Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Edward Hardwicke, a young actor who had already established himself at Bristol for something like a year, and would later achieve huge success as Dr Watson to Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes in the Granada television series, never forgot the morning Nat Brenner approached him to ask, ‘We’ve got this young actor coming soon. Would you mind if he shares your dressing room?’ They instantly hit it off.

  Most provincial theatres enjoyed a healthy relationship with the local newspaper, and newcomers to the Bristol Old Vic were often announced in the entertainment pages, sometimes with a little biographical profile, especially if there was something colourful about them. Hardwicke has good reason to remember O’Toole’s particular entry. ‘It said that he was related to a Victorian actor called J. L. Toole who played the Fool to Henry Irving’s King Lear, and I was terribly impressed by this. Then years later we were chatting and I’d recently been to the Garrick Club and in the lobby somewhere was a bust of J. L. Toole and I asked Peter, “Did you ever follow up your connection with J. L. Toole?” And he said, “It was bollocks, dear boy, pure bollocks.” ’

  So why had he done it? After admitting his deception, O’Toole offered Hardwicke this fascinating and revealing explanation. ‘Peter said that when he first auditioned at RADA he was standing in the foyer and there used to be a sergeant who looked after the front door and there were students coming down the stairs and the sergeant said to Peter, “You see that guy there, his father is a famous actor, Sir Cedric Hardwicke.” And it was me! And Peter said, “I remember looking at you, Edward, and you had a bow tie on and suede boots, you looked frightfully confident, so the next day I went to look to see if I could find an O’Toole in the acting profession, there wasn’t one but there was a J. L. Toole.” So he turned himself into a relation.’

  The Theatre Royal, home of the Bristol Old Vic company, was an extraordinary theatre. Situated on King Street, close to the centre of the city, it proudly boasts of being the oldest continually working playhouse in Britain, retaining much of its original Georgian splendour. Pretty quickly O’Toole was put to work. His first role was a couple of lines playing a cab driver in a production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, which opened in September 1955. He shared the stage with a fellow newcomer, Glasgow-born John Cairney, who remembers O’Toole carrying around with him a big whip, ‘which I’m glad to say he never used on me.’

  In a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, starring Eric Porter, O’Toole had even fewer lines, just one in fact as a Georgian peasant who announces at one point, ‘Dr Astrov, the horses have arrived.’ Not much to make an impact with. Faced with this problem, O’Toole decided that the peasant he was playing was in fact the young Stalin. For hours he worked diligently on the make-up from old photographs of the Russian dictator and affected a slight limp. Come opening night, on he walked, ‘smouldering with resentment for the aristocracy. I could hear a hush come over the audience.’ A glaring O’Toole pronounced, ‘Dr Horsey, the Astrovs have arrived.’ He knew he’d cocked it up, it was written all over his face for days. Phyllida Law was a young actress at Bristol and remembers being quite taken by the actor’s public show of remorse. ‘He was so depressed, saying how awfully bad he’d been, which I thought was enchanting.’

  One of the grand old dames of Bristol Old Vic, who’d been there for years and liked to think of herself as something of a barometer of talent, was less forgiving, recalls Hardwicke. ‘She invited Peter and me out to lunch, which was quite a thrill, and Peter went off to the loo and she leaned over to ask me, “Is he a good friend?” I said, “Yes, we get on very well.” She said, “Well, do try and persuade him to give it up.” ’

  While O’Toole, even at this early stage, was, in Hardwicke’s estimation, ‘an extraordinary personality’, he had a long way to go yet. ‘This may sound odd, but in those early days at Bristol Peter was just another actor. It’s only when you look back and you think, I suppose the seeds of what he turned into were there, you don’t necessarily at the time recognize any of that, he’s just another mate in a company of actors.’

  John Cairney remembers O’Toole as ‘a whirling windmill of passion and enthusiasm. I can still see Peter and me wrestling on the Green Room floor of the Theatre Royal, during some kind of young-blood quarrel – why, I cannot remember. He was constantly going round and round, seemingly unsure of which way the wind was blowing. But there was no denying the innate power that was there, though it had yet to be applied fully to the talent. But, he was all go – and he went.’

  One of the highlights of the year at the Bristol Old Vic was the annual pantomime. Nat Brenner was a great visionary, who saw theatre as an instrument for social good and social improvement and happily put on music hall and panto alongside Shakespeare and Chekhov. O’Toole’s first taste of the Bristol panto was Dick Whittington. John Cairney was in the cast, coping as best he could with O’Toole’s ‘long gangling legs and arms and wild eyes’. Halfway through the performance both corpsed, neither could remember the next line, nor could they hear what the prompter was calling out because of the laughter from the audience. ‘So we both marched into the prompt corner and lifted the girl out on the high stool and put her centre stage and made her point to the place in the script. Then, to further laughter, we carried her off again and resumed the action. As a result of this, we were both on the carpet before John Moody, the director of the company, and threatened with instant dismissal. But fortunately for theatre, especially in Mr O’Toole’s case, he changed his mind the next day. The incident was all part of our mutual excess.’

  Following his first panto experience, O’Toole played in his first Shakespeare, a production of King Lear, with Eric Porter in the title role. O’Toole would later class Porter as one of the two best Lears he ever saw, the other being Donald Wolfit. Porter was the star of the Bristol Old Vic, ‘and very much the father of the company’, says Susan Engel, a pupil at the nearby Bristol Old Vic theatre school. And there is little doubt that O’Toole watched and learnt a great deal from him, later citing the actor as a huge influence and ‘a real catalyst for me. He released a lot of my own energies because of his great looseness and power.’ Dazzling on stage, Porter could be enormously generous off it, treating his fellow actors to grand dinners at some of Bristol’s most expensive restaurants. But after his success there Porter was sadly not to have the career that his talent deserved. His memorable performance as Soames in the BBC’s 1967 television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga should have led to greater things, but it didn’t. ‘He couldn’t cope with his own sexuality,’ says Susan. ‘It was so awful for gay men in those days. I don’t know how some of them managed to survive; and many didn’t. You went to prison if you were caught. I think he suffered terribly. He was tortured.’

  For the rest of 1956, O’Toole appeared in small roles in a number of productions including Volpone by Ben Jonson, Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw, The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar, The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Ondine by Jean Giraudoux, The Empty Chair by Peter Ustinov and The Skin of our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. There was also a production of Othello that featured a truly memorable opening night, as told by O’Toole during a mid-nineties appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Amongst the cast was an old actor by the name of Robert Atkins, who in the thirties and forties had essayed all the great Shakespearean roles, and taught at RADA during O’Toole’s spell there. The two had got on well and on the day of the first read-through Atkins approached O’Toole and asked, ‘What are you playing, old son?’

  ‘I’m playing Lodovico, sir.’ A minor part.

  ‘Lodovico,’ said Atkins. There was a pause. ‘Oh, the clown who forgets the letter.’

  O’Toole hadn’t the first clue what the old thespian was on about so did a quick scan of the text and sure enough there was a scene in which Lodovico arrives at Othello’s palace to deliver an important letter from the Doge (Atkins must have misremembered it).

  To achieve a sense of perspective, the set designer h
ad constructed an intricate series of arches that formed the palace entrance, the last of which was a mere five foot high. ‘You don’t mind ducking under it as you make your entrance, do you?’ the designer had kindly asked O’Toole. Not at all. The opening night arrived. O’Toole was ready in the wings, dressed in a long green velvet cloak. The trumpets sounded, his cue to arrive bearing the all-important letter. Ducking under the first arch he felt jammed. ‘My cloak had got wrapped round both sides of the arch. I didn’t know this, I just thought what it needed was a hefty heave.’ And that’s what he gave it, only to watch in stunned silence as the arches toppled over like dominoes. The poor actress playing Desdemona looked distraught wondering how on earth she was going to make her own entrance and Joseph O’Connor’s dark make-up as Othello was running into his eyes. And there stood O’Toole, alone amidst the rubble, his hand rummaging inside his cloak – he’d forgotten the letter.

  Parts like Lodovico were typical of those O’Toole was being asked to play during this season; largely inconsequential. ‘That’s because they were always worried he wasn’t going to turn up,’ reveals Edward Hardwicke. ‘I can remember being in the dressing room at one point and he hadn’t showed yet and a taxi was sent up to his digs and he was still fast asleep with a smashed alarm clock lying about the floor. Peter was a bit of an enfant terrible.’

  Episodes like this were not uncommon. Sheila Allen, an actress who had recently joined the company from rep in Birmingham, recalls that the incidents of O’Toole turning up late for rehearsals or not turning up at all were perpetual. ‘He’d go to bed plastered and not hear the alarm go off or maybe he hadn’t set it, and he’d be full of courtesy and apology on arrival. Peter was adorable, but impossible.’

  After most performances O’Toole retired to the Royal Navy Volunteer, a public house just across the road from the theatre, often staying for late-night drinking sessions. When he wasn’t in the pub O’Toole was busy brewing his own whisky. ‘We made gallons of it. We had a distillery. The only trouble was we couldn’t find anything to store it in. So we got some of those big carboys they keep acid in and filled them with the stuff. Judging by the taste of the whisky, we left some of the acid in.’

  The Royal Navy Volunteer was a favourite haunt in Bristol, but he’d a tendency to ferret out some of the city’s less salubrious bars, downing his pint of Guinness amidst a clientele of drunks and miscreants. As Nat Brenner observed, ‘He cultivated the friendship of people who were plainly psychopathic.’ When O’Toole turned up at the stage door one afternoon wearing a face of cuts and bruises Brenner asked, ‘Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you court this kind of trouble?’ O’Toole didn’t need to think about his answer for too long. ‘I need it. I need to feed on it in order to inform myself about these people.’ Brenner got used to receiving calls at all hours from the local Casualty department reporting that a Mr O’Toole had been admitted and had readily arrived at the conclusion that here was ‘a young man with a sense of self destruction’.

  He was beginning to forge a reputation; sometimes the police would pick him up out of the gutter and drive him home. Susan Engel claims that a rule came into force at the beginning of one of the terms at the Bristol Old Vic theatre school stating that no girl be allowed to walk unaccompanied in King Street. ‘All the other actors were little tiny mice in comparison to Peter. They were ordinary blokes, Peter was a bit outrageous, in fact he was major outrageous. So one had already heard of O’Toole by the sheer fact that we were forbidden to go to King Street because there was an outrageous actor down there. He got himself well known in the town quite quickly.’ Of course, the female students all went charging down there for the very reason they were ordered not to.

  In spite of this growing reputation for wildness his obvious talents were not overlooked by the theatre’s hierarchy, especially Nat Brenner. ‘Nat was a big guru for Peter,’ says Susan Engel. Supportive and approachable, Brenner was a quiet, reserved and precise man, and a master of a myriad of classic styles, Chekhov, Restoration, Elizabethan, and taught his students and actors a healthy respect for the text, a lesson O’Toole never forgot. With Brenner as his champion, O’Toole began steadily to gain more prominent roles during 1957. He played Alfred Doolittle in a production of Shaw’s Pygmalion in March before essaying the role of the moment – Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s groundbreaking Look Back in Anger. Phyllida Law appeared opposite him as Helena. ‘I had to biff him one, didn’t I, had to smack him round the chops and he took it on the chin, so he did.’ Osborne travelled up for a performance and later declared O’Toole the best Porter he ever saw. ‘I would think that was the case,’ says Phyllida. ‘Peter was Jimmy Porter really, in many ways.’

  In May, O’Toole appeared as Lysander in a sparkling production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It typified the sort of grand productions Bristol put on, with large casts and beautiful set design and costumes. Phyllida had been cast as Titania and her fiancé Eric Thompson was playing Puck. Midway through the run the pair married. ‘Peter came,’ recalls Phyllida. ‘And in the evening performance, by which we must have all been nearly dead, he threw rice all over the stage and there were fairies skidding all over the joint.’

  An even bigger success was an old-fashioned musical entitled Oh! My Papa, which saw O’Toole burst into song and play opposite an equally combustible performer in Rachel Roberts. Needless to say the pair of them got on famously. In July it transferred to London’s Garrick Theatre. As the curtain fell on the opening night boos rang out around the auditorium and the show never recovered. To drown the memory of his calamitous West End debut O’Toole knocked back several measures of hard liquor and was arrested at three in the morning for harassing a building in Holborn. He spent the night in the cells and in the morning explained to the court, ‘I felt like singing and began to woo an insurance building.’ The next morning his spirits were somewhat lifted by the critics’ reception of his performance. ‘While the play itself got hammered Peter was picked out,’ recalls Phyllida. ‘He was very good in it.’

  It led to O’Toole’s first real bit of national exposure, when he and Finney (then appearing in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist at Birmingham) shared the cover of the theatre magazine Encore. ‘What have these young actors in common?’ its leading critic asked. ‘Above all, the magic touch of personal magnetism. Love them or leave them, you can’t ignore them.’

  O’Toole awoke pissed, not the first clue where the hell he was, only that he’d scribbled down on a piece of paper that he was required to show up to rehearsals in an Irish club somewhere in Islington for a television play. Quickly he grabbed whatever clothes were lying around on the floor and left the flat in a bedraggled state, ‘and somehow found wherever this bizarre place was where we were rehearsing.’

  He was already two days late.

  The play was The Pier, James Forsyth’s social drama about a gang of teddy boys, and Kenneth Griffith, a lanky, neurotic type of actor who had appeared in several films, was inexplicably playing the leader. As rehearsals passed into the third day Griffith could still see only eight members of his gang when there should have been nine. ‘Where’s this other chap, then?’ As if on cue O’Toole arrived, barging through a pair of swing doors. ‘And there was what appeared to be a tall young tramp,’ Griffith recalled of the occasion. ‘He looked down at us and said, “Sorry I’m late, darlings.” Then his eyes fixed on me, he came thundering down the stairs, picked me up, kissed me (we’d never met) said: “I think you’re bloody marvellous,” put me down, and retreated to a corner.’

  Griffith was perturbed, this was after all just a bit-part player and they shared only the one scene together. When Griffith suggested they do a quick run through of it: ‘Bang! He gave a performance which was devastating,’ Griffith remembered. ‘I knew immediately that this was the most formidable competition I’d ever come across. I felt as if I had just met the young Edmund Kean. I had no doubt whatsoever.’

  The Pier was broadcast that October on the ITV netwo
rk, by which time O’Toole was back at Bristol where he was about to make his greatest impact yet, beginning with an extraordinary production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Susan Engel didn’t miss a single performance. ‘I saw it for three weeks every night. Peter was cast as Vladimir and was just a mercurial, riveting presence. And his voice, his rasping voice, and his intonation, I can still remember his inflections and I’ve seen it perhaps ten times since, different productions, with wonderful actors, and none of them came close to the performance Peter gave. He kind of spoilt it for any of the other actors.’

  Another Bristol theatre student who saw O’Toole’s Vladimir was Patrick Stewart, then just seventeen years old: ‘And O’Toole has been my benchmark for stage charisma ever since – just the intensity of his presence. I came out of that production shaking with excitement, even though I was at times puzzled and scared by the play. I said to myself, “One day I’m going to do that part.”’ It took something like fifty years to finally fulfil that promise to himself.

  Then came the panto, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Eric Porter had left the company so O’Toole was given the responsibility of playing the Dame and practically took charge of the entire production. ‘I can’t remember who wrote the script for Ali Baba,’ says Susan Engel. ‘Not that we kept to it at all, O’Toole kind of invented the whole thing.’ Susan was now able to observe O’Toole at close quarters since she’d taken over the role of the Dame’s sister after one of the actresses was forced to pull out. It was an experience she has never forgotten. Susan remembers O’Toole telling her that he’d based his whole Dame routine on Max Miller. ‘He absolutely worshipped those old music hall comics, and Max Miller’s timing was O’Toole’s bible.’ On stage O’Toole would suddenly, and frighteningly, grab hold of Susan’s arm: ‘Wait for it, wait for it,’ he’d command. ‘And you’d have to wait for the laugh. He was dictatorial, but for the reason of getting it right, getting the laughs. And every night he would improvise.’