Peter O'Toole: Cheerful rebel

[xchrom]

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2007/jan/21/awardsandprizes.oscars?CMP=fb_gu


On the lookout... Peter O'Toole in Venus

Peter O'Toole is feeling rather fragile, he tells me as he hobbles into a smart New York hotel room, unzipping one of several jumpers he is wearing. He is 74, but that's not the problem. No, no, it's just that he went out last night with friends, and they took him to some 'wretched place' and made him have red wine. Just like old times, you might think, only most of his drinking pals are dead now - 'wretchedly inconsiderate' of them - and ... Suddenly, O'Toole looks up with a comically vacant stare, followed by a broad, cavalier smile. 'Am I boring you with all these tales of mortality?' he says.

The last of a generation of hell-raising, gut-wrenching Shakespearean actors who made it in the movies, O'Toole has had more comebacks than a phoenix with repetitive strain injury. In the critic David Thomson's expression, death's door is one of his regular residences. More than 30 years ago, O'Toole had so soured his stomach with drink that he very nearly went ungently, yet he's managed to tot up nominations for seven Oscars. Along with his late friend Richard Burton, he holds the record for the most nominations without a win, and when the Academy offered him a Lifetime Achievement Award four years ago, he famously quipped (before accepting it anyway) that he ought to turn it down because he still hoped to 'win the lovely bugger outright'.

Many think that might happen in the coming weeks, with his performance in Hanif Kureishi and Roger Michell's film Venus. The film, which documents the aged droolings of a thespy lothario over a sulky teenage girl, wasn't written for O'Toole, but it couldn't have survived anyone else. He rescues the script with his dastardly gentleman's charm, and offers one of the great performances of his life, partly because it might be about his life, or about one parallel and less successful. Throughout the film, a trio of retired actors regularly meets up in a greasy spoon in north London; they call each other 'Dear', utter words like 'Antigone' and 'Temazepam' in the same laboriously drawn breath, and measure the column inches in their friends' death notices. (When O'Toole tells his ex-wife - played by Vanessa Redgrave - that he's been given a role as a corpse in a TV drama, she says: 'Typecast again?')

You can't help feeling, on leaving the cinema, that Venus is intended as a memorial to O'Toole himself: the Old Vic grandee, the skittish playboy of What's New, Pussycat?, the Arabian adventurer, the drenched and unwell hack Jeffrey Bernard.

[Beringia]

1. Much like women actors

once O'Toole lost his looks and youth, he played odd and sometimes pathetic characters, but he stayed in the game.

[kentuck]

2. We shared the same birthday.

And he was my wife's favorite actor.