Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  The pair had very nearly worked together before. In 1959, when Hiller was in London with his wife, they’d gone one evening to see The Long and the Short and the Tall. ‘About ten minutes into the first act this private came on stage and sort of took over, and I was just bowled over. I took out a piece of paper and I wrote down – Peter O’Toole. Of course, not long after that he was in Lawrence of Arabia.’

  What surprised Hiller the most about O’Toole was a reluctance to interact socially with the other members of the cast. He was very private and kept himself largely to himself on the set, save for the odd game of poker with his co-stars. Despite his gregarious nature, O’Toole had always loved being alone, relaxing in his own company, but in recent times had started to become a much more introverted person, something that Siân had noticed. Over the years O’Toole had become much more withdrawn, not a recluse by any means, but certainly spending more time alone than he had done. This was to be largely the pattern for the remainder of his life.

  As for his relationship with Sophia Loren, cast as Dulcinea, whom he playfully took to calling ‘silicone’, it was complex. To the press O’Toole was generous in his praise for the actress, but Hiller remembers one incident in particular that struck him as rather odd. One afternoon, as the cameraman was setting up a shot, a visibly distressed Sophia walked over to him. ‘What’s wrong?’ said Hiller, taking her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Sophia, you’re playing the part just right.’

  ‘I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about Peter!’

  ‘What about Peter?’

  Sophia caught her breath. ‘Every time you say ready and you’re going to say action, Peter says to me – “What makes you think you can act.” ’

  ‘Sophia,’ said Hiller reassuringly. ‘He’s just trying to get your adrenalin up for the scene.’

  Sophia shook her head. ‘I’ve been acting long enough to know when somebody’s trying to get my adrenalin up, or when they’re trying to put me down.’

  ‘I’ll speak to him if you want, but it would be much better if you can show him that it doesn’t bother you.’

  ‘Easy for you to say,’ Sophia replied. ‘Not so easy for me to do.’

  Hiller had a quick think. ‘I’ll tell you what to do. The next time he says it you smile and say – “Fuck you!” ’

  About twenty minutes later Sophia came running over to Hiller, her face beaming. Hiller guessed what had just happened. O’Toole never said it to Sophia again.

  It was odd behaviour to be sure, especially since O’Toole was genuinely impressed by Sophia’s professionalism. And yet friction was never far from the surface. They’d sometimes play poker between takes. After one match Sophia playfully accused O’Toole of trying to cheat as she took the winnings and put them in her expensive Gucci bag. Amidst a torrent of abuse O’Toole grabbed the bag and ripped it to shreds. Calmly Sophia sat back down and dealt out the cards again – and won.

  One of the film’s most touching moments is when Sophia holds the wounded O’Toole in her lap. For her close-up, Sophia had expressly asked for O’Toole not to be present, he might distract her, and she wanted to focus totally on the marker representing her eye line that had been positioned at the base of the camera. As luck would have it O’Toole waltzed into the studio that morning asking what was happening. Hiller told him and O’Toole offered to stay.

  ‘No, we don’t need you. It’s fine. Sometimes when you have a mark you prefer the other person not to be there.’

  ‘She’ll want me!’ boomed O’Toole.

  ‘She doesn’t. I asked her,’ said Hiller flatly.

  ‘We’ll see about that!’

  O’Toole began to make strong strides towards the set when Hiller grabbed hold of him. Sophia was huddled in a corner alone working on her emotions. ‘This is not the time to get into a discussion about this,’ advised Hiller. O’Toole finally saw sense and turned away, making towards the camera crew instead and asking where Sophia’s mark was. An assistant showed him and O’Toole took off a shoe and placed it right on the camera base before leaving. This was no prank, or laddish jape, believes Hiller, but a deliberate act of sabotage. ‘He meant that to disturb Sophia, to say – you don’t need me, but I’m there.’

  In spite of admitting that his singing voice was akin to ‘a broken bottle going under a door’, Man of La Mancha was O’Toole’s second film musical in just a few short years. This time, however, he realized that his voice was not up to the task of singing most of the songs, including the standout track, ‘The Impossible Dream’, and that he would have to be dubbed by a professional singer, Simon Gilbert. The usual procedure for this was for the actor to lip-sync the singer’s version on the set, but Hiller was keen to use O’Toole’s artistry and asked the actor to give his own version of each song, even though it wouldn’t be used, so Gilbert could achieve the same level of emotion.

  Man of La Mancha flopped at the box office and received such poor reviews that Hiller was personally affected by it: ‘I couldn’t work for eight months. I kept thinking, what had I done wrong?’ Analysing the film today, Hiller believes he didn’t quite get the mix of reality and fantasy right. O’Toole himself received mixed notices, too. David Robinson of The Times thought he had turned into ‘a very strange performer, spitting and mouthing his lines with the excessive vowels of a twenties stage juvenile’, while Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review thought he played Cervantes’ hero ‘with extraordinary delicacy and restraint’.

  One doubts O’Toole read the reviews; according to Hiller he never even saw the film. By the end of its production he had grown disenchanted with the filmmaking process and with the film industry itself, principally the people behind it – the suits, the executives who’d no creative bone in their bodies. ‘The business is run by the cornflakes men,’ he grumbled. ‘And they’re only in it for the girls. You used to join amateur dramatics to get at the crackling. These men buy up studios to achieve the same end.’

  Mostly though he was tired and fed up with acting, he’d been at it since Bristol, ‘twenty years of it in one uninterrupted lump’, and he wanted a rest. His fortieth birthday seemed as good a time as any to reassess what he wanted out of life and where he was going. Right now his life was drawing him back to Clifden, where preparations had begun on his dream home. Taking Siân and the kids with him, nothing would be heard of O’Toole for the next twelve months.

  FIFTEEN

  In the last few years O’Toole had been back many times to Clifden, sometimes with Siân and the kids, sometimes alone. Always he would make the effort to see Billy Foyle, and sometimes he’d bring a little showbiz sparkle to the town. Foyle will never forget one occasion, when O’Toole arrived for lunch at the little restaurant he owned on the high street with Federico Fellini in tow and an entourage of ten of the most beautiful women anyone had ever seen. People in the town still talk about it.

  As he’d promised, Foyle had been looking for a perfect piece of land for O’Toole to build on and had finally found the ideal spot, up on the picturesque Sky Road a few miles outside Clifden. It was totally isolated and barren, looking out over the Atlantic. ‘And really he shouldn’t have got planning permission,’ confesses Foyle. ‘But I knew some of the lads in the planning office, this was how things were done back in those days, I had a few words with them and greased their palms so to speak and Peter had no problem.’

  Over the next couple of years the house slowly began to take shape, with both O’Toole and Siân often working alongside the builders, digging ditches for the sewage or planting trees, flowers and vegetables in the garden, which due to the battering they received from the harsh wind off the Atlantic had repeatedly to be replaced. ‘Plants must be sturdy to survive here,’ O’Toole pointed out. ‘Just like the people.’ Until it was completed the family all crammed into a three-roomed cottage which had no phone or television and just a Calor-gas stove to cook on, while the entourage (nanny, chauffeur, tutor and minder) were installed in the best hotel in Clifden with all the mo
d cons. ‘They had swimming pools and tennis courts,’ remembered Kate. ‘We had brown water from the well and warm milk from the cow. We loved it.’

  When it was completed the house was very much an extension of its owner. ‘There was a coldness about it, I thought,’ says Billy Foyle. Very few people really got to know who Peter O’Toole was. ‘With Peter,’ says Billy, ‘you never really got inside of his head. He wouldn’t come out and say, “Billy, I feel bloody awful,” or “This marriage has gone on the blink.” He would never confide in me. I know he trusted me, but he would never confide in me about his personal life.’ It was the same with Johnnie Planco, who represented him in America for over thirty years. ‘Peter rarely talked about his personal life beyond his children.’

  O’Toole’s Irish bolt hole was the complete antithesis of Guyon House, which was warm and inviting. And it is no coincidence that Siân was responsible for buying and furnishing their Hampstead home, while O’Toole took the lion’s share of the decision-making at the Clifden property. Inside it was basic and about as far removed from a film star’s house as it was possible to get. For one thing there were no carpets, instead the floors were made from slabs of stone. When Robert Shaw, who had his own home in Ireland, paid a visit he scratched his head before complaining that the O’Tooles must have been mad, bypassing luxury in favour of impersonal functionality.

  In other ways, though, it was impressive. The outside walls were made entirely of stone from a local quarry. Inside it was spacious, with high ceilings and wood-panelled doors and walls. The drawing room was built to O’Toole’s own specifications with a large stone fireplace with a turf fire that was never allowed to go out and two large windows looking out over the sea. Often he’d stand for hours just looking out across the vast blueness, taking in the wildlife and the smattering of islands that lay off the coast, inhabited mostly by fishermen, as they had been for centuries. But the rooms were all plain, almost anonymous. ‘You could go in and out of that house ten times and you’d ask me to describe it and I couldn’t,’ says Billy Foyle. Yet O’Toole lived blissfully quietly there for many years. It became an anchor in his life, a place of sanctuary and refuge to disappear to and be at peace with himself and his surroundings. He’d go off on long walks along the coastal roads or up into the mountains or drop down into Clifden. The small town represented the perfect antidote to his frenzied lifestyle in London, with its one main high street and two prominent churches either end, one Catholic, the other Protestant. ‘I don’t attend either,’ O’Toole told a reporter. ‘I go to Frank Murphy’s pub.’

  Predictably O’Toole was a regular in the town’s numerous bars and was often spotted out and about. He was treated with respect and courtesy by the community, who came to regard him as one of their own, rather than a film star. ‘After a while they loved him,’ says Foyle. ‘He became more Irish than the Irish themselves. He kept boasting about the O’Toole name and friends to this day ask me, “By the way, did Peter O’Toole ever find his roots?” No, I’d say, but there was more joy in looking for them than finding them.’

  Although the house was secluded, lying off the road, the O’Tooles were always happy to receive invited guests and even threw the occasional party. ‘We had some jolly old evenings up there,’ remembers Foyle. For many summers Michael D. Higgins, a future President of Ireland but then a Labour Senator, with his wife Sabina and their children, would hole up in a small cottage just down from the main house. Old friends, too, would call upon them. One afternoon the girls, who had been playing in the front garden, ran inside the house crying, ‘Mummy, Daddy. There’s an old tinker woman coming up the drive.’ When they opened the door Siân and O’Toole were delighted to see Katharine Hepburn, dressed in a black raincoat, her face half covered with a shawl. She’d come to see O’Toole about a possible film and ended up staying several days. Before leaving she wanted to know if living in the wilds of Connemara O’Toole wasn’t only escaping the film world but civilization as well. ‘Hell, no,’ he answered. ‘This is civilization.’

  The movies hadn’t entirely been left behind, scripts continued to arrive, were dutifully read and immediately forgotten. For a while he contemplated writing a novel or perhaps a play, there was even talk of doing some academic study, having always been self-conscious of his lack of formal education. Instead it was an approach from the Bristol Old Vic that prompted him to leave his Irish idyll and return to the world of acting.

  By 1973 the Bristol Old Vic was in trouble. In recent years the theatre had been modernized and turned into an arts complex, but audiences were dwindling. A plan was needed to bring the public back, a marquee name. Nat Brenner, now principal of the Old Vic school, was convinced he could persuade O’Toole to return. Just recently the actor had set up a scholarship at the school to help one pupil every year. The very first recipient was a certain Pete Postlethwaite and it was Brenner’s suggestion that it might be a nice gesture if O’Toole came to the school to meet him. What happened next became one of Brenner’s favourite O’Toole stories. Pete Postlethwaite was called out from class and asked to go to Brenner’s office and there was O’Toole sitting in the corner. After a few minutes of polite conversation, O’Toole suggested they all go for a drink. It was the middle of the afternoon and the drinking carried on until closing time. ‘Nat,’ said O’Toole. ‘I think we should go to Joe’s.’ Brenner shot his old colleague a quizzical look. ‘We can’t drive to London, that’s ridiculous.’ ‘I don’t mean Joe’s in London,’ said O’Toole. ‘I mean Joe’s in Dublin.’ Hailing a cab they drove to Bristol airport and hired a plane to fly the three of them out to Dublin to carry on drinking for another four hours or so, after which O’Toole put the pair of them back on a plane to Bristol where they arrived first thing in the morning and Postlethwaite went back to his classes.

  Very little persuasion was needed in the end for O’Toole to come to the aid of his beloved Bristol, and the plan was to perform three plays: Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, The Apple Cart by Shaw and the first full-scale professional stage revival of the Ben Travers farce Plunder. The Old Vic was unable to afford the wages of a star actor, so O’Toole offered his services for free, with Bristol providing him with accommodation, a pleasant house in Clifton, for the three months he would be there. O’Toole did insist on hand-picking much of the company himself, old friends like Edward Hardwicke and Nigel Stock, along with a smattering of new up and coming talent – Judy Parfitt, Sara Kestelman and Penelope Wilton, who became one of his favourite actresses.

  O’Toole knew it was going to be hard work and he took the venture seriously, after all this would be seen as a theatrical return of sorts, his first performance on the British stage since the mid-sixties. ‘I imagine that he might have been feeling quite anxious,’ says Sara Kestelman. ‘Although he would never have let you see that because he was a proud man, an aggressively proud man.’

  Rehearsals began on Uncle Vanya with the theatre’s artistic director Val May in charge. They did not go well. ‘In the rehearsal room O’Toole was arrogant and he was selfish,’ remembers Sara. ‘He didn’t listen and he didn’t really pay respect. He didn’t respect Val May at all, he despised what you might describe as Val’s rather pedantic way of working: This is where you pick up the pen and this is where you put it down. Many in the company didn’t really want to work in so prescriptive a manner, certainly O’Toole didn’t want to work like that, and it was crazy to assume he would want to. Why would anyone want to offer him that kind of detail, except in the most helpful way, which is no doubt how Val meant it, but it came across in a schoolmasterly way and put O’Toole on the back foot from the start.’ And so he very much pursued his own route, arriving on day one with a prepared performance that he did not intend to alter in the slightest.

  Despite the problems, Uncle Vanya was a triumph when it opened in October 1973, with O’Toole receiving a standing ovation every night. ‘It was a completely brilliant piece of work,’ confirms Sara. ‘His Vanya, when we opened, was astonishing. It was
terribly moving, and it was very funny and touching and dangerous. But as the run went on he got practised in it, he knew the moments that would work and he moved towards them, so it wasn’t as good, but it was still a very fine performance.’

  Since part of the reason that O’Toole had returned to Bristol was out of loyalty to his old mentor Nat Brenner, it was baffling that when Brenner came in to direct the second play of the season, Plunder, O’Toole turned on him so viciously. ‘He would humiliate him in front of everybody,’ recalls Sara. ‘And it was a shocking thing to behold.’ Like Val May, Brenner was another prescriptive director, no doubt due to having worked for many years with students where you have to be very specific about how you elicit a performance as opposed to a professional who might be able to interpret it in a very different way with more expertise. ‘But I wasn’t expecting O’Toole to be so damaging to him and so cruel,’ says Sara. ‘And because he was a very strong man you couldn’t, unless you wanted to risk having a bop on the chin, you couldn’t really intervene, and Nat didn’t really know how to protect himself, because he wasn’t expecting it. And it was pretty consistent throughout rehearsals. Whatever Nat would say Peter would belittle immediately, he’d say, “We’re not going to do that,” or he’d just deliberately ignore it.’

  Again, a troubled rehearsal period seemed to have no effect on the finished production and Plunder was well received by the public, who came to see it in droves.

  During the run of Plunder it was clear that O’Toole was not in the best of health. He was suffering again from stomach pains, at times excruciating. He took pills but they didn’t seem to work and physically he looked thin and pallid. Siân was there most of the time to lend support, but that didn’t stop O’Toole openly flirting with some of the actresses. ‘Certainly there were little liaisons during the season,’ claims Sara.