Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Due to his friendship with the MCC’s head coach Don Wilson, O’Toole was also a regular visitor to the nets at Lord’s, once facing an over from Imran Khan at full tilt. But he took greater satisfaction in helping children developing their skills at Brondesbury and Cricklewood cricket clubs, and was never happier. Approaching his sixties, O’Toole had decided to become a qualified cricket coach. It was a way of putting something back into the community, sharing his love of the game with a new generation and a way of relating with his son. ‘I wanted Lorcs to know I still shared his sense of adventure – a merriment. I was an older father and I had to keep up without conscious effort.’

  For Lorcan’s birthday, again O’Toole had looked to do something in the local community. He’d heard that the sports centre at the Royal Free in Hampstead, the hospital whose staff had saved his life years before, put on children’s parties. One afternoon he decided to pay it a visit. Keith Hunt, who ran the sports centre, was sitting quietly in his office when there was a firm knock on the door, followed by the unmistakable figure of Peter O’Toole waltzing into the room. Hunt was astonished, since this wasn’t the first time the two of them had met, though plainly O’Toole had forgotten. Back in the late sixties Hunt worked as a barman at the Old White Bear, a popular pub just round the corner from Guyon House. Naturally O’Toole was a regular and Hunt would have to sometimes escort him home when he’d had a little too much to drink. The White Bear was run by a fearsome landlady who frequently banned O’Toole: ‘But then she’d forget she’d banned him and he’d drift in and then when he got a bit boisterous she’d ban him again.’ Hunt always found O’Toole the perfect gentleman, never offensive, even when loaded.

  Over the course of four years Keith Hunt organized Lorcan’s birthday party at the hospital’s sports centre and witnessed firsthand the special relationship between father and son. ‘He adored Lorcan. He loved that boy. It was such a beautiful bond between them, an incredible bond. It was such a closeness that you really felt it.’ The parties were either football-themed or made use of the centre’s swimming pool and O’Toole always attended, wearing his trilby hat and with the collar turned up on his camel-hair coat. ‘He wafted into a room and the room changed, totally,’ Hunt says. ‘Even youngsters who might not have heard of him went – wow.’ As Lorcan and his friends had fun, O’Toole would sit quietly at the side, content to be left alone, but also happy to talk if approached, happy to reminisce about David Lean or whatever subject came up. ‘He always had time for people,’ says Hunt. ‘If someone said, “Can I have your autograph please,” he’d say, “Why do you want an autograph of me, I’m nothing now.” Although I think he still preened when people recognized him.’

  After the first party O’Toole got in touch with Hunt to send him tickets to see Jeffrey Bernard as a thank you. The invitation also included a visit to see him backstage. ‘He had a room with a bar, which was for his guests, and he just sat there drinking water. Smoking, always. He used to say to me, “I’ve been told by my doctor I’ve got the lungs of a twenty-year old.” ’ A little while later O’Toole heard that Hunt took regular trips over to New York to see the Broadway shows that he loved and so always made sure that the hottest tickets in town were made available to him. ‘He paid for the use of the sports centre for Lorcan’s birthdays, very generously, that was all he needed to do, but then he’d call me saying, “I hear you’re going to New York next week, what show do you want to see?” ’

  However, Hunt’s most remarkable encounter with O’Toole was yet to come. One Saturday afternoon at the centre Hunt saw a couple of football fans playing at the pool tables and calmly and politely told them that as this was a members’ only club he was sorry but they’d have to leave. ‘One of the guys got out a razor. I ducked but he just caught the top of my head and as with any head wound there was a lot of bleeding. Out of panic I think the two men ran off.’ The incident made the local newspaper and the next day O’Toole called Hunt’s office. ‘Are you OK? I’ve just read the report.’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks, Peter, except when I see a razor blade now I go all cold. I can’t even wet shave myself any more. I just can’t do it.’

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Last Saturday.’

  ‘What time?’ asked O’Toole.

  ‘About two thirty.’

  ‘Right, you and me will wet shave by the pool table at two thirty on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘No, you don’t have to worry about it,’ said Hunt.

  ‘No, I remember something like this happening in Ireland and it worked.’

  Sure enough, the following Saturday at two thirty O’Toole arrived and together the two men had a wet shave and afterwards Hunt felt fine about using a razor again. ‘When I said, “Thank you so much,” afterwards he went, “I haven’t done anything.” ’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Since O’Toole had a sizeable investment in the Jeffrey Bernard stage production he was keen for it to continue after his stint in it came to an end. First Tom Conti took over the role, still playing to packed houses, then James Bolam. In early 1991 O’Toole contacted Waterhouse and Sherrin with a view to reviving his celebrated performance as Bernard, this time in a bigger venue. They settled on the Shaftesbury Theatre. Again it was a huge success over its limited two-month run, and the offer came in to take the play on tour to Australia. O’Toole said he’d do it on the condition that Royce Mills came as well. It was agreed. ‘But then Australian Equity objected to me,’ recalls Mills. ‘They said, “We know who Peter O’Toole is, but who’s this Royce Mills? Never heard of him.” So Peter turned round and said, “Fuck them, I’m not doing it.” ’ Dennis Waterman was cast as Bernard instead.

  Coming off yet another triumph as Jeffrey Bernard, O’Toole sniffed around for another potential stage hit and was certain he’d found it in John Osborne’s new play, Déjà Vu, a sequel to his landmark Look Back in Anger, which saw a middle-aged Jimmy Porter still ranting and raving against the world. Osborne had spent the best part of two years trying to interest producers and theatres into taking it on, encountering a barrage of rejections, including from the Royal Court itself which had produced the original. Still, O’Toole was enthused, writing to Osborne: ‘It feels like old times. We could stir up a hell of a fuss.’

  The two met that July to begin discussions, with the biggest stumbling block the play’s sheer length. Having timed the whole thing at around the four-hour mark, which would necessitate two intervals, O’Toole told Osborne, ‘Sing it, hum it, shout it, speak it, rapidly recitative it, exit and entrance it on golf carts or bumper cars, when act two is uttered out loud it lasts for approximately one hour and 45 minutes. That is five minutes less than the entire playing time of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.’

  Osborne went off to make forty-five minutes’ worth of cuts, but O’Toole was still not happy and left the production shortly before rehearsals were due to begin. ‘As I understood it,’ recalls Tony Palmer, who was installed as director, ‘Peter and John had a tremendous row, things had been thrown and I think they’d finished up with almost blood on the floor. They were both fairly fiery characters. After that Peter said he absolutely wouldn’t do it. But I thought he was such an extraordinary actor and such ideal casting that I wanted to try and persuade him to come back.’

  Palmer got in touch with O’Toole and set up a meeting that lasted three hours, during which they went through the text carefully together. O’Toole was still adamant that in its current form the thing was undoable, since no one went to the theatre any more to see what was a three-act play. He also seemed anxious about his age, that he was too old for the part. ‘Well, no,’ said Palmer. ‘Rather more importantly I think you have that absolutely right feeling of having had a life very well used.’ Palmer waited to be hit but instead the actor merely raised half an eyebrow.

  There were more reservations. Some of the speeches O’Toole thought were full of Osborne’s own private hang-ups and that
he’d lost the trail of what it was he was trying to say with the play. Palmer remembers there was one bit O’Toole thought was completely bonkers where suddenly Jimmy Porter is talking about all the Australian nurses that he hated. ‘That’s got no relevance to Jimmy Porter,’ blasted O’Toole. ‘It probably has a great deal of resonance to John Osborne, but there’s simply no point in including this tirade about Australian nurses.’ Palmer felt some loyalty to Osborne but couldn’t help but agree with O’Toole’s objections and got a promise from him that if he managed to persuade Osborne to do some more major revisions he would look at it again. Palmer left the meeting quietly confident. The next problem facing Palmer was getting Osborne to cut three acts into two. ‘And that was not easy.’ Once accomplished the ‘revised’ script was sent to O’Toole, but nothing was heard again. So what could have been amongst the theatrical events of the nineties, Peter O’Toole back as Jimmy Porter, was never to be. The play did open six months later with Peter Egan in the role, an excellent actor, but not quite the same thing, and as a result Déjà Vu did not make the impact it might have done and quietly disappeared.

  Instead O’Toole teamed up again with Keith Waterhouse and Ned Sherrin for Our Song, a play about an illicit love affair between a successful middle-aged married advertising executive and a destructive young woman in her twenties, played by Tara Fitzgerald. It opened in November 1992 at the Apollo Theatre where it was greeted warmly by audiences and favourably by critics, but came some way short of making the same kind of impact as Jeffrey Bernard.

  Classifying himself now as a jobbing actor, offers of work continued to come his way, although he had become more prickly in the way he conducted himself, according to Johnnie Planco: ‘If he arrived on a movie set and he liked the way he was treated, he had respect for everybody, he’d do anything. But if he walked on and somebody might just say good morning the wrong way, all through the shoot he’d be miserable. Either way he’d remain professional right the way through, but it was either a joy and a comfort or it was a trauma.’

  The most rewarding recent jobs were from television. He had a small role in the acclaimed Lynda La Plante drama serial Civvies with Jason Isaacs, about former soldiers struggling to come to terms with civilian life, played the Emperor of Lilliput in a lavish mini-series based on Gulliver’s Travels and was asked by BBC producer Verity Lambert to headline a television adaptation of the P. G. Wodehouse comedy Heavy Weather, also starring Richard Briers and old friends Bryan Pringle and Ronnie Fraser. A fan of Wodehouse, O’Toole was also delighted to be working with Jack Gold again, who’d been brought in to direct. ‘Peter loved playing the Earl, he entered fully into the spirit of the production.’ His was truly a dotty performance and a welcome return to comedy. Again Gold found O’Toole creative and inventive to work with. ‘He was frail, though. But he had enormous will power. There was a great joie de vivre about Peter. He enjoyed life all the time, it seemed to me.’

  In the cinema, the work on offer was of an inferior quality. Typical of these was The Seventh Coin, an action adventure made on very little money (‘It was put together with string and chewing gum and sleight of hand,’ admits its producer Lee Nelson), but at least there was the allure of location work in Israel and it gave O’Toole the chance to play a villain, something he was rarely asked to do and the reason why he accepted the offer.

  His arrival at Ben Gurion airport, according to Lee Nelson, was like that of a visiting deity. ‘They literally stopped the plane on the runway to allow Peter to leave and get into a private car, then the plane carried on to the arrival terminal and everybody else got off.’

  Nelson was apprehensive though when his star arrived. Such were the budgetary restraints that the production could not afford the kind of amenities and behind the scenes comfort that a star of O’Toole’s stature was used to. ‘The trailer that he had to change in was quite frankly embarrassing, but he could not have been more thoughtful, loving, approachable, prepared, and ready to go every day.’

  At the end of every busy day O’Toole’s ritual was to wander back alone to his trailer on the set, strip and take a sponge bath. Lee Nelson knocked on the door one time asking about something. O’Toole called him in. ‘So I open the door and he’s standing there full frontal, totally naked, nothing on at all, he couldn’t have been more blasé.’

  One of the clauses that O’Toole insisted upon having in his contract was that he stay at the American Colony hotel in Jerusalem, situated in the West Bank. It was an old Ottoman-style building, a beautiful boutique hotel with a guest list that was legendary, including T. E. Lawrence himself. ‘When I saw he’d put that in his contract,’ says Nelson, ‘of course I said, “Well, I’m staying there, too.” So we’d meet sometimes in the bar and have a drink. He told me that on Lawrence of Arabia he and Omar Sharif when they were filming in Jordan and wanted to get some booze they would hire a little boat and sail over to Israel. One night they were intercepted by the Israeli Navy who thought they were gun-runners!’

  O’Toole knew he’d been living on borrowed time for years, watching all his drinking pals from the sixties go under the turf one by one. ‘The common denominator of all my friends is that they’re dead,’ he once said. He became a fully paid-up member of the ‘hip-flask mob’, standing around open gravesides in the shivering cold, downing warmth-giving shots of the hard stuff. ‘They’re dropping like flies, it’s the end of an era. I’ve played all the graveyards: Kensal Green. Putney Vale. Golders Green.’

  One passing, in 1997, particularly shook him, that of Ronnie Fraser. The outpouring of grief at his funeral in Hampstead was testament to how beloved he was. O’Toole was one of the pallbearers, sharing the duty with Simon Ward, Chris Evans and Sean Connery. For years O’Toole and Ronnie had not just a deep friendship but a special relationship going on, as fellow actor Bruce Montague reveals: ‘I lived a few houses away from Ronnie Fraser in Belsize Park. Ronnie was fond of strange substances – “African woodbines” as they were sometimes called. Ronnie was one of Peter’s regular suppliers. The transactions were strangely formal. Although I knew what was going on, I was sent to the kitchen while a plastic bag was handed over and Peter placed a wad of notes under a cushion of the sofa. Then I was summoned back into the sitting room and conversation continued as normal. At one point Ronnie couldn’t find his weed and he phoned the police, with whom he was on friendly terms. “Have you got any sniffer dogs in Hampstead?” he said. “We could lay our hands on one. Why do you ask, Ronnie?” said a constable. “Well, could you send it round? I seem to have mislaid my stash.” ’

  Just a few short months later James Villiers died, again another close friend gone. Not long after the funeral O’Toole asked Villiers’ widow Lucy if she would come and work for him as his assistant. She ended up staying with him and looking after his day-to-day professional business right up until the end. ‘They were really close,’ confirms Planco. ‘He took her everywhere with him. She ran his life. I would talk to Lucy probably as much as I talked to Peter.’

  After Villiers passed the grey clouds descended once again. ‘Peter got very depressed during that period,’ claims Planco. ‘He was saying things like, “Why am I surviving? Burton’s gone, Finchie’s gone, Fraser’s gone, they’ve all gone. Why am I still here?” ’

  Harris was still around and they occasionally met up at the odd rugby match, usually Harris’ beloved Munster, and reminisce about the old days. During one sporting afternoon O’Toole suddenly said, ‘Ah, Jesus, I miss waking up in fucking places that you never knew you’d been to.’ Harris smiled. ‘I know. I used to love going to the shop to buy a packet of cigarettes and not coming back home for a month.’ Both men burst out laughing. As O’Toole recalled, ‘We were two old codgers trying to watch a rugby match and stay sober!’

  During one lunch Harris said to O’Toole, ‘Chaps like us, after all we’ve done, we should be dead, shouldn’t we?’ O’Toole looked at his old friend and said, ‘But, Richard, we already are!’

  O’Too
le’s next film, Fairy Tale: A True Story, was loosely based on the Cottingley Fairies hoax of 1917, when two young cousins took photographs that purported to be them interacting with real fairies. O’Toole played Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a keen spiritualist who accepted the photographs as genuine and pitted his credibility against the cynicism of his friend, the escapologist Harry Houdini, played by Harvey Keitel. According to director Charles Sturridge the two actors spent most of their time talking about bars they knew rather than worrying about any clash of acting styles. Co-star Paul McGann recalled his first meeting with O’Toole as strictly bizarre. After the obligatory, Hello, how do you do, O’Toole changed tact completely. ‘Now – disease. I’ve been meaning to talk to you . . .’ And off he went about typhus, the Irish potato famine, the Battle of the Somme, the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler.

  O’Toole flew next to America to make Phantoms, a sci-fi/horror movie, a genre he’d never tackled before, which was part of the reason for taking it on. Director Joe Chappelle’s first contact with O’Toole was in a conference call that also included the producers and Dean Koontz, who’d written the script based on his own novel. ‘Over similar calls I’ve had with actors subsequently over the years, they all want to give notes and have changes made, some quite major. Not so with Peter. He did not want any changes. For him, the concept of pink pages [i.e., script revisions] was “daft”.’ For much of his career, O’Toole saw himself, the actor, as the author’s advocate.

  Chappelle finally met his star at the home he was renting in Georgetown, Colorado, the film’s principal location. ‘Not surprisingly, I was nervous going in – his larger than life reputation preceding him. Would he be drunk? Bombastic? Rude? He’d worked with David Lean, William Wyler, Bertolucci, garnered countless Academy Award nominations and I was a virtually unknown director coming off Halloween 6.’ Chappelle needn’t have worried. O’Toole was gracious and welcoming and it turned out to be a memorable evening. They had dinner together, watched a Denver Broncos football game on TV and O’Toole recited Irish poetry and Shakespeare sonnets. ‘It was like my own private My Favorite Year.’ One of the most difficult shots in the film required O’Toole to perform a long speech during a heavy snow fall. It took all night to shoot. ‘And Peter nailed it,’ recalls Chappelle. ‘When the dailies came back, however, the moisture in the air had somehow messed with the camera and the image was out of focus. Expecting the worst I said, “Peter, we have some bad news.” As soon as he detected where the conversation was going he simply said, “Done.” ’