Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Barnes had populated RADA with a large number of teachers who came from a sort of cobweb-strewn twilight world, theatrical equivalents of Miss Havisham. There was Ernest Milton, a Shakespearean actor very definitely of the old school. Finney recalled seeing Milton once huffing and puffing after a departing train yelling at the top of his voice, ‘Stop! Stop! You’re killing a genius!’ And there was Nell Carter, whose claim to fame was that she had been Nerissa to Dame Irene Vanbrugh’s Portia before the First World War. Even the German fencing teacher had a duelling scar!

  Most of the students held their tongue. Female students were especially timid in those days, just out of school and too afraid to say boo to a goose. It was different with the boys, many, like O’Toole, had already done their National Service and were mature beyond their years and not intimidated by the teachers at all. O’Toole could at times display sheer contempt for them, screeching during rehearsals, ‘My god, what the hell does he know? If he were any good he wouldn’t be teaching here, would he?’ There was a wildness in him, inherent, God-given, that simply would not be subsumed. ‘He’d never take direction,’ remembered Roy Kinnear. ‘That’s the confidence of youth. Peter would tell the director how he was going to do a scene and then do it.’

  During a diction lesson, where students performed a speech and then were submitted to a critique, O’Toole arrived with absolutely nothing prepared. ‘That’s all right,’ said the teacher, handing him a book. ‘Read something out of that.’ O’Toole started. ‘No, no,’ said the teacher. ‘Do it again.’ O’Toole sighed audibly before beginning once more. Just a few lines in he was interrupted again. ‘No, no, no!’ O’Toole threw the book at him and stormed out, not returning to the class for a week. He later apologized. ‘Even then Peter did not suffer fools gladly,’ says Malcolm Rogers, who witnessed the altercation. ‘Peter didn’t have a great deal of respect for that teacher, he was quite old and wasn’t very good. It was a flash of temperament and not what most students would do.’

  Voice production and the teaching of ‘standard’ English, or Received Pronunciation, were important at RADA. Teachers could be quite scathing with those who had a regional accent. Some students did rebel against the need to eradicate the regional tone in their voice, others like O’Toole were more philosophical, leaving RADA with their northern vowels totally flattened out and condemned to the dustbin. Looking back today, Keith Baxter also sees the value of those diction classes. ‘I was from Wales. One of my teachers told me that I sounded as though my mother dug for coal with her fingernails. It wasn’t that we wanted to talk posh, that’s not it, we didn’t want to talk like the Royal Family, we just wanted when we got into the theatre to talk like Olivier, or Ralph Richardson or Gielgud, actors who spoke beautifully, we all wanted to do that. Not to mimic them, that was easy and we all did it, but what dazzled us was the power of their voices and we all got a sense of the craft that goes into an actor’s speech.’

  Students were actively encouraged to attend as many theatre performances as possible. That winter of 1953 Richard Burton, back from his first foray in Hollywood, reigned supreme at the Old Vic. Tickets were like gold dust with the twenty-eight-year-old hailed as the new Olivier. A group of RADA students, O’Toole amongst their number, decided to see King John, with Burton playing Philip the Bastard. Taking it in turns to queue for cheap tickets they sat up in the gods, crackling with anticipation.

  The curtain that evening fell to applause like thunder and O’Toole stepped outside into a cold, windy Waterloo Road almost traumatized by what he’d seen. ‘When Richard Burton strutted his Bastard on to the stage, he fetched with him a virility and poetry which neither before nor since have I seen matched in any playhouse.’ Conveniently located nearby was a pub and O’Toole’s group made haste inside. He was halfway through his pint when Burton and other cast members bounded in, calling out for refreshment. O’Toole watched the Welsh wizard ‘lift his pint with an ease and sure-handedness that told of diligent practice’. It was a strange sensation to sit so close to actors who had entertained him so grandly, there was laughter, good humour, it delighted him, yes, ‘but though I can see and hear all this, I cannot yet touch it’. They were professionals, O’Toole was still very much the apprentice. At one point O’Toole distinctly recalled Burton catching sight of his own gaze and staring back with a grin, ‘as big as it was friendly. He raised his glass to me, to my friends, we raised our glasses to him, and then with the grin still on him he ambled away.’

  That same season O’Toole saw Strindberg’s The Father and was captivated by the veteran actor Wilfrid Lawson. Not long after, travelling in the tube and swotting up on some text, O’Toole realized he was sat opposite the great man, who was glaring at him. ‘Not in public, my boy. Not in public.’ It was the beginning of a great friendship that lasted till the old man’s death in 1966. Lawson became something of a mentor to O’Toole, he was his kind of actor, brazen, slightly daft and not giving a fuck for convention. He was also an alcoholic but amazingly remained in work. There were antics galore with Lawson. During one theatrical run he took strongly against a particular actress. In one performance she was starting her big speech when the audience was diverted by a large puddle of liquid seeping onto the stage. Lawson was behind the prop door taking a piss.

  O’Toole lived in a succession of dingy bedsits and friends’ sofas during his two years at RADA, even for a time on a barge that came perilously close to disaster one night during a party after too many revellers came aboard: ‘We had to man the pump at the stern and wank the bastard in dread of her sinking.’ This kind of haphazard existence led to regular greetings of, ‘Hello, Peter, which hedge did you sleep under last night?’ as he bounded through the academy’s door. One night after seeing the musical Guys and Dolls in the West End and endeavouring to walk home with a bottle of whisky for company he spent the night under the stars on the old bandstand in Green Park.

  Money was difficult too, especially in that first year, and O’Toole was forced to look for work. Most of his colleagues seemed to have their own suit, which got them hired as shop assistants; with no such finery O’Toole had to settle for a job on a building site working the cement mixer. He also washed dishes at Lyons’ Corner House restaurant in the West End for ten shillings and a free meal. His fellow washer-upper was an equally young and broke showbiz hopeful, Danny La Rue. During the holidays he’d go back up to Leeds, where he often found part-time work as a postman.

  O’Toole’s confidence as a performer had now grown to such an extent that he often displayed impatience and contempt when given small roles in productions. It was an attitude that earned a stern rebuke one day when his teacher Hugh Miller yelled at him in front of the whole class, ‘O’Toole, there are no small parts, there are only small actors.’ It was an important lesson, that even the smallest role can make a telling contribution, can steal the show if played with imagination and bravura. It also endeared him greatly to Miller, who became one of the few teachers at RADA he ever had any time for. A great raconteur, Miller had worked on Broadway and knew his stuff and would become a huge influence. ‘He was the one who turned the key that unlocked and set free whatever abilities as an actor were held inside me.’ As would another teacher, Clifford Turner, one of the foremost authorities on voice production, who like Miller had a big personality and wasn’t afraid to inject a bit of fun into proceedings.

  There was much respect, too, for Ernest Milton, who directed O’Toole in a student production of Twelfth Night. ‘Tristram Jellinek was in it who was a great friend of Peter’s,’ recalls Malcolm Rogers. ‘And Peter had sent Tristram off for his cane, “I must have my cane!” and Ernest Milton roared, “I’ll not have you fetching and carrying for Peter O’Toole!” ’

  The bigger stage roles did begin to come O’Toole’s way that second year. One in particular stands out for Keith Baxter: Catherine’s brother Prince Potemkin, in George Bernard Shaw’s Great Catherine. ‘It was a real knockabout part,’ says Baxter. ‘And Peter was f
alling over, doing prat falls, the whole works.’ Baxter had gone that night with Roy Kinnear and afterwards they trudged back to the flat they shared in Battersea, a distance of some miles. In those days the tubes stopped early and there were no late-night buses, and with taxis a financial no-no, hard-up students had no choice but to walk. ‘So we’d been pounding the pavement hard for two hours almost in complete silence,’ recalls Baxter. ‘And then we crossed Battersea Bridge and there was a roadside cafe for late-night lorry drivers and so we sat and had a cup of tea. We really hadn’t talked much, then Roy looked at me and said, “He’s fucking incredible isn’t he.” And I said, “Yes.” There was something about Peter that was absolutely irresistible, overwhelming. As an actor he was just something beyond any of us, any of us.’

  O’Toole didn’t run around with any particular crowd at RADA, though he’d a nose for finding the best parties and the pubs that sold the cheapest beer. Already his penchant for the bottle was the subject of much gossip. ‘The main thing I remember about Peter is that he seemed to have a very romantic attitude to alcohol,’ reports fellow student Pauline Devaney. ‘Peter always used to say that he wanted to be dead from drink by the time he was thirty, which always seemed to me a curious ambition.’

  Certainly odd things seemed to happen to O’Toole and O’Toole alone. On his way to a RADA production he was a passenger in a car that hit a ten-ton lorry on the A1. He was taken to hospital, his leg bursting with pain, but discharged himself after being kept waiting for an X-ray. He caught a train down to London where a sympathetic doctor pumped him full of enough painkillers to give a performance. The next day the X-ray proved that he had a broken leg. Elizabeth Rees-Williams shared many classes with O’Toole and can’t recall an occasion when she saw him without a plaster or a bandage somewhere on his person. ‘And a bloody bandage, because he’d been in some scrape or other. Even in those days there was a frisson about him.’

  O’Toole’s final year at RADA was all change for the academy, when Sir Kenneth Barnes, approaching his eighties, was pensioned off; not before time most would say, as he was in serious decline and quite deaf. ‘Really to impress Sir Kenneth when you acted you had to shout it,’ admits Malcolm Rogers. ‘Subtlety didn’t really come into it.’ His successor was John Fernald, who’d had a long career in the theatre as a director, and with him came an air of efficiency and vitality and more forward thinking. Fernald really intended to mix things up and was instrumental, for example, in organizing a student production of Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, the first time this play had been performed anywhere in Britain, with O’Toole in a principal role. Among the chorus was a first-year student by the name of Glenda Jackson.

  O’Toole’s reputation at RADA was by now well established, along with his wild ways and eccentric behaviour; he once took an ironing board onto the pavement outside the academy’s doors and did his shirts. The actress Lisa Harrow was told one story of the time O’Toole, Bates and Finney all appeared in a play together. ‘And apparently O’Toole came on stage as someone bringing in these glasses of wine, and he’d peed in all the glasses.’

  Delia Corrie had just begun her first year at RADA but already had heard all about O’Toole. ‘He cut a dashing figure when he used to sweep into the canteen making all us silly young actresses adore him! There was no doubt that he was going to make an impression to not only lowly RADA students but in the outside world.’

  Pauline Devaney, however, found O’Toole strangely aloof and insular. ‘Peter was not into getting on with people. Normally if you’re in a very confined space, as we were for both rehearsals and performance, you get on with each other, but I have no recollection of him ever being particularly friendly.’ Conversely Elizabeth Rees-Williams remembers O’Toole as ‘an embracer’. Someone with enormous charisma who was larger than life. ‘There was so much excitement when he was around, anything could happen and you never knew if it was going to be good or bad or whatever.’

  By the end of Fernald’s first term, Elizabeth was gone, unceremoniously booted out. Feeling sorry for herself, she agreed to take part in a small fringe-theatre production, where she made the acquaintance of a young actor studying at another drama school, LAMDA. The physical attraction between them was undeniable and they began dating. His name was Richard Harris. It’s Elizabeth’s recollection that not long after their relationship started she introduced Richard to O’Toole in a pub, thus beginning an extraordinary friendship. The connection between the two men was instant. ‘Richard recognized in Peter that spark and that quest for life and appetite for life, because they really wanted to enjoy life and live it to the full. And I think they both did.’

  O’Toole enjoyed telling one story of Harris the drama student living in a distressing bedsit in Earls Court. After one mighty bender they returned to this hovel rat-arsed and starving hungry. A desperate search for food uncovered nothing but a solitary pork chop in the fridge; ancient it was, clearly it had been there a long time. They smelt it, looked at it, and thought better of it, so threw it out of a window and went to bed. Came the morning they left the squat and under the window from which they’d thrown this pork chop there was a dead dog.

  There is also the tale of when the pair drove down to Brighton for the weekend to catch the pre-London try-out of Paul Scofield’s Hamlet at the Theatre Royal. Arriving outside one of the resort’s grander hotels they booked the presidential suite and proceeded to go nuts on room service. After the second day, Harris came to his senses. ‘We’ve got to leave now, Peter, how much money have you got?’ Nothing, as it turned out. Harris was likewise skint. It was pouring with rain, storms; the beaches were windswept and dangerous. Harris had a brainwave. ‘Take your clothes off, Peter, all of them.’ Rolled up into a tight ball, the garments were turfed out of the window into a little side street. ‘Come on, let’s pretend we’re going for a swim.’ Covering their modesty with towels they casually walked through the lobby towards the main doors. The manageress, a stern-faced woman, looked up from her work. ‘Where are you going?’

  Harris smiled. ‘We’re going for a swim.’

  The woman looked incredulous. ‘A swim, in this! The waves are ten feet tall out there, the currents . . . ’

  ‘Yes, we’re going for a swim,’ countered Harris. ‘We’re Irish, we’re tough. We can handle it.’

  Once out of sight they snuck up the street, quickly changed and made a bolt for it. In the late 1960s Harris was on a one-man concert tour and arrived to play a gig in Brighton. Not just that but his promoter had booked him into that very same hotel. ‘I recognized the lobby. Oh my god. I signed my name and it was the same woman behind the desk. I hurriedly finished and made my way to the lift when, “Oh, Mr Harris.” I said, “Yes.” “We thought you and Mr O’Toole drowned.” ’

  One of the advantages for RADA students was the end of year public show, which theatre managers, agents and critics were invited to attend. It was a terrific chance to be noticed, maybe even get a job. In it O’Toole performed a piece from Pirandello’s The Rules of the Game. Strange as it may seem, although O’Toole and Finney were the undisputed stars of RADA (as Elizabeth explains, ‘When Peter or Albie were doing anything, you’d all go and watch’) they were not expected to win the gold medal, the prize given to the year’s best student. Everyone expected it to be John Stride, who was seen very much as the golden boy. There was a gasp when at the end of the show the prize went instead to Bryan Pringle.

  According to theatre director William Gaskill, the names of O’Toole and Finney were reverberating around the theatre world long before they graduated. ‘People already knew who they were before they’d gone into the profession. People in the theatre knew how good they were.’ It was no surprise to Malcolm Rogers that it was these two who came out of the starting gate first. ‘They were the two, I felt mentally, who’d got it together, they knew where they were going. They had a sense of direction.’ Indeed, they had already been hired by two of the country’s most prestigious repertory t
heatres: Finney was heading to Birmingham rep, while O’Toole had come to the notice of the Bristol Old Vic’s general manager, Nat Brenner, who sensed something special. ‘He was absolutely riveting. I was smitten.’

  FOUR

  O’Toole left RADA, aged twenty-three, with a little blue book that every student was given upon graduation, The RADA Keepsake and Counsellor. It gave indispensable advice for the rocky road that lay ahead, gems like: ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t get the job as long as the shoes you were wearing at the audition were clean.’ Goodness knows what O’Toole did with the thing, chucked it into the nearest bin most likely.

  Walking up the steps of the Bristol Old Vic for the very first time was to O’Toole the high spot of his life. ‘It always will be.’ Here was a theatre that had seen such eminences as Kean, Kemble and Irving ply their trade, and in recent years, under the formidable stewardship of artistic director John Moody and Nat Brenner, evolved into one of the most important repertory companies in the country. ‘There was so much energy pouring out from that stage from a strong company at that time,’ says actor John Cairney. ‘It was a proud thing to belong to the Old Vic at Bristol because it managed to combine the best of the old, yet contain all the surging talent of the new.’ Just a year prior to O’Toole’s arrival it had staged the first production outside America of Arthur Miller’s seminal play The Crucible, after no producer in the West End would mount it.