in a minor way, ordering the entire household to vote Labour in the 1964 General Election. There were even reports of a unique campaign strategy that saw O’Toole hire a coach with Guinness on tap to travel around the local pubs promising Labour voters a ‘free drink and ride’ to the polling station.

  Over the years Guyon House had been expensively furnished, a tasteful mix of antique and modern, mainly chosen and bought by Siân. O’Toole’s main influence was seen in his study, his hideaway den christened the Marcus Luccio’s Room, an in-joke for Shakespearean scholars, for he is a character in Othello talked about but never actually appearing. O’Toole populated the room with all manner of theatrical memorabilia: the walls were covered with theatre posters, and tucked away were the gloves once worn by Sir Henry Irving and Edmund Kean’s ring, a gift from Kenneth Griffith.

  O’Toole’s other interest in the house was a steadily growing collection of paintings and objets d’art. There were a number of Jack Butler Yeats paintings, hung in the drawing room, including his father’s favourite, The Emigrant. A Bonnard hung on a wall opposite the couple’s bed, there was a Picasso in the hallway and a Jacob Epstein bust that Kate used as a makeshift place to hang her discarded knickers.

  O’Toole’s passion for archaeology and collecting antiquities began on Lawrence of Arabia, and was happily satisfied with each new far-flung location. He once confided to the photographer Bob Willoughby that he smuggled a pair of precious Greek earrings through customs by hiding them in his foreskin, resulting in some minor discomfort that lasted weeks. Dotted around the house were Noh masks from Japan, a bejewelled Persian chest and his particular favourite – pre-Columbian art. Going off on excavation digs, O’Toole explained to Malcolm McDowell on the set of Caligula that the best way to find Etruscan jewellery was to lo
cate the drains in the tombs, and then to sift through all the grime with one’s fingers because as the bodies decompose all the artefacts deposit themselves into the channels: ‘The thought of Peter O’Toole on his hands and knees in an Etruscan catacomb makes for a lovely image.’

  Many of these finds he gave to Siân, who built up such a grand collection of Etruscan jewellery that she was advised that many of the pieces were so valuable they needed to be in the Louvre in Paris. One afternoon she raised the issue. ‘O’Toole [it wasn’t unusual for Siân to address her husband in conversation using his surname, a revealing habit since it illustrates something of her attitude towards him – apparently both distant and hero-worshipping], do you want this to go to the Louvre – I don’t mind, really.’

  ‘Do I fuck. It’s yours.’

  The house tended to revolve around O’Toole, its atmosphere entirely linked to the moods of the owner. Siân called life there ‘intermittently ecstatic or unbelievably dreadful’. It was certainly never dull. Beside a chair he took to keeping a box of ping-pong balls which he used to throw at the television set when something came up he didn’t like or didn’t agree with. It was apparently Siân’s idea after the occasion he was so incensed about something he threw a portable TV through the screen of their larger television.

  As for the children, he was delighted and happy and madly in love with them, but he didn’t necessarily want them under his feet the whole time. ‘My father decreed that we were to be neither seen nor heard unless specifically invited into the presence,’ remembered Kate. She and her sister, along with their nanny, lived on the top-floor nursery, a self-contained flat that had a small balcony and looked out over the London skyline dominated by an unhindered view of St Paul’s Cathedral. It was a place that O’Toole rarely ventured, if a story of Siân’s is to be believed. One evening both parents came up to see Patricia, who was ill in bed. A couple of days later the young girl confessed to not recognizing the man Siân was with and asked who he was. Concerned about O’Toole’s lack of presence in their children’s lives, coupled with his constantly changing appearance, Siân began to leave stills of him around the house in whatever role he was currently playing.

  Life at Guyon House went in cycles, when O’Toole was working and when he was not working. Preparing for a job, O’Toole was a moderate, benevolent presence. ‘I lock myself away for a month, before any film or play, and I absorb every word and every moment.’ Things changed dramatically when filming started. ‘I walk around like a ghost not talking to anyone,’ he confessed. When the work and the role were discarded there was a new change as he became almost a different person. ‘Erratic and unpredictable,’ claimed Siân.

  It was a rollercoaster ride quite often, coming to an end only when another project came along.

  During the peak years of the 1960s, as one of the biggest stars in the world, O’Toole’s time was precious and he was in huge demand. François Truffaut wanted him to play the lead in his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s classic science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451. O’Toole passed and Truffaut chose Oscar Werner. For a time Robert Bolt wanted him to play Henry VIII in the film adaptation of his hit stage play A Man for All Seasons, a role that went instead to his sometime drinking competitor Robert Shaw. O’Toole was also first in the frame to play Fagin in the big-screen version of Lionel Bart’s hugely successful musical Oliver!. Indeed he claimed to have been personally promised the role by Bart himself. However, when a press release was issued linking Peter Sellers to the part O’Toole fell out with Bart and they didn’t speak to one another for years.

  In early 1967 he began work on the screen version of George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Great Catherine, playing a very prim and proper British military attaché to the court of the sexually uninhibited Catherine the Great of Russia. It was the third co-production with Keep Films after Becket and Lord Jim, and something of a personal project, given his love of Shaw and the fond memories he still had of his success in a production of it during his RADA days. He and Buck managed to assemble top international names in Jeanne Moreau and Zero Mostel, and O’Toole insisted on a role for Jack Hawkins, his first screen appearance after an operation to remove his larynx due to cancer. It was a lovely show of affection and loyalty to his old friend. When O’Toole first heard that Hawkins could no longer speak due to throat surgery he sent him a card. Inside he wrote two words, ‘Shut up.’

  The film was thrown into chaos when the original director, Elliot Silverstein, who’d made his name with Cat Ballou, quit due to creative differences with O’Toole; in other words he wouldn’t do what O’Toole told him. ‘I didn’t want to become a star’s lackey,’ said the American. O’Toole was adamant that he wasn’t going to have anyone messing around with his film. ‘If it’s going to be wrong, I want it wrong my way.’ In the end Gordon Flemyng, who’d collaborated with O’Toole on Ride a Cock Horse, was brought in.

  It was shot at Shepperton, and when O’Toole’s services were not required he often waddled back to his dressing room to rest, maybe check over his dialogue or crack open a bottle of champagne and chat to Perkins, whose job was to drive the star everywhere and get him home safely after a night on the sauce. One particular afternoon, when the unit were finally ready to shoot, Flemyng dispatched an assistant to fetch O’Toole. He knocked on the dressing-room door. No reply. He knocked again, still no reply. Walking inside, the place was empty, only a television set blasting out the horse racing from nearby Sandown Park. The assistant’s attention was drawn to the image on the TV screen, a close-up of the crowd in the stands, and there was O’Toole gamely cheering on the nags. The assistant rushed over to Flemyng. ‘Peter’s not in his dressing room. He’s at Sandown races.’

  Flemyng looked puzzled. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I’ve just seen him on television.’ The errant actor was told to return immediately to the studio.

  Against his better judgement, O’Toole had agreed to make a picture on location in Switzerland for producer Martin Poll called The Ski Bum, playing a misfit ski instructor who gets mixed up in shady dealings thanks to his girlfriend, played by newcomer Katharine Ross. He was never happy with the script and at the last minute declared it totally unworkable and refused to make the movie. Far from aggrieved, Poll merely sent O’Toole another script and this one met with almost instant approval.

  James Goldman’s witty and literate play The Lion in Winter, a dramatization of the personal and political conflicts of Henry II of England, his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine and their three sons, all fighting each other to inherit their father’s kingdom, had been a recent smash on Broadway. Poll had quickly snapped up the film rights and hired Goldman to adapt it to the screen in the belief that it was a perfect vehicle for Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, a sort of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in ermine. What had O’Toole hooked, besides the obvious brilliance of Goldman’s words, was the intriguing idea of playing a character he had already essayed in Becket, this time an older and wiser version.

  Once committed, O’Toole sought to make a high-class production. It was his suggestion that there was only one actress formidable enough to play Queen Eleanor, and that was Katharine Hepburn. Scribbling a quick note to her, O’Toole sent the script to Martha’s Vineyard, where she was holed up, still grieving the recent loss of her beloved Spencer Tracy. A week later the phone rang and a voice said: ‘I might as well do it before I die.’

  With backing from heavyweight producer Joseph E. Levine, the search began for a suitable director. O’Toole had seen a short film called Dutchman made on a shoestring budget in a week at Twickenham Studios by debutant Anthony Harvey. It was about a woman preying on men in the New York subway and had O’Toole so excited that he sent a print over to America to show Katie Hepburn. ‘I don’t quite know what a murder in a subway’s got to do with Henry II,’ she replied. ‘But if you trust him let’s go ahead.’ Anthony Harvey has never forgotten the enormous debt of gratitude he owes Peter O’Toole for The Lion in Winter, which effectively launc
hed his career as a director. This was a major motion picture and for O’Toole to insist on a newcomer was a huge gamble that had it backfired would have reflected badly on his judgement. Even Harvey himself wasn’t quite sure the right decision had been made and took the script over to the Boulting Brothers, for whom he was currently working as an editor, and asked, ‘Do you think I really could do this?’ The filmmaking pair, responsible for some of British film’s finest comedies (I’m Alright Jack, Carlton Browne of the FO et al.), replied, ‘Are you crazy. You can do it. Pull yourself together!’

  To play Henry’s three bickering sons O’Toole and Harvey went against the wishes of the American producers in casting complete newcomers: Nigel Terry, John Castle and Anthony Hopkins, none of whom had made a film before. Hopkins was with the National Theatre Company when his agent called to say that he was in line to play the young Richard the Lionheart. Hopkins was a huge admirer of O’Toole, having seen his Jimmy Porter at Bristol – ‘He was the most extraordinary actor I’d ever seen’ – but arriving at the production office in Eaton Square was determined not to put his reverence on display. Handed a script Hopkins read the part, with O’Toole giving lines off-camera. Afterwards there was a short pause and discussion. ‘Right, you’ve got the part,’ said O’Toole and ordered him to get out of his National Theatre contract. When Olivier proved obstinate it was O’Toole who personally rang him up to plead Hopkins’ case, that here was an actor with real potential for the cinema. It did the trick.