Peter O'Toole

by Robert Sellers

  When it opened, My Favorite Year did modest enough business but over the years has grown in reputation, something Gruskoff puts down to O’Toole’s performance. ‘He made the movie what it is – a semi-classic.’ It is a master class in physical comedy and timing. And met with near-universal acclaim. The doyen of American film critics Pauline Kael raved: ‘O’Toole is simply astounding. I can’t think of another major star, with the possible exception of Ralph Richardson, who would have the effrontery to bring this sly performance off.’

  Early on the signs were clear that O’Toole would bag another Oscar nomination, and so it was. This time he lost out to Ben Kingsley for Gandhi. Gruskoff puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of backers MGM, a company then heading for bankruptcy. ‘You need money to win an Oscar, to put the ads in the trade papers, and MGM didn’t have the financial clout to compete with the other companies. Had they had the money Peter might have stood a better chance.’

  Much of My Favorite Year was shot on location in New York, with interiors done in Hollywood. O’Toole had always preferred New York to Los Angeles and was beginning to spend more time there and so was eager to find some kind of representation in the city, having an agent back in London, Steve Kenis, and one in Hollywood. Johnnie Planco had been a successful agent since he joined the famed William Morris Agency in New York in 1972, staying there until 2000. In those twenty-eight years he became the youngest department head and senior vice-president in the agency’s history, representing among others Tom Hanks, Richard Gere, Rock Hudson, Michael Douglas, Susan Sarandon and John Cassavetes. Planco was asked to drop by the set of My Favorite Year to meet O’Toole. Directed to his trailer, Planco knocked sharply on the door. No answer. He knocked again, then repeatedly until it was opened. ‘Yes,’ said O’Toole.

  Planco introduced himself. ‘Yes,’ said O’Toole.

  ‘We talked about my dropping by to see you.’

  There was another short pause. ‘Yes. Now’s not a good time,’ and with that the door was firmly closed. It was not a successful first encounter. ‘But then when I got to know him,’ says Planco, ‘I knew that’s exactly how he treated somebody he didn’t know. But then we took off like a rocket and he came to New York quite often.’

  Very early on in their relationship Planco knew he was dealing with someone who was much more than a mere star. People like Robert De Niro can sit in a cafe and you’ll never notice them, but there are stars who when you meet them in real life are so much bigger than they are on the screen. ‘And Peter was one of those. He would just stand in the doorway, and every head in the room would whip around. It was the way he carried himself. And his voice. There was no sneaking him in and out of anywhere. He had it. And a lot of famous people don’t.’

  O’Toole remained in America in the spring of 1982, having agreed to appear in a made-for-television movie entitled Svengali, a modern twist on the George du Maurier novel published in 1894 and which had been filmed several times, most memorably with John Barrymore. O’Toole plays a mercurial voice coach who discovers Zoe, a young singer (played by Jodie Foster), performing in a seedy night club and agrees to accept her as a student. There was nothing very original in the material, the real story for many was what was happening on location in New York. Svengali marked the first time Jodie Foster had stepped back into the limelight after she was the unwitting motive in an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. When John Hinckley gunned down Reagan it was to prove his warped love for the actress, after becoming infatuated with her ever since she’d played a prostitute in Taxi Driver. Anthony Harvey, who O’Toole had insisted direct the film, recalls that press interest was intense. ‘We were always being followed in New York when we went from one location to another by reporters who longed to get some dirt on us. We were always running round corners trying to escape from them.’

  The pair struck up a touching friendship on set, with O’Toole mischievously nicknaming the actress ‘midget’. ‘He gave her enormous encouragement,’ remembers Harvey. ‘And the chemistry between them was amazing. He had a gift for making people feel comfortable.’ By the end of filming Jodie wrote in an Esquire article that the making of Svengali had helped her fall back in love with acting. ‘It cured me of most of the insecurities. It healed my wounds.’

  Inevitably in this type of ‘star is born’ scenario, the young artist falls in love with her teacher but the way in which the subject was approached, and in O’Toole’s performance, it never came across as offensive. ‘There he was with Jodie,’ says Harvey, ‘who was far younger than he was, and the love scenes he did with such enormous originality that you never felt this is a dirty old man. It was a very moving relationship between an older man and a young girl.’ Harvey also sensed a change in the older O’Toole, some fifteen years after they worked together on The Lion in Winter, a definite mellowing. ‘The anger was still there, of course, but there was a gentleness, an inner strength.’

  After filming Svengali, O’Toole returned to the peace and isolation of Clifden where he quietly celebrated his fiftieth birthday with family and friends. He was in the process of converting some farm cottages near his property into homes for his daughters. Eventually, both Kate and Patricia would have homes nearby. ‘This is Zulu-style living,’ he was to call it. ‘The family lives in the same spot, but each family member has his own dwelling. I think it’s a very sensible arrangement. It keeps the family together but the fuck away from one another at the same time.’

  At his house, O’Toole had put up a greenhouse and employed someone local to act as his gardener and odd-jobs man. One day this chap was standing there with O’Toole looking at this strange and wonderful plant. ‘Jesus, Peter, they’re mighty plants. What kind are they?’

  ‘Ah, they’re fantastic non-flowering tomato plants. They’re my pride and joy.’

  They were in fact marijuana plants, O’Toole having been given some seeds by a friend. Unaware of this the gardener took special care of them when O’Toole went off filming, lovingly nurturing and fertilizing them. All hell broke loose on his return when he saw that the plants were now almost as tall as the house. Paul D’Alton was a friend of the family and was up at the house with a few other people the day O’Toole came back and recalls with humour his reaction. ‘He went absolutely mad. We thought this was great craic. I must have been seventeen or eighteen at the time, and Peter was yelling, “I can end up in fucking jail over this, you fuckers. You’ve got to get rid of it.” And we were literally putting it in bags and hiding it in people’s houses around the town. The whole town had dustbin bags full of the stuff. It was like Whisky Galore! hiding it from the authorities. People in the town still talk about it.’

  Paul D’Alton attended school in England but during the holidays always came back to Clifden, where he worked in the bar and restaurant that his uncle Frank Kelly owned on the High Street. Frank Kelly was a great friend of O’Toole’s and it was through that association that D’Alton became a friend of the family, particularly with O’Toole’s youngest daughter Patricia, seeing as how they were the same age. D’Alton was one of the very few people allowed inside the inner sanctum of O’Toole’s Irish home, often just sitting around drinking beer, watching the actor and his uncle play snooker. Looking back now, D’Alton realizes how privileged he was to observe the private O’Toole, the real person behind the movie star as he relaxed and could be himself at home. He was surprised that O’Toole never liked to reminisce. At home the film-star persona was firmly switched off, and he felt free from any obligation to put on a ‘performance’. He wasn’t a great one for saying stuff like ‘The first time I met Orson Welles.’ Instead he talked about current events, sometimes rugby. O’Toole and Frank Kelly often read The Times together and discussed politics. ‘He was also a great lover of young people,’ says D’Alton. ‘He loved being surrounded by the young, he was very contemporary in that sense, he would know about the music of the time and things like that. He wasn’t an old luvvie sitting in a chair recalling his great H
amlet. Although he could be extremely luvvie-ish when he turned it on. But he wouldn’t be in real private company.’

  O’Toole would drive into Clifden most days, usually to see Frank Kelly in his bar, and they’d sit in there and chain-smoke for hours shooting the breeze. ‘He was never hassled on the street or anything like that,’ confirms D’Alton. ‘It would mainly be the tourists who might come up and ask for an autograph.’ At other times you wouldn’t see him in town, he’d be holed up alone in his house not seeing anyone for days. ‘At times Peter could be intensely, almost pathologically private,’ says D’Alton. ‘At others, a ribald, daring attention-seeker. He arrived in town once with this London taxi. I said, “Peter, you’re supposed to be low key here, you’re driving around the place in a fucking London taxi!” And he said to me, “Well, darling, it’ll give the feckers a thrill.” And we were driving along sharing a joint in the back seat and him waving like the Queen Mother to the astonishment of tourists. There was a dual personality there.’ Many people identified this strange quirk in his personality. ‘He was a contradiction,’ says actress Amanda Plummer. ‘Private and then very gregarious, and then very private, isolated, and then totally out there.’

  One summer Sting came to visit. O’Toole and Sting had got quite pally during the Macbeth run, with the rock star then married to Frances Tomelty, who played Lady Macbeth. He was to leave her, of course, to marry O’Toole’s former girlfriend Trudie Styler. Sting had rented a house in nearby Roundstone and was often seen roaring through Clifden on a vast motorbike on his way to see O’Toole. It was a holiday cut dramatically short when one lunchtime Sting barged breathless through the door of Frank Kelly’s bar shouting: ‘I have to go! I have to go! Where’s everybody? Where’s Peter?’ After a moment of what seemed like blind panic Sting was off, never to be seen again. His disappearance remained a mystery until O’Toole himself showed up that evening saying that Sting had upped and legged it back to England because he’d received death threats from the Provisional IRA. ‘Really?’ asked Kelly, somewhat sceptical. O’Toole broke into a wide grin. ‘Did they fuck, those feckers down in Roundstone couldn’t stand him so they ran him out!’ It was an admission that was met with resounding laughter from everyone in the bar. ‘IRA my arse!’ O’Toole roared.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The time had come to lay the ghost of Macbeth and make a return to London’s theatreland. For what some commentators were calling his stage rehabilitation, O’Toole was taking no chances, choosing a play he loved and knew well, Shaw’s Man and Superman, and another very theatrical star role in John Tanner, and asking his old friend Patrick Dromgoole to direct. The two men had kept in touch over the years since Bristol, ‘sort of’. ‘We could have rows, not speak for years and when we met he’d completely forgotten we’d ever had a cross word.’

  If O’Toole was anxious or had misgivings about what lay ahead he wasn’t showing it. As for his state of mind, well that was highly changeable. ‘It really depended how he was when you caught him,’ says Dromgoole. ‘If you caught him on a high then he could be as jubilant and bubbly as ever. But he was at times pretty low.’ Often O’Toole simply didn’t turn up for rehearsals and stayed in bed, forcing Dromgoole to go round to Guyon House to lay down the law and if possible get him up, which sometimes entailed a bout of singing. ‘I used to do that when we were in the flat together in Bristol, he’d be asleep and I’d go and sing very loudly until he got up to chase me out of the room. I’d sing cockney songs to him, tunes like “My Old Man’s A Dustman” or “Any Old Iron”.’

  What was made very clear from the off was that O’Toole had no intention of taking direction. ‘Peter was not a man who was obedient to a director or obedient to anybody,’ says Dromgoole. While he took and used some suggestions here and there, O’Toole was determined to do it his way and play John Tanner, political firebrand and confirmed bachelor, as a man of huge attractiveness and tremendous charm. According to Dromgoole it was an approach that worked splendidly. ‘When you have a character talking about marriage and relationships and the male/female principle, it can be a bloody bore, but Peter made the guy so lyrical, so when he advanced his theories or explained things he kept the audience with him all the time.’

  The play opened in Birmingham first, then travelled to other cities before arriving at London’s Haymarket Theatre in November 1982. As the first night approached, O’Toole grew increasingly nervous, well aware that the press were waiting for him. At least he could take solace in the fact that this time the whole company were on his side. According to Lisa Harrow, who played Ann Whitefield, everyone, not least herself, was in complete awe of him. ‘Sometimes I’d just look across the stage and go, oh my God, I’m on stage with Lawrence of Arabia. It used to rivet me to the spot.’

  There was no need to worry, his performance was mostly well received. O’Toole had now perfected an acting style of such power and idiosyncrasy that it was a phenomenon to be savoured for itself alone. ‘He sometimes used to soar and it was thrilling to watch,’ says Lisa. ‘He was a master, even if it was sometimes all out of control. He was just pure theatre and there are very few of them around.’ Here was somebody who now had utter command of his craft. ‘He was technically brilliant,’ recalls Michael Byrne, who was in the production. ‘His technical ability vocally on stage was just extraordinary.’

  Some commentators, however, complained that he had turned into a self-indulgent ham. O’Toole’s style of acting had always looked back at the musty world of the barnstorming actor managers represented by Henry Irving and his hero Edmund Kean. He knew there was a mesmeric presence when Kean was on stage and he was always aiming for the same kind of effect. If that was interpreted by some as scenery chewing so be it. ‘I think a critic once said he went over the top at a certain stage of his career and liked the view so much he never came down again,’ jokes Dromgoole. ‘And that’s not entirely unfair. He was a barnstormer, both as a theatrical presence and as a person.’

  He could sometimes be impossible to act with. When in a clinch with Lisa Harrow, he wasn’t averse to directing her live on the stage, telling her, ‘No, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait – now say the line.’ Michael Byrne recalls that O’Toole would stand back and give him a wink whenever he got a laugh. There was without doubt an element of playing to the crowd. ‘He was an actor who absolutely adored his audience and they adored him,’ says Byrne. ‘I remember, he would sometimes take a speech so fast that he’d trip himself up and he would stop and he would say to the audience, “Oh, I’d better start that again.” And of course they loved it.’

  He did look fragile, though. ‘I think he only had half a pancreas at that point,’ believes Byrne. And rumours were flying around that he was still taking cocaine. So when, halfway through the limited run, O’Toole dramatically vanished people were understandably concerned. Lisa Harrow remembers O’Toole’s daughter Patricia, who was working as the stage manager, coming into her dressing room with the news that the understudy was on. ‘Something had gone wrong with Peter. It was never really properly discussed but it sounded like he’d had an overdose of something really bad and he was just not capable.’ As far as she could tell, O’Toole had gone into one of his black depressions. He wanted Siân and she wasn’t there.

  O’Toole was missing for five days before he finally turned up at the theatre. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ claims Lisa. ‘He crawled into my dressing room, literally crawled, and he had the make-up from five days before still on his face. This is Peter O’Toole we’re talking about. And he put his head in my lap and apologized. That was so shocking.’

  Whilst on tour Lisa had discovered she was pregnant by her partner, the actor Sam Neill. Delighted, Neill was present for those early shows, indeed filled her dressing room on opening night with flowers. As the London run came to an end prior to Christmas, the couple suddenly split up, leaving Lisa shattered. Somehow she made her way to the theatre that evening, speaking to no one about what had happened, but in a terrible state. At t
he close of the first act Lisa had one of her most important scenes with O’Toole, about how successful her character was going to be at getting the man she wanted, precisely the opposite of what had just happened in real life. ‘As I began my lines I totally collapsed, tears just poured out of my face, I couldn’t speak for sobbing, and I thought, this is the moment I leave the English stage because I can’t go on. Acting with Peter, usually you hadn’t a clue where his mind was. He was just so big and out there that the idea that he would actually pay attention to what was happening to you, well, you didn’t even think about that. But he walked slowly towards me without his eyes leaving mine for a second, and he literally forced me to turn and face the audience, and pull myself together and carry on.’

  When the curtain hit the deck O’Toole grabbed hold of Lisa. ‘Baby, what’s wrong?’