Peter O'Toole

Peter Seamus O'Toole was born on August 2, 1932. Official records place his birth in Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, though O'Toole himself enjoyed telling interviewers that he might have been born in Connemara, Ireland, and he held both British and Irish identity throughout his life ^[1]. His father, Patrick O'Toole, was an itinerant Irish bookmaker known as Captain Pat, and his mother, Constance, was a Scottish nurse. The family moved frequently around the racetracks of northern England during Peter's early childhood before settling in the Hunslet district of south Leeds ^[2].

His schooling was Catholic and, by his own account, unhappy. He left formal education in his early teens and found work at the Yorkshire Evening News, first as a copy boy and later as a trainee journalist and photographer ^[1]. The newspaper trade gave him an early education in language, but he concluded that reporting was not his calling. National service followed: he spent two years in the Royal Navy as a signaller before returning to civilian life still unsure of a direction ^[2].

The answer arrived through amateur theatre in Leeds and a spontaneous trip to London. In 1952 he auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and won a scholarship. His RADA class of the mid 1950s became legendary, including Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Richard Briers among his contemporaries ^[3]. Anyone asking who was Peter O'Toole before the fame finds the shape of the later man already visible in those years: a working-class northerner with Irish roots, quick wits, and an appetite for risk.

After graduating from RADA in 1955, O'Toole joined the Bristol Old Vic, then one of the most respected regional companies in Britain. Over roughly three years there he played dozens of roles, from small parts to leads, and his 1957 Hamlet at Bristol drew serious critical attention ^[3]. The stage remained his training ground: in 1959 he appeared in the West End in The Long and the Short and the Tall, and in 1960 he played Shylock and Petruchio for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, performances that marked him as one of the outstanding classical actors of his generation ^[2].

Film work began modestly. He took supporting roles in pictures such as Kidnapped and The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, both released in 1960, learning the different discipline of the camera ^[1]. Producers noticed the tall, fair-haired actor with pale blue eyes and a voice that could shift from whisper to trumpet within a sentence.

The decisive break came when the director David Lean and producer Sam Spiegel cast him as T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia after other actors, including Marlon Brando and Albert Finney, fell away from the project ^[4]. The production consumed nearly two years, much of it in the deserts of Jordan, Spain, and Morocco. When the film opened in December 1962 it won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and O'Toole received his first nomination for Best Actor. Overnight the little-known stage actor became an international star, and any Peter O'Toole biography necessarily turns on that single role ^[4].

The record most often cited among Peter O'Toole facts concerns the Academy Awards. He was nominated eight times for Best Actor: for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Becket (1964), The Lion in Winter (1968), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), The Ruling Class (1972), The Stunt Man (1980), My Favorite Year (1982), and Venus (2006). He never won a competitive Oscar, the most nominations in that category without a victory ^[5]. In 2003 the Academy voted him an Honorary Award for his body of work. He initially asked for the honor to be delayed, writing that he was still in the game and might yet win the prize outright, but he accepted the statuette that March with evident good humor ^[5].

His 1960s run remains remarkable by any standard. In Becket he played King Henry II opposite Richard Burton's Thomas Becket, and four years later he returned to the same king, older and embittered, in The Lion in Winter opposite Katharine Hepburn, who won an Oscar for the film ^[1]. He shared the screen with Audrey Hepburn in the caper comedy How to Steal a Million (1966) and appeared in the ambitious biblical epic The Bible: In the Beginning (1966). For The Lion in Winter he also won a Golden Globe, one of several he collected across his career ^[2].

The theatre never lost him. His 1963 Hamlet opened the National Theatre of Great Britain at the Old Vic under Laurence Olivier's direction, a distinction few actors can claim ^[3]. Decades later, his performance in the title role of Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, staged in London in 1989, was widely treated by British critics as one of the great comic stage performances of the era. Among the achievements is also his Emmy: he won in 1999 for playing Bishop Cauchon in the miniseries Joan of Arc ^[2]. Later screen highlights included his Oscar-nominated turn as an aging actor in Venus (2006) and voice work as the food critic Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille (2007), which introduced him to a new generation ^[6].

O'Toole married the Welsh actress Siân Phillips in 1959. The couple had two daughters, Kate and Patricia, and remained together for two decades before divorcing in 1979. Kate O'Toole later became an actress herself ^[1]. In the early 1980s he had a relationship with the American model Karen Brown, with whom he had a son, Lorcan O'Toole, born in 1983 ^[2].

His drinking was as famous as his acting. Through the 1960s and early 1970s he belonged to a hard-living circle of actors that included Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Oliver Reed, and stories of marathon benders followed him everywhere. The lifestyle nearly killed him: in the mid 1970s he underwent major abdominal surgery, with parts of his stomach and intestine removed, and a subsequent blood disorder brought him close to death ^[7]. He gave up alcohol afterward and often spoke about the change with characteristic dry wit rather than regret.

Away from the set he was a devoted follower of rugby union, supporting Ireland at internationals, and a lifelong cricket enthusiast who qualified as a coach and spoke of the game with scholarly affection ^[7]. He read constantly, collected first editions, and published two volumes of memoirs under the title Loitering with Intent in the 1990s, covering his childhood and his RADA years in a digressive, comic prose style that reviewers found true to the man ^[2].

The decades after his health crisis brought both misfires and revivals. A 1980 Macbeth at the Old Vic was savaged by critics, yet it sold out its run as audiences came to see the spectacle for themselves; O'Toole later wrote about the episode with self-mocking candor ^[2]. The same year, his performance as a tyrannical film director in The Stunt Man earned some of the best American reviews of his career and another Oscar nomination, and My Favorite Year (1982), in which he played a faded swashbuckling movie star, added one more ^[5].

He kept working steadily through the 1980s and 1990s in film and television, including a role as the tutor Reginald Johnston in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture ^[6]. Television brought him the Emmy for Joan of Arc in 1999 and a nomination for playing Paul von Hindenburg in Hitler: The Rise of Evil (2003). In 2004 he appeared as King Priam in the epic Troy, and from 2008 he played Pope Paul III in the series The Tudors ^[2].

Venus, released in 2006, gave him a final leading role of substance: an elderly actor drawn into an unlikely friendship with a young woman. The performance brought his eighth and last Oscar nomination at the age of 74 ^[5]. In July 2012 he announced his retirement from acting, saying the profession no longer held the appeal it once had. He died on December 14, 2013, at the Wellington Hospital in London, aged 81, after a long illness ^[8]. His funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium, and tributes came from across the acting world and from the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins ^[8].

O'Toole occupies an unusual position in film history: a classically trained stage actor who became a global star through a single towering screen performance and then spent fifty years refusing to be confined by it. Critics continue to rank his Lawrence among the finest performances ever put on film, and Lawrence of Arabia itself is preserved in the United States National Film Registry and regularly appears near the top of institutional lists of great cinema ^[4].

His Oscar record has become a fixture of awards commentary, cited whenever a distinguished actor goes home empty-handed. Yet the honors he did receive tell their own story: the Honorary Academy Award, an Emmy, multiple Golden Globes and BAFTA recognition, and honorary degrees on both sides of the Irish Sea ^[5]. In 2013 the Irish government and Irish film institutions mourned him as one of their own, a claim he had always encouraged ^[8].

For students of acting, the interest lies in the instrument itself: the deliberate musicality of his phrasing, the stillness he could hold on camera, and the sense of danger he carried into even light comedy. Among Peter O'Toole achievements the least measurable may be the most lasting, the proof that flamboyance and precision can live in the same performer. His memoirs, his recorded interviews, and above all the films keep that demonstration available to anyone who looks ^[2].