Peter O’Toole



Nb. This was unpublished thanks to dismal performance of Troy.

Master of the epic and shunning retirement, Peter O’Toole is back on set. In a chance encounter, Nicola Graydon discovers his appetite for acting, for vodka and for life, is undiminished.

Los Angeles Airport (LAX) is a desert of human contact. There’s none of the bustle of JFK or Heathrow; no shops or cafes, not even a Starbucks and definitely no loitering. So the tall white-haired man, dressed in a crumpled white linen suit and raffish striped tie, sitting on the pavement outside Terminal Four, deserved scrutiny. My brief glance turned into the kind of stare that mothers hiss at their children for.

‘Do sit down, dear,’ Peter O’Toole, screen legend, flawed genius, legendary drinker and last surviving British reprobate now that he’s been abandoned by fellow hell-raisers Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, drills me with those famous aquamarine eyes and pats the curb beside him.

He offers a filterless Gauloise before putting his own into an elegant black cigarette holder. In Los Angeles, this is practically an arrestable offence but, O’Toole, ever a law unto himself, behaves as though we’re passing time in a bar somewhere.

We had met briefly in Mexico on the set of Troy, the film based on Homer’s Iliad. Purported to cost $200 million with thousands of extras, filmed on location in three countries, with elaborate sets that took months to build and perhaps the most impressive cast ever to grace the screen in one movie, Troy is being touted as an epic to crown all epics.

As King Priam, the patrician and pious ruler of Troy and father of Hector (Eric Bana) and Paris (Orlando Bloom), O’Toole is the veteran of the ensemble, a master craftsmen among ingénues. Whispers on set are that with this role, O’Toole may finally claim his illusive first Oscar. He shares with Richard Burton the dubious distinction of having the most nominations – seven - without a win. Presumably, the reason why the Academy decided to honour him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002.

But Oscars could be further from O’Toole’s mind. He’s just happy to be out of Mexico. ‘I f********g hate Cabos San Lucas with a bottomless pit of loathing,’ he says with deep emphasis. ‘Seems to attract every f*******g fat ugly person on the planet.’

Out of his inside pocket, emerges a buffed silver flask. ‘Drink?’ he grins wolfishly.

We offer a toast in neat vodka to the success of the film. Rumours of his tee-total state are clearly exaggerated and for a 72-year-old recreant, with some fifty years of intermittent heavy drinking behind him, just emerged from a gruelling six month shoot, O’Toole looks remarkably well. His eyes are still astonishingly clear even if they do occasionally drift into the middle distance.

‘It’s a marvellous tale. Marvellous. Best bloody script I’ve read in a long time. Everyone’s done it of course. Chaucer, Dante, Keates even Shakespeare. Did you know?’ he turns those blazing eyes on me again, ‘that T. E. Lawrence wrote a beautiful version of The Iliad long before he wrote Seven Pillars. It’s an endless yarn that needs telling with every generation. Nothing beats it, baby.’ It’s a term of endearment that O’Toole uses liberally but I’m unaccountably thrilled to be the recipient.

It’s been a hell of a shoot. From an unprecedented summer heat wave in Malta to hurricanes, mosquitoes and high humidity in Mexico. Cast and crew were holed up for months in the tacky resort hotels that have turned Cabos, once a charming fishing village on the tip of the Baha Peninsula, into a tex-mex destination for Californians looking to get blitzed on cheap tequila.

There was a mutiny among extras forced to stand for hours in mid-day sun, and several of the cast have been carried off with stomach viruses, mysterious respiratory illnesses and heatstroke. O’Toole, seemingly, swanned through it all with blue robes swishing around his lank frame like a latter-day Lawrence.

‘They were carrying them off like flies,’ director Wolfgang Petersen chuckles, ‘but Peter was there on time every day working in that heat, giving everything in every take. He has the discipline of the old professional school of acting. He was wonderful to work with.’

Petersen, a David Lean acolyte, never considered anyone but O’Toole for King Priam. ‘It’s the mother of all stories about war, love, violence, passion and hate,’ he says. ‘The first literary masterpiece in human history that’s never been filmed before. So I had to have Peter. He’s more than an actor, he’s a symbol, a bridge to the epics of the past. He brings with him a history – and great presence.’

He used just one scene to draw his quarry: a pivotal moment when Priam goes to Achilles’ tent to beg for the corpse of his son, Hector. ‘From the moment I read that scene all I could see was O’Toole and those wonderful, watery blue eyes,’ says Petersen.

‘Achilles has just acted with great savagery but he awakens to the humanity in Priam. It turns him around and he acts mercifully. It required a majestic performance and I couldn’t think of anyone else who could pull it off.’ O’Toole admitted at a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel in London that this was indeed what had persuaded him to join the cast.

Shooting the scene took a day and a half. Achilles’ tent was relocated to the ballroom of a local hotel in Cabo. Petersen had to be sure that his actors were afforded absolute privacy and quiet. Then, the way he tells it, he just let the action roll as the two actors – superstars from different generations – drove each other’s performances to the limit.

Even Roger Pratt, award-winning cinematographer admits to welling up as he watched O’Toole willing Pitt to meet him head-on, ‘It was magical to film. No effects. Just two performances that are absolutely true to the emotion of the moment. O’Toole was generous to a fault, as present off camera as he was in shot. It was give and take but there’s no doubt that Brad Pitt was in awe; it felt like O’Toole was passing the torch to his younger counterpart.’

Troy is relying on the chemistry between three of the world’s most bankable leading men – Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom and Eric Bana - to raise it above usual epic fare: where Gladiator was essentially the story of one man with a few good cameos, all three leading roles in Troy have dramatic journeys of equal weight. The presence of O’Toole appears to have mitigated what might have become an almighty clash of egos as they all deferred to his greater experience and status.

‘For someone of my generation Peter O’Toole is so far above the pedestal I never imagined I would meet him, let alone work with him,’ Eric Bana, bisceps honed by extra-curricular sword practise and gym workouts, recalls how O’Toole made him immediately comfortable. ‘He came into my dressing room and talked cricket. After that, I was no longer intimidated. He became Peter, instead of Lawrence. He’s a gentlemen, very gracious.’ However, he admits that acting with one of the greats ‘raised his game’.

‘You never forget you’re working with a master so you have to rise to the occasion. O’Toole works with real fire, not pretend fire. In some ways you’re not having to work so hard. There’s this sparkle in his eyes that’s so powerful that all you’re doing is reacting to what’s being put in front of you.’

In an early scene shot at Shepperton Studios, Bana was giving a speech to the city fathers, arguing against going to war with the Greeks. ‘We were on the third take and I was starting to get into it. I could feel it rising in my belly. When I sat down Peter grabbed my knee, ‘Bana goes into O’Toole speak, ‘Thaaat’s right! It’s the f*****g language, it deserves to be spoken, go out there and f******g speak it!’ After that I flew. He was paying enough attention to notice that I was getting to the point where it was beginning to affect me, he was letting me know that I must seize the moment. It was very, very cool.’

Meanwhile it’s clear that O’Toole gets a kick out of passing the torch. A renowned sports fanatic, he regularly invited his young co-stars to watch sporting events – rugby, football and the Lennox fight – at his ‘digs’. ‘We’re all team-players,’ he explains on the curb, ‘Sean (Bean) loves football, so does Eric (Bana) and Brad has his basket ball. That’s how we survived in that hell hole.’

‘I couldn’t have done better with my sons,’ he says, dreamily. ‘Orlando makes a beautiful Paris and Eric had me laughing before every take. He’s a stand-up comedian, you know, very good at impersonations. ‘Vel, lets shoot ziz damn saga’ he’d say seconds before Wolfgang. I watched Chopper the other day. Strange, dark little movie but he’s bloody good in it.’

‘And that young Brad,’ he continues. ‘Good boy, very brave. Brave choices he makes.’ I wonder if he saw himself in the ‘young Brad’. After all, O’Toole, himself has made risky choices – The Ruling Class, Lord Jim, Caligula - that have had many saying he failed to fulfil the potential of his early genius.

‘Well, of course, I’d have killed to play Achilles forty years ago. In fact I asked the producer if she was absolutely certain I was too old. But Brad does it brilliantly. I mean, he looks like a God, for God’s sake. You can see him decorating a bronze age vase, can’t you?’

‘Shall we have another?’ Out comes the silver flask again. This time I raise my glass to him. In his turn, he takes it and cheers, ‘To us, baby.’ And slips another Gauloise into his holder puffing gloriously into the late afternoon haze.

****

At Priam’s Palace in the city of Troy built on 10 acres inside Fort Ricasoli, a 17th Century military compound in Malta, a dozen guards are wilting in full ceremonial dress, leaning listlessly on their spears.

Petersen is waiting for O’Toole to emerge from make-up and there’s an unmistakable flutter of excitement among the jaded crew when he finally arrives. Even dressed in an unprepossessing white terry-cloth dressing gown with mid-calf socks and sandles, O’Toole makes an imposing patriach.

Shadowed by an assistant carrying a black umbrella to shield him from the sun, he stiffly climbs the stairs to his palace and sits beside Diane Kruger, the elfin beauty and virtual unknown who plays Helen – ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ - and waits for action to begin. It’s an important scene. Hector and Paris, newly returned from a peace delegation to the Myceans, are to present Helen, Paris’s fatal prize stolen from under the nose of husband, King Menelaus, to their father. It’s the moment which will seal Troy’s fate.

For a moment we’re back in 1963 on the set of Anthony and Cleopatra, the extravagant Burton/Taylor film that nearly broke 20th Century Fox ending Hollywood’s appetite for sword-and-sandals epics until Gladiator hailed their return three decades later, precipitating a string of green lights for new digitally enhanced productions - Lord of the Rings, Alexander and Last Samurai - after Ridley Scott proved the technology could deliver dramas on an epic scale for a fraction of the cost.

With Troy, Warner Brothers is returning to the authenticity of building huge sets that will be enhanced, not created, by technology. The city of Troy in Malta was built by 500 Maltese workers, 200 UK craftsmen and over 140 tons of plaster – more then Gladiator and Harry Potter put together. And O’Toole, scion of the Old School, further amplifies its credibility.

As Petersen gets ready to shoot, O’Toole begins to prowl in the background. Still in his terrycloth dressing gown, he lets out a guttural roar. Pacing in circles he does it a few more times before costume puts on his blue robes and he draws himself up to his full height and strides, without a hint of stiffness, into the blinding sun.

‘There it is: the lion’s roar. You know when Peter’s about to do a take,’ notes Andrew Jack, the British dialect coach fresh from Lord of the Rings. ‘He’s centring his voice; getting down to his emotion. Also it roughens the vocal chords and achieves a deeper pitch. Apart from that, it means that everyone is aware that something is about to happen.’

Jack was hired to coach the actors to use subtle pronunciations to differentiate between the Trojans and the Greeks. On being introduced to O’Toole, however, the actor asked, slightly puzzled, ‘The film is in English, I presume?’ ‘Yes,’ Jack replied. ‘Well, I have been speaking English for an awfully long time, dear boy. I think I’ll be alright.’ And that was it. Jack decided that the Trojans would all speak ‘O’Toole’ – that is, the classic ‘received pronunciation’ of the London stage.

O’Toole is in fact leading a cast of British talent, unprecedented for a full blown ‘Hollywood’ production. In the Greek corner is Brian Cox as Agamemnon, Brendan Gleeson as Menelaus, John Shrapnal, Julian Glover and Julie Christie as Thetis, Achilles’ mother. Under Peter O’Toole’s command is Orlando Bloom, James Cosmo, Trevor Eve as the only politician strongly opposed to the war and Nigel Terry – whose first film role was as O’Toole’s favoured son in Lion in Winter - as high priest, Archeptolemus, who persuades Priam to bring the wooden horse within the walls of Troy as an offering to Poseidon, god of the sea.

This is O’Toole’s final scene and the first time that I’m on the receiving end of those intense eyes that, according to the cinematographer, never blink on camera.

Priam and his courtiers discover the horse on an endless deserted beach north of Cabo on the road to Todos Santos - one of the few beaches long enough to land a thousand ships. Rearing out of the waves at a height of 38 feet, constructed of steel and fibreglass and weighing 11 tons, it’s nothing like the finely carved Trojan horse of popular mythology. Instead it’s black, strapped together with rope, eyeless and malevolent.

Nigel Phelps, production designer, drew on the Wickerman and the blackened hulls of the war ships littering the beach, ‘The Greeks had just 12 days to build the horse so they had to use the only materials available to them. And we wanted it to look like a pagan offering, an evil omen.’

Paris argues against, but High Priest Archeptolemus (Nigel Terry) plays on Priam’s fatal devotion to the gods and wins the argument. ‘Nigel broke my heart,’ says O’Toole. ‘He waited in that hell hole for weeks just for that last big speech about the horse. This can be a cruel business.’

It’s 40 degrees in the shade, make-up melts moments after application, everyone is flagging but it’s O’Toole’s last scene before flying out of Mexico so he knows he’s is in the home straight. He kisses the pretty blond script supervisor on her forehead in a fatherly Priam-like gesture and gets on with it.

Orlando Bloom, as beautiful in the flesh as he is on screen, is waiting in the make-up tent, ‘I’m still rather nervous in his presence,’ he says. ‘He could blow me off the screen, and I’m sure he will, but acting aside, he’s a human being with this extraordinary spirit.’

In fact O’Toole’s final performance has nothing to do with acting. Hearing that Brendan Gleeson, a fellow Irishman best known for his performance as Mel Gibson’s sidekick in Braveheart, had brought his fiddle to Mexico, O’Toole had asked if he might play something for him.

Gleeson was determined to make good his promise. ‘On the day before I left, I took the fiddle to his place and he was in the middle of interviews for the DVD. I was so nervous the bow was going like a jack hammer. First I played a mournful lament, then a reel. Peter was simply tapping his foot, then he stood up and started dancing, hands and feet going like the clappers. There was no stopping him. It will be one of my great memories.’

Gleeson admits to being ‘star struck’ by his elegance and generosity. On a production that didn’t even have a ‘wrap party’ (a usual perquisite for any film), O’Toole sent hand written notes to all the cast inviting them for drinks. ‘He was the only one with the class to do it; he galvanised us all.’

More usually, while the rest of the young cast lived it up on tequila in a down-at-heel Mexican karaoke bar, O’Toole retired to his ‘digs’ to write the third part of his rambling, eccentric memoirs, named, appropriately enough Loitering with Intent, which will finally deal with his years as a superstar following Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.

He was 26 (Orlando Bloom’s age) when he became the Golden Boy of cinema. His divine good-looks - new nose job, bleach blond hair and a tan to set off those cornflower eyes - led Noel Coward to remark that if he had been any prettier they would have had to call it Florence of Arabia.

Troy has been a doddle by comparision to Lean’s masterpiece. That took two years to shoot and in the process O’Toole lost two stone in weight, was bitten by a camel, suffered third-degree burns, a fractured skull, two sprained ankles, a sprained neck, a dislocated spine and concussion.

But it was his career that suffered most spectacularly. After another couple of searing epics - Beckett with Richard Burton and The Lion in Winter with Katherine Hepburn, whose death he mourned while in Mexico - the 1970’s saw him in virtual free-fall where his reputation for heavy drinking superseded anything he did on stage or screen.

Some actors might have come to see Lawrence as an albatross but O’Toole still remembers his alter-ego with deep satisfaction. ‘Saw it on DVD the other day,’ he says. ‘Heresy to say so but what a fabulous invention. Could see every grain of sand. It stands the test of time, doesn’t it? Why would I disown it? It was an amazing experience, a great movie. David Lean remains my absolute hero.’

He’s still friends with Omar Sheriff, although he hasn’t seen him in a while. They were famously locked in jail in a Los Angeles clink as a result of a spectacular bender with comedian Lenny Bruce the night before the premier but O’Toole has never minded about jeopardising a stellar Hollywood career.

‘Never much liked Hollywood,’ he has said on more than one occasion. ‘Not my cup of tea.’

Instead he retreated to Connemara, on the mythic West Irish coastline, where he built a house with his former wife Sian Philips and brought up his two daughters, Kate and Patricia. And, every so often - just as everyone was prepared to write him off - he would rise Lazarus-like to the occasion – The Stuntmen in 1980 and the fabulous self-parody of Allan Swann in My Favourite Year that won him another nomination in 1982, the ram-rod tutor in Bertolucci’s lush epic, The Last Emperor and two sell-out runs in the West End as another notorious drunk in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

His role as the benign and benighted King Priam, who brings nobility to the idea of peace among those who believe in war but ultimately has to sacrifice his beloved city for the love of an errant son, may well be one of those occasions.

But sitting on the curb, in a smog-besmurched Los Angeles sunset there’s a sense that he could care less, not for the production for which he wishes untold accolades, but for himself. Last year he turned down the Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement writing to the Academy saying he was ‘enchanted’ but adding, ‘I am still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright. Would the Academy please defer the honour until I’m 80?’

And, judging by his knack for survival, O’Toole may well be turning in performances till then. ‘What amazes everyone is the amount of energy he has,’ Bana recounts. ‘He has this fire in his belly and can summon the energy of ten of us mortals into the frame of a seventy-something. It’s very encouraging for someone my age to think that I could, potentially, go on as long as him.’

O’Toole is a rare thing these days, an endangered species. He comes from an age when ‘personalities’ had personalities; when celebrity played second fiddle to great acting. It’s clear that he still loves his craft which in Richard Burton’s words, he lifts to ‘something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing.’

And he’s still driven by an old-fashioned belief in story-telling that can move people to deeper understanding, ‘The Iliad works as well now as it did thousands of years ago. Two great civilisations driven to the brink of annihilation because of acquisition, greed and a personal drive to power. Sound familiar?’ he turns to me and arches an eyebrow. Does he think the film will communicate this to modern audiences? ‘We can only hope, baby, we can only hope,’ He searches around the concrete and glass for some wood to touch. I proffer a match which he grasps before throwing over his shoulder. ‘Good girl,’ he murmers.

He’s rifling through his pockets again. This time he pulls out a small pot of pink lip gloss, applies it to lips still partially disguised with Priam’s beard and offers it to me. ‘I rode on a dolphin’s nose, you know,’ he says apropos of nothing. ‘Two of them come up behind you and put their noses on the soles of your feet and lift you out of the water. I felt like the figurehead on a Rolls Royce flying through the air.’

‘Well, come on, baby, let’s board this bloody flight.’ He sighs, suddenly seeming like all of his seventy two years and unfolds his lanky, 6ft 3inch frame from the pavement. One last drink? He pours some vodka into the tiny silver flask and hands it to me. ‘To the gods,’ I say, and drink. O’Toole pours a second, lifts the cup skywards and with, typical relish, shouts to the oblivious empty concourse, ‘F**k the gods!’

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