Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  Whilst filming Power Play in Toronto, O’Toole was introduced to Ed Mirvish, a Canadian businessman and theatrical impresario who persuaded him to undertake a season at the city’s prestigious Royal Alexandra Theatre. Seized by the chance of a return to the stage, O’Toole asked Nat Brenner to set up the deal since he was scheduled to fly with Malinche to Cape Town in the spring of 1978 to start work on the Douglas Hickox directed Zulu Dawn, a prequel to the classic 1964 film Zulu. He had agreed to play Lord Chelmsford, the arrogant commander of British forces in South Africa who presided over one of the British army’s greatest military defeats at the Battle of Isandlwana, an engagement that occurred the day before the heroic British stand at Rorke’s Drift.

  Zulu Dawn proved to be a handsomely mounted production, shot in the kind of terrain that O’Toole thrived in, right in the middle of the African bush, ten miles from the actual battle site, now a memorial. It must have reminded O’Toole of his days on Lawrence, since everything had to be built from scratch including roads, wells and a runway for small planes. At one time 250 crew members and 6,000 extras were living on location. Given the logistics involved, shooting passed relatively smoothly, though O’Toole had trouble with his horse. ‘It threw him several times,’ recalls the film’s producer Nate Kohn. ‘In the end, though, he came to love the horse and asked if he could have the animal. We shipped it to him in Ireland. After being thrown one time, he required a tetanus shot. The nurse gave it to him in his trailer. She swooned when she left the trailer and fainted.’

  Kohn liked to think he got to know O’Toole quite a bit during the filming. ‘He was among the most intelligent actors I’ve met. He was also funny, quick-witted and didn’t seem to take himself seriously. I was particularly struck by his diction. He is the only actor I’ve worked with who was able to actually improve his performance in looping’ (the re-recording of dialogue by actors during post-production). One morning O’Toole came into Kohn’s office to discuss his character. They talked for about an hour. ‘His insights and suggestions were brilliant and we incorporated them. He was very focused on doing the best possible job.’ As he was leaving, O’Toole paused in the doorway, ‘By the way, I won’t be showing up on set until I’m paid.’ The production company had run into financial troubles and owed some of the members of the cast money. Needless to say, they were able to rustle up the required sum surprisingly fast.

  In the film O’Toole looks, even for him, haggard and gaunt, and Kohn was fully aware of the actor’s recent surgery: ‘Something about removing his spleen, about which he joked, so he didn’t drink, although I think he did experiment with the local weed.’ Kohn also confirms that O’Toole did not get along terribly well with his co-star Burt Lancaster. ‘Coming as they did from different schools of acting. They only had one scene together, but it proved to be extremely powerful.’

  Finishing his commitments in Africa, O’Toole returned to Toronto in September 1978. The plan was to perform two plays directed by Nat Brenner, Uncle Vanya and Noël Coward’s Present Laughter. After Toronto the productions were to go on tour in the United States. Rehearsals did not go well. Canadian actress Nonnie Griffin arrived on the first day with high expectations. That all changed when she caught sight of O’Toole. ‘I thought, three months of this tour he’s going to be dead. His face was the colour of puce and he was all skin and bone, it was awful.’ Slowly, Nonnie began to see things unravelling, the plays were poorly prepared and many of the actors had in her view been miscast. Most of all O’Toole was behaving irrationally, one minute charming, the next ranting and raving. ‘I think he might have been on some kind of drug, maybe it was cocaine, because he changed so much, total change, which can only be explained by drugs. You could see what a sweetie pie he could be but then his mood would suddenly alter and he’d be in a rage just like that. He could turn on you and destroy you in seconds.’

  The prospect of staying with the show for three months was filling Nonnie with horror and she decided to leave. ‘It was with regret,’ she says, ‘because Peter and I had great chemistry, we just sparked, but he was truly a mental case during that production.’ Later on she heard some stories from the play’s run, one involving the Canadian actor James B. Douglas, who played the role of the manservant in Present Laughter. ‘Jimmy was quite an adept actor and he used to get great laughs and Peter became enraged on the stage with him, he’d say things like – fuck you! He was having a breakdown, I think.’

  Martyn Burke and his wife had been invited to the opening night of Uncle Vanya. ‘I hadn’t seen him for maybe four or five months and when the curtain came up and Peter stepped onto the stage there was an audible gasp throughout the entire audience. People were so shocked at the way he looked. Physically he looked devastated, gaunt, haggard, barely recognizable as Lawrence of Arabia, just a totally physically destroyed human wreck.’ It was no surprise to Burke that O’Toole could not carry the play and gave a performance that fell back on his stock mannerisms. He was going through the motions and it was sad to see. The production and O’Toole particularly were savaged by the critics.

  After Toronto the company embarked on its tour of the United States, which marked O’Toole’s debut on the American stage. Over the years he had been courted by several Broadway producers but was always wary of making such a heavy commitment. ‘The prospect of signing to do one play for a year absolutely terrifies me.’ Playing in Chicago and the Kennedy Center in Washington, audiences were delighted and dismayed in equal measure as his performances ran the gauntlet from slurry to exuberant, enjoyable and yet at the same time unnerving. Midway through the run no one was surprised when an exhausted O’Toole revealed he was quitting the tour early.

  EIGHTEEN

  O’Toole found himself at a Hollywood party, not drinking but doing somersaults in the middle of the floor (this was apparently something he did quite often when bored at parties, that and hide behind curtains to pop out and surprise people, just to liven things up), when he was approached by a director called Richard Rush. This meeting was no happy accident, Rush was a huge admirer of O’Toole. ‘He defined the outer limits of the art of acting for me.’ For several years Rush had been working on a script about an imperious film director who hires a criminal on the run as a stunt man on his new movie. ‘At the beginning you recognize him as a benefactor, who gives this young man a place to hide and shelter. But by the last act of the picture you have to believe that this man is going to kill the kid in order to get it on film, and there aren’t many actors who can handle that kind of subtle transition and still remain fascinating to the audience.’

  Rush cornered O’Toole and they chatted happily for half the evening. ‘But I never brought up the screenplay because it seemed like such a tacky thing to do at a party. When he walked out the door I remember saying to myself, “You chicken shit bastard, why the hell didn’t you mention it!” ’ Then fate interceded. O’Toole came dashing back inside and grabbed Rush. ‘Somebody just told me you directed Freebie and the Bean. I’m crazy about that picture.’ Rush seized his chance. ‘Well, I’ve got a screenplay for you.’ A week later O’Toole had read the script of The Stunt Man and identified it as the best he’d seen in quite some time, and the role of maverick director Eli Cross was without question the best since The Ruling Class. He called Rush. ‘I’m a literate and intelligent man, and unless you let me do your film I will kill you.’ Rush thought that was about the best answer one could possibly get.

  The financing for the film wasn’t quite in place and the inclusion of O’Toole’s name above the title didn’t exactly help. ‘It was not easy casting Peter because the Hollywood money men didn’t rate him high enough box-office wise,’ recalls Rush. ‘So it was a battle. But there was no chance of yielding on my part. Once O’Toole said yes the picture had to go with him as far as I was concerned.’ Eventually the budget was raised thanks to investment from a shopping-mall magnate and filming began on location in California towards the end of 1978.

  Before a foot of celluloid
was taken Rush was warned about O’Toole’s reputation for being sometimes difficult on set, but as it turned out he was no trouble at all. ‘You couldn’t ask for a more perfect working companion. It was like having a Stradivarius to play that was quite willing to be played.’ In turn, O’Toole loved working with Rush, rating him amongst the best directors he ever worked with.

  In the role of the young fugitive Rush had hired Steve Railsback, then best known for playing Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie Helter Skelter. As he prepared for his first scene with O’Toole, Railsback felt under pressure. ‘When you work with somebody like a Peter O’Toole, when you’re working with what I considered greatness, you’d better step your game up or you’ll get destroyed.’ O’Toole wasn’t out to deliberately intimidate the young actor, he was just doing what he did naturally, taking the moment by the scruff of the neck and flying. That’s when Railsback started to climb, he had to. ‘That night I went to my trailer and there was a bottle of wine with a ribbon and a card and it said: “Steve, for being unintimidatable – love Peter.” I still have that card.’

  As the shoot went on, Railsback and O’Toole grew close. Between takes they’d wander off and just talk, talk about the work, about acting, about themselves. Railsback listened to O’Toole’s roaring stories about the past. ‘And that man could tell a story, you would visualize everything he was saying, you could see it. There was something about Peter, even when he wasn’t telling a story, you were transfixed. God, what a pleasure it was to be with that man.’

  When the unit landed in Sacramento to shoot over the course of a few days, Railsback’s hotel room was right next door to O’Toole’s. Out back in the yard the owner kept some ducks and every morning at 2 a.m., without fail, O’Toole would wander out onto his balcony and recite Shakespeare to them. ‘And I would get up to make sure I was listening.’

  O’Toole displayed no hang-ups, he wasted no time with prima-donna behaviour, he was relaxed and free and the mood on set remained upbeat throughout. ‘We couldn’t wait to get to work every day,’ confirms Railsback.

  Given the role he was playing was a crackpot and tyrannical movie director, the suggestion was that O’Toole had used his old Lawrence collaborator David Lean as inspiration. In truth, the character didn’t change much from Rush’s own conception, although O’Toole was certainly instrumental in refining the role, for example carefully selecting the right costume. Every morning he’d go to Rush with a new set of clothes. ‘One day Peter came to me and said, “How’s this?” And I said, “That’s it, that’s exactly the look I’ve been after, the Americanization of Peter O’Toole.” What I didn’t realize was that he was dressed exactly like me and it wasn’t until noon that day that I finally figured that out.’

  It wasn’t just his choice of costume, O’Toole brought an enormous amount to the film. ‘Mostly the magic of turning those words on paper into a living and breathing reality,’ says Rush, who also had a hand in the screenplay. ‘Which had all the subtlety and virulence that one could hope for, and on top of that the extra O’Toole power that he delivered.’ There was something else, too, which the director interpreted as being traditional in the English theatre, of the leading man being a sort of father figure within the company. Whenever there was some little problem developing in relationships between the cast, Rush could always rely on O’Toole to help solve them.

  As he waited for what he was sure would be an enthusiastic response to The Stunt Man, O’Toole took on two television projects. First was Strumpet City, a seven-part serial based on James Plunkett’s bestselling novel about the 1913 strike known as the Dublin Lockout, where workers were threatened with losing their jobs if they refused to sign a pledge not to join a union. It was the most ambitious television project RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, had ever undertaken and O’Toole excelled as James Larkin, an Irish trade-union leader and activist. Appearing in only a handful of scenes, O’Toole was proud enough of the production to help flog it at the Monte Carlo television festival, where he was lauded and invited to dinner with Princess Grace at the Palace.

  His second venture was far more taxing, involving several months of hard slog on brutal locations in Israel. Masada was an eight-hour American TV miniseries based on a true event, when nine hundred Jewish zealots held out against a vast Roman legion on a mountain-top fortress. At $21m it was the most expensive miniseries ever made. O’Toole played a Roman general commanding an army seemingly made up purely of British thespians. The producers had cast Americans to play the Jewish renegades. ‘And the Americans were very health conscious,’ recalls Peter Strauss, who played the leader. ‘Eating carefully and doing smart things about the sun. And the Brits would be up till five in the morning collectively singing and enjoying the local libation in the hotel. And the Brits never got sick while all the Americans came down something awful.’

  During long camera set-ups O’Toole would invariably wander off into the desert on his own with just an umbrella for company. ‘Once he meandered off and no one could find him for the rest of the day,’ recalls Strauss. ‘And to this day I don’t think anybody knows where he went. He had this Lawrence-like adoration of the desert and seemed much more comfortable in it than the rest of us.’

  O’Toole did seem to distance himself as much as possible from the rest of the company, taking his privacy seriously. While the bulk of the cast stayed in the same hotel, O’Toole rented a private house some distance from the location and when work was done for the day would return there alone. ‘Peter was not an actor you got close to on the set,’ confirms Strauss. But he was always pleasant and once again arrived having done his usual meticulous research. ‘No one can ever say to me that Peter O’Toole was not the best prepared actor on the set,’ says Strauss. ‘He would have his cigarettes, and once in a while he would partake from this little snuff box, and God only knows what that was all about. He would come on the set and very quietly listen to the director’s instructions regarding staging, and then you would just sit there in awe as he delivered a thirty-page speech without hesitation and impeccably prepared.’

  In one of the film’s most important roles, that of a slave girl who is the lover of O’Toole’s general, director Boris Sagal had cast the Nicaraguan-born former supermodel Barbara Carrera, who had been acting for only a few years. When she heard she would be playing most of her scenes opposite O’Toole, Barbara got a friend of hers to run a print of Lawrence of Arabia. ‘And I was blown away by the beauty of this man, he was overpowering.’ When Barbara arrived in Israel she thought a nice way to introduce herself was to invite O’Toole over for lunch at her rented villa. He arrived in a convertible driven by Malinche, determined it seemed to make a good first impression, wearing a grand hat and cape as if he were going to the opera. When Barbara opened the door to greet him she was momentarily stunned. ‘Because he looked so different, it was not the young man whom I saw on that screen, it was someone who was looking more like his father. But his eyes, my God, his eyes were amazing, so bright blue. And I liked him from the first moment I met him.’

  Barbara was scheduled to begin work the next day, but due to difficulties ended up waiting around in her trailer and not being used. When O’Toole heard what had happened he was visibly upset. Exactly the same thing happened the following day, Barbara was left waiting and they never got around to shooting her scene. The next morning O’Toole arrived to say good morning. ‘Did they get to you yesterday?’ he asked. Barbara shook her head. ‘What!’ Grabbing Barbara’s hand, O’Toole pulled her out of the trailer and onto the set. ‘There must have been two thousand extras there dressed as Roman soldiers,’ she recalls. ‘And everyone looked at him as this great General. And he was holding me by the hand, I felt like a five-year-old, and he got the attention of all these people and said, “Never, in my twenty years of acting, have I seen such an abominable treatment of a leading lady. If she were Sophia Loren they would have to go to Rome to bring her back.” And I was fine, I was not at all upset that they didn’t
get to me. But that was Peter, he demanded his fellow workers be shown respect.’

  Until the end of shooting O’Toole took Barbara under his wing, teaching her how to survive the extreme desert heat by drinking water every ten minutes and sharing his supply of salt tablets. In return she was to call him her ‘mentor’. She was still relatively inexperienced as an actress, and O’Toole guided her and helped her enormously, going through every scene they shared together. He’d take her to one side and say, ‘This scene is a close-up, Barbara, so you must stay very, very still. There is tremendous power in stillness.’ He would direct her almost. ‘He educated me and I was a willing pupil. He told me that I should always look for the greatness in a character. And it didn’t matter how lowly they were, find the greatness in the lowliness.’ Barbara also remembers being told that every evening before going to sleep he took the script and re-read his entire part. In that way he was able to keep entirely in the character.