Post by Ace on Mar 1, 2007 16:45:58 GMT -5
Because he lost an unprecedented and undeserved 8 times for Oscar's Lead Actor last Sunday, because I adore him and because this is one fantastic interview:
Cheerful rebel
Peter O'Toole emerged during Hollywood's glittering golden age - acting, and partying wildly, alongside legends Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Now, at 74, his performance as a lecherous old actor in Venus has placed him among the favourites to win the Oscar he has been denied seven times.
Gaby Wood
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer
Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.
The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.
Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')
You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.
His face lights up at the mention of What's New, Pussycat?, a madcap caper which was Woody Allen's first script and (depending on your sense of humour) possibly O'Toole's most appealing role. He is as proud of his comic roles as he is of his epic, tormented heroes. 'There's a line I had to say in a film once,' he grins: '"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Which had been said by Edmund Kean. And it is, it's bloody difficult to get it right. I've never known a good actor who couldn't play comedy, and I've never known any actor who found it easy.'
He speaks in a purring, plummy voice, his diction elegantly clear yet fluid enough to suggest the years of nocturnal slurring to which it must have been subjected. He is dapper yet mischievous, a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his white shirt, the electric white wisps of his hair fighting the smoothness of their renowned style. He is charming, but not shy of correcting you with a glowering, sidelong look, or of swearing his heart out to punctuate a point. When he laughs, it is a hoarse, chesty laugh from which you imagine he might not mind if he didn't recover: however frail he says he feels, he approaches every tale with aplomb.
There is something mysterious about O'Toole: from this vantage point, he seems to have been an old-school successor to Gielgud or Olivier, yet when he first came on the scene he was lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism. I ask him whether, when he was at the Bristol Old Vic or at the Royal Court in the 1950s, he was aiming to shatter a tradition or defend one. The response comes slowly, deliberately, accompanied by dramatically hooded eyes.
'One of the enduring myths of our time,' says O'Toole, 'is the Fucking Royal Court. George Devine was a third-rate mummer who couldn't act for toffee. He was a nice old stick, George, but surrounded by these bloody gruesome young amateurs. I found it deeply overrated, but the myth continues. The revivals of Look Back in Anger have been execrated. Well, it was never very good. I went to see it - dreary little production, drearily done. It's all PR. A PR put out a flyer and referred to John Osborne as an "angry young man". It was one of those phrases, everybody used it - I was called an "angry young actor". God!'
Weren't you a rebel? 'I had a rebellious nature, of course. But I wasn't particularly angry about anything. I was quite cheerful!'
O'Toole's first London success was The Long and the Short and the Tall, a Second World War play put on at the Royal Court in 1959 (the part had been written for Albert Finney, a classmate of his at Rada, but Finney developed appendicitis during rehearsals). The all-male cast made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. It was partly their carousing offstage behaviour, and partly the fact that most of these new young actors had come from the provinces (they were the unwealthy beneficiaries of Clement Attlee's postwar reforms), that made them right for the kitchen-sink age.
Yet O'Toole was always a traditional actor - the fact that he's listed alongside Finney, who kept his northern accent, Richard Burton, always inalienably Welsh, the Irishman Richard Harris and the famously cockney Michael Caine, is perhaps an accident of timing more than a true description of his impact. O'Toole was brought up in wartime Leeds with an Irish bookie father ('I'm not working-class,' the self-described 'slum Mick' once said, 'I come from the criminal classes.'); but he was not on stage to flaunt his lower-class roots, and on film he lived up to the aristocracy of his breathtaking looks.
The looks themselves, though, were a kind of mask: in 1960, after a stunning few years at the Bristol Old Vic and that run in London, O'Toole was advised by certain film-makers to fix his nose (Joseph Losey was against it, Nicholas Ray was in favour). The nose, which was then long and - O'Toole claimed - wonky as a result of a rugby game during National Service in the Navy, was surgically straightened in time for a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. ('I thought, well, fuck it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy little heap,' he later said.) It was this picture that David Lean saw when he was casting Lawrence of Arabia
There were those who said the pretty boy we have come to know was a sell-out compared to the rugged man of the stage. But he went on to give some historic performances in the theatre - as Shylock at Stratford that same year, as Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963, in Waiting for Godot in Dublin in 1970 (Beckett once told him he thought no decent film could be made with dialogue - it had all been downhill since the silent era). And he more than made up for the prettiness with his behaviour: there was an undercurrent of (as was said of his character, TE Lawrence) 'insubordination', a choice of brilliant, 'difficult' men as mentors, and a dashing flair for being banned from every drinking establishment he set his sights on.
Michael Caine was O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall; considering he never went on stage, Caine later said, it was incredible he was so exhausted at the end of the run, but waiting anxiously in the wings every night as O'Toole swung in at the very last minute was enough to give any man a coronary. Once, the pair went out drinking and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole, 'What fucking day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.
'I do not regret one drop,' O'Toole now says of his long nights, most famously spent with Richards Harris and Burton. 'We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public!'
I wasn't wondering about the regrets so much as the pleasures, I explain, and urge him to recall particular nights. 'Oh, well there were so many, darling, so bloody many,' he replies, with a look of contented defeat. He claims he really did once go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica.
What percentage of his life, would he say, has he woken up in places he didn't recognise? 'Oh,' O'Toole says, shaking his head at the incalculable number, 'the one to ask was Harris. He literally would say to Elizabeth, his third wife: I'm just going down to the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes. And a month later he didn't know where he'd been. But don't forget, we weren't morose. It was just a fuel, it was in addition to what we were doing, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? It was a fuel for various adventures ...'
They would play snooker or watch rugby together; sometimes, in a jazz joint, O'Toole would find Burton draped over the bass player, beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to a picked out iambic accompaniment. Burton, he says, was 'bursting with life'. One of O'Toole's party pieces was climbing - climbing the wall of Lloyd's bank in Covent Garden, for instance, in the early hours, just for fun. Walls people now climb with ropes, he adds, they used to scale 'in our Sunday shoes'. Did they ever think they'd die? I ask. 'No,' he says with a smile, 'we enjoyed the climb.'
Meanwhile, he had a family in Hampstead. The actress Sian Phillips, to whom he was married for 20 years, has written of their relationship in terms that almost make it rival that of Burton and Taylor. O'Toole, a 'dangerous, disruptive human being' in her description, would disappear for days, or pick fights that quickly escalated to shattered glass. But, as with many of his onscreen incarnations, she suggested, he was so charismatic all was routinely forgiven. (The alcoholic matinee idol he plays in My Favourite Year has a line O'Toole delivers inimitably. Wandering into the wrong loo, he is reprimanded by a stern old woman. 'This is for ladies only!' she grumbles, to which he replies, unzipping his fly: 'So is this, Ma'am, but every now and again I have to run a little water through it.') In the end, it was Phillips who had an affair and left. They have two daughters, Kate O'Toole - named after Katharine Hepburn and now an actress herself - and Pat. O'Toole has a 23-year-old son, Lorcan, from a later relationship with an American model called Karen Brown (Lorcan is Lawrence in Gaelic). As a result of a very public custody battle some years ago, Lorcan primarily grew up with his father, and now he is an actor.
About many of his friends and acquaintances, O'Toole is discreet to the point of looking injured at the mention of their name. 'I don't want to be rude - if you don't mind,' he says when Elizabeth Taylor comes up in conversation. But assuming he's happy to offend the dead, I ask him about an incident in which he reportedly roughed up Kenneth Tynan, this newspaper's celebrated theatre critic. I imagine this to be just another entertaining brawl, a mythical, whisky-fuelled fistfight, but O'Toole seems terribly saddened by the memory.
'Oh, all right, since it's come up ...' he says, and tells the story. It was the summer of 1974. He was making a film in Paris with the noir master Otto Preminger, about a kidnap by Palestinian terrorists. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: 'To Peter O'Toole, the so-called Irishman ... we have planted a bomb in the building.' It was signed by the IRA, and the terrified crew cleared out. 'This was the height of the bombings,' O'Toole says now, 'Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.'
Eventually, word was sent that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag - by Tynan. O'Toole couldn't believe it; he marched off to find him. 'He was sitting in the room, looking un-Ken-like, smoking cigarettes over and over again. He said: "But I thought you'd see through it!" And' - a look of sweet regret comes over O'Toole's face - 'I'm afraid I punched him. Very hard.'
That was the last time they spoke, an awful result, since Tynan had been such a champion of O'Toole, whom he called an 'insomniac Celtic dynamo'. 'You'll find there's a bit cut out of Ken's diaries because I wouldn't tell the story,' O'Toole explains. 'Well, I didn't want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls ... I may have done. And so that was the end.'
Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O'Toole for Playboy magazine, and they'd had this wonderful exchange:
Tynan: 'Are you afraid of dying?'
O'Toole: 'Petrified.'
Tynan: 'Why?'
O'Toole: 'Because there's no future in it.'
Tynan: 'When did you last think you were about to die?'
O'Toole: 'About four o'clock this morning.'
O'Toole has said goodbye to certain things he loves - the drinking, of course, is dramatically reduced, and he no longer plays cricket, a game to which he has been devoted all his life, and which he also used to coach. He doesn't mind - he went out in style. His favourite cricket field is in Devon, a place near Dartmoor called Lustleigh, and that was where he batted for the last time, several years ago. 'The grounds are behind a church - they're beautiful - and there's a river. The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river. I knew I was finished - I could hardly see the bloody ball - but I went bang! And the ball went boom, into the river, in my favourite little cricket field, and I said: Pedro, get out now. And I did.'
All this has left time for other pursuits, however. One thing the bad-boy persona always veiled was a scholarly man of letters. Loitering With Intent, O'Toole's autobiography, of which he has published two volumes, is richly written and Irishly eloquent. He is working on a third volume now, and has a theory about Shakespeare's sonnets he may yet put to paper.
Reminiscing about his mentor, the renegade actor-film-maker Kenneth Griffith who died just six months ago, O'Toole tells me about an episode that cemented their friendship. In the mid-1950s, Griffith and O'Toole shared a dressing room in Manchester with George Formby. Formby, they found, kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys, and they asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find it very difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick up another ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite - whenever anything would go wrong, they'd say: 'pick up another ukulele!' and roar with laughter, as if that were the solution to every problem in life. Even now, wheezing with pleasure in the telling, O'Toole gives the impression that his survival instinct is so strong he won't ever really disappear; he'll just shift into another key.
Best Actor Academy Award nominations
Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Becket (1964); The Lion In Winter (1968); Goodbye Mr Chips (1969); The Ruling Class (1972); The Stunt Man (1980); My Favourite Year (1982).
Cheerful rebel
Peter O'Toole emerged during Hollywood's glittering golden age - acting, and partying wildly, alongside legends Richard Burton and Richard Harris. Now, at 74, his performance as a lecherous old actor in Venus has placed him among the favourites to win the Oscar he has been denied seven times.
Gaby Wood
Sunday January 21, 2007
The Observer
Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.
The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.
Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')
You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.
His face lights up at the mention of What's New, Pussycat?, a madcap caper which was Woody Allen's first script and (depending on your sense of humour) possibly O'Toole's most appealing role. He is as proud of his comic roles as he is of his epic, tormented heroes. 'There's a line I had to say in a film once,' he grins: '"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard." Which had been said by Edmund Kean. And it is, it's bloody difficult to get it right. I've never known a good actor who couldn't play comedy, and I've never known any actor who found it easy.'
He speaks in a purring, plummy voice, his diction elegantly clear yet fluid enough to suggest the years of nocturnal slurring to which it must have been subjected. He is dapper yet mischievous, a silk cravat tucked into the collar of his white shirt, the electric white wisps of his hair fighting the smoothness of their renowned style. He is charming, but not shy of correcting you with a glowering, sidelong look, or of swearing his heart out to punctuate a point. When he laughs, it is a hoarse, chesty laugh from which you imagine he might not mind if he didn't recover: however frail he says he feels, he approaches every tale with aplomb.
There is something mysterious about O'Toole: from this vantage point, he seems to have been an old-school successor to Gielgud or Olivier, yet when he first came on the scene he was lauded as the embodiment of a new, gritty realism. I ask him whether, when he was at the Bristol Old Vic or at the Royal Court in the 1950s, he was aiming to shatter a tradition or defend one. The response comes slowly, deliberately, accompanied by dramatically hooded eyes.
'One of the enduring myths of our time,' says O'Toole, 'is the Fucking Royal Court. George Devine was a third-rate mummer who couldn't act for toffee. He was a nice old stick, George, but surrounded by these bloody gruesome young amateurs. I found it deeply overrated, but the myth continues. The revivals of Look Back in Anger have been execrated. Well, it was never very good. I went to see it - dreary little production, drearily done. It's all PR. A PR put out a flyer and referred to John Osborne as an "angry young man". It was one of those phrases, everybody used it - I was called an "angry young actor". God!'
Weren't you a rebel? 'I had a rebellious nature, of course. But I wasn't particularly angry about anything. I was quite cheerful!'
O'Toole's first London success was The Long and the Short and the Tall, a Second World War play put on at the Royal Court in 1959 (the part had been written for Albert Finney, a classmate of his at Rada, but Finney developed appendicitis during rehearsals). The all-male cast made such a habit of sitting in the pub all possible hours that a line had to be rigged up from the theatre so the stage manager's 10-minute call could be heard at the bar. It was partly their carousing offstage behaviour, and partly the fact that most of these new young actors had come from the provinces (they were the unwealthy beneficiaries of Clement Attlee's postwar reforms), that made them right for the kitchen-sink age.
Yet O'Toole was always a traditional actor - the fact that he's listed alongside Finney, who kept his northern accent, Richard Burton, always inalienably Welsh, the Irishman Richard Harris and the famously cockney Michael Caine, is perhaps an accident of timing more than a true description of his impact. O'Toole was brought up in wartime Leeds with an Irish bookie father ('I'm not working-class,' the self-described 'slum Mick' once said, 'I come from the criminal classes.'); but he was not on stage to flaunt his lower-class roots, and on film he lived up to the aristocracy of his breathtaking looks.
The looks themselves, though, were a kind of mask: in 1960, after a stunning few years at the Bristol Old Vic and that run in London, O'Toole was advised by certain film-makers to fix his nose (Joseph Losey was against it, Nicholas Ray was in favour). The nose, which was then long and - O'Toole claimed - wonky as a result of a rugby game during National Service in the Navy, was surgically straightened in time for a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England. ('I thought, well, fuck it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy little heap,' he later said.) It was this picture that David Lean saw when he was casting Lawrence of Arabia
There were those who said the pretty boy we have come to know was a sell-out compared to the rugged man of the stage. But he went on to give some historic performances in the theatre - as Shylock at Stratford that same year, as Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963, in Waiting for Godot in Dublin in 1970 (Beckett once told him he thought no decent film could be made with dialogue - it had all been downhill since the silent era). And he more than made up for the prettiness with his behaviour: there was an undercurrent of (as was said of his character, TE Lawrence) 'insubordination', a choice of brilliant, 'difficult' men as mentors, and a dashing flair for being banned from every drinking establishment he set his sights on.
Michael Caine was O'Toole's understudy in The Long and the Short and the Tall; considering he never went on stage, Caine later said, it was incredible he was so exhausted at the end of the run, but waiting anxiously in the wings every night as O'Toole swung in at the very last minute was enough to give any man a coronary. Once, the pair went out drinking and woke up in a strange flat. 'What time is it?' Caine asked. 'Never mind what time it is,' said O'Toole, 'What fucking day is it?' And sure enough, it was two days later, three hours before curtain up.
'I do not regret one drop,' O'Toole now says of his long nights, most famously spent with Richards Harris and Burton. 'We were young people who'd been children throughout the war - well, you can imagine what it felt like in 1945 to be free - not to be bombed, not to be rationed, not to be restricted. There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm. We weren't solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public!'
I wasn't wondering about the regrets so much as the pleasures, I explain, and urge him to recall particular nights. 'Oh, well there were so many, darling, so bloody many,' he replies, with a look of contented defeat. He claims he really did once go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica.
What percentage of his life, would he say, has he woken up in places he didn't recognise? 'Oh,' O'Toole says, shaking his head at the incalculable number, 'the one to ask was Harris. He literally would say to Elizabeth, his third wife: I'm just going down to the corner to buy a packet of cigarettes. And a month later he didn't know where he'd been. But don't forget, we weren't morose. It was just a fuel, it was in addition to what we were doing, which was leaping and shrieking and saying: why not? It was a fuel for various adventures ...'
They would play snooker or watch rugby together; sometimes, in a jazz joint, O'Toole would find Burton draped over the bass player, beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to a picked out iambic accompaniment. Burton, he says, was 'bursting with life'. One of O'Toole's party pieces was climbing - climbing the wall of Lloyd's bank in Covent Garden, for instance, in the early hours, just for fun. Walls people now climb with ropes, he adds, they used to scale 'in our Sunday shoes'. Did they ever think they'd die? I ask. 'No,' he says with a smile, 'we enjoyed the climb.'
Meanwhile, he had a family in Hampstead. The actress Sian Phillips, to whom he was married for 20 years, has written of their relationship in terms that almost make it rival that of Burton and Taylor. O'Toole, a 'dangerous, disruptive human being' in her description, would disappear for days, or pick fights that quickly escalated to shattered glass. But, as with many of his onscreen incarnations, she suggested, he was so charismatic all was routinely forgiven. (The alcoholic matinee idol he plays in My Favourite Year has a line O'Toole delivers inimitably. Wandering into the wrong loo, he is reprimanded by a stern old woman. 'This is for ladies only!' she grumbles, to which he replies, unzipping his fly: 'So is this, Ma'am, but every now and again I have to run a little water through it.') In the end, it was Phillips who had an affair and left. They have two daughters, Kate O'Toole - named after Katharine Hepburn and now an actress herself - and Pat. O'Toole has a 23-year-old son, Lorcan, from a later relationship with an American model called Karen Brown (Lorcan is Lawrence in Gaelic). As a result of a very public custody battle some years ago, Lorcan primarily grew up with his father, and now he is an actor.
About many of his friends and acquaintances, O'Toole is discreet to the point of looking injured at the mention of their name. 'I don't want to be rude - if you don't mind,' he says when Elizabeth Taylor comes up in conversation. But assuming he's happy to offend the dead, I ask him about an incident in which he reportedly roughed up Kenneth Tynan, this newspaper's celebrated theatre critic. I imagine this to be just another entertaining brawl, a mythical, whisky-fuelled fistfight, but O'Toole seems terribly saddened by the memory.
'Oh, all right, since it's come up ...' he says, and tells the story. It was the summer of 1974. He was making a film in Paris with the noir master Otto Preminger, about a kidnap by Palestinian terrorists. He turned up to work one day and found a note in mirror writing in the apartment where they were filming: 'To Peter O'Toole, the so-called Irishman ... we have planted a bomb in the building.' It was signed by the IRA, and the terrified crew cleared out. 'This was the height of the bombings,' O'Toole says now, 'Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, my forebears were getting together and blowing things up. You had to take these things seriously.'
Eventually, word was sent that there had been a party in the apartment the night before and that the note had been written as a gag - by Tynan. O'Toole couldn't believe it; he marched off to find him. 'He was sitting in the room, looking un-Ken-like, smoking cigarettes over and over again. He said: "But I thought you'd see through it!" And' - a look of sweet regret comes over O'Toole's face - 'I'm afraid I punched him. Very hard.'
That was the last time they spoke, an awful result, since Tynan had been such a champion of O'Toole, whom he called an 'insomniac Celtic dynamo'. 'You'll find there's a bit cut out of Ken's diaries because I wouldn't tell the story,' O'Toole explains. 'Well, I didn't want to make him look too much of a twat! He claims I kicked him in the balls ... I may have done. And so that was the end.'
Ten years earlier, Tynan had interviewed O'Toole for Playboy magazine, and they'd had this wonderful exchange:
Tynan: 'Are you afraid of dying?'
O'Toole: 'Petrified.'
Tynan: 'Why?'
O'Toole: 'Because there's no future in it.'
Tynan: 'When did you last think you were about to die?'
O'Toole: 'About four o'clock this morning.'
O'Toole has said goodbye to certain things he loves - the drinking, of course, is dramatically reduced, and he no longer plays cricket, a game to which he has been devoted all his life, and which he also used to coach. He doesn't mind - he went out in style. His favourite cricket field is in Devon, a place near Dartmoor called Lustleigh, and that was where he batted for the last time, several years ago. 'The grounds are behind a church - they're beautiful - and there's a river. The thing to do at Lustleigh is to strike the ball into the river. I knew I was finished - I could hardly see the bloody ball - but I went bang! And the ball went boom, into the river, in my favourite little cricket field, and I said: Pedro, get out now. And I did.'
All this has left time for other pursuits, however. One thing the bad-boy persona always veiled was a scholarly man of letters. Loitering With Intent, O'Toole's autobiography, of which he has published two volumes, is richly written and Irishly eloquent. He is working on a third volume now, and has a theory about Shakespeare's sonnets he may yet put to paper.
Reminiscing about his mentor, the renegade actor-film-maker Kenneth Griffith who died just six months ago, O'Toole tells me about an episode that cemented their friendship. In the mid-1950s, Griffith and O'Toole shared a dressing room in Manchester with George Formby. Formby, they found, kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys, and they asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find it very difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick up another ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite - whenever anything would go wrong, they'd say: 'pick up another ukulele!' and roar with laughter, as if that were the solution to every problem in life. Even now, wheezing with pleasure in the telling, O'Toole gives the impression that his survival instinct is so strong he won't ever really disappear; he'll just shift into another key.
Best Actor Academy Award nominations
Lawrence of Arabia (1962); Becket (1964); The Lion In Winter (1968); Goodbye Mr Chips (1969); The Ruling Class (1972); The Stunt Man (1980); My Favourite Year (1982).
