A legend still in the making
Peter O'Toole is hoping The Final Curtain will cement his reputation. Brian Pendreigh visits him on set

Brian Pendreigh
Guardian


Friday June 16, 2000

In a 17th floor penthouse overlooking Trafalgar Square, Big Ben and the Thames, JJ Curtis, doyen of television celebrities, is in a good mood. He is holding a tabloid newspaper naming his main rival in a porn scandal and he has been having his portrait painted for posterity, wearing a cravat and a red, velvet dressing gown that sweeps the floor.

He greets his appointed biographer with old world charm, but his mood changes with the news that the writer wants to resign. The words "Beg pardon?" shoot from his lips with the velocity of a pair of bullets. "No, no, no," he says, regaining his composure. "That would be so ungrateful." Behind the gentle demeanour is an inherent menace.

Peter O'Toole's face fills the frame of the director's monitor and the familiar blue eyes seem as cold and unwelcoming as Christmas at a Siberian nudist camp. As he films a scene in his new movie The Final Curtain, he sculpts each word with the care of an artist. And yet he claims, that as he has grown older, acting has become increasingly difficult. "When you're young you just go boom," he says. "It seems to get more difficult the more one knows about it."

O'Toole has sometimes steered a narrow course between genius and ham, and the indifference of many of his recent films suggests he has not always made the right choice in terms of performance, or projects. The Final Curtain unites the veteran star of Lawrence of Arabia with the writer of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting in a vicious satire on modern television and modern television audiences. O'Toole describes it as "the most original script I've come across for many years". It is also the first feature for which writer John Hodge has broken away from the triumvirate he formed with producer Andrew Macdonald and director Danny Boyle and it is being billed as O'Toole's first leading role for over a decade.

O'Toole sits facing the door, his Gitane held in vintage cigarette-holder, like a character from a Coward play, except he has dispensed with dressing gown and cravat. He is a commanding figure, even in his vest, with his slacks unfastened to reveal white Y-fronts, in a seeming parody of the fashion for exposing the tops of designer underpants. He commands his little court, enjoying the sunshine and warmth that dances through the open door, while tourists wander down Waterloo Place towards St James's Park oblivious to the proximity of legend.

"This is your first lead role for 10-15 years," I begin. "Not true," he says majestically. "I don't know where you got your information from." Well, there is the film company press release, which describes The Final Curtain as his "first major feature film leading role" since 1982's My Favourite Year - the film that made it seven Oscar nominations for O'Toole without a win, a record he shares with Richard Burton. "I saw that too," he chirps, his tone noticeably lightening.

And then there is the fact that half the stuff he did in the 90s is entirely forgettable. O'Toole's recent oeuvre includes Fairytale: A True Story, in which he played the supporting role of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; the Emperor of Lilliput in the expensive TV adaptation of Gulliver's Travels; and last year's Old Vic revival of Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, in which he could finally put his decades of wild living and heavy drinking to creative use.

But there were also films like Rebecca's Daughters (in which he played a drunken 19th-century lord who dresses in women's clothes to infiltrate a transvestite road-toll protest group), Molokai: The Story of Father Damien and Dean Koontz's Phantoms. "Doesn't really matter," he says, sounding a little like Eeyore. "Maybe those weren't released."

He does not dwell on films once completed and apparently did not see Lawrence of Arabia until years after its release. Despite the accumulation of Oscar nominations, his best-known role remains that first starring role as TE Lawrence. There is a sense of unfulfilled potential. At 67, he is the same age as Michael Caine and slightly younger than Sean Connery, though he seems older. The blond hair is now silver and the thin features are gaunt, almost skeletal, as if a familiar face has been aged by computer technology.

O'Toole has had to wait a long time for a film role that could do for him what The Untouchables did for Connery, what Hannah and Her Sisters did for Caine and what Jeffrey Bernard did for O'Toole's own fortunes on stage. He had all but given up hope. "I'm afraid the scripts have become very poor," he says languidly. "We're going through a very poor passage right now." Does this malaise affect the whole of the British film industry, despite the boom in production? "Is there a British film industry?" he asks, with what seems like a genuine sense of surprise. "The British film industry." He ponders the notion, chews on the words. "Sounds like a very good idea."

"In times it's been economically sensible for films to be made here," he says, "but there's never been an industry as such." He believes the quality of scripts is poor in both Hollywood and Britain, making him all the more enthusiastic when he received the latest offering from Hodge, the quiet-spoken Scot who trained as a doctor before writing Shallow Grave on scraps of paper between seeing patients.

The Final Curtain's central character is JJ Curtis, a TV superstar, a national institution, and host of a traditional family game show. (Cinephiles might spot the apparent allusion to an earlier media superstar: JJ Hunsecker was the name of Burt Lancaster's showbiz columnist in Sweet Smell of Success). Curtis's preeminence is challenged by Dave Turner (Aidan Gillen), who hosts a show in which contestants sit in an electric chair. Meanwhile, JJ's doctor tells him he is dying. With his world collapsing, JJ recruits an intellectual, Jonathan Stitch (Adrian Lester), to write his life story, but Stitch does not like what he discovers about the self-styled "genial Uncle JJ, the housewife's choice" and wants out.

"We needed someone who was instantly recognisable," says producer Chris Young. They considered Michael Caine, but the feeling was that Caine was just too much Caine - whereas O'Toole was familiar, but without the same degree of personal baggage. "He starts killing people, but we need to like him too. We need to be unable to resist his charm, and Peter has that extraordinary combination of danger and charm."

O'Toole read the script and immediately re-read it three times to check his initial enthusiasm was justified. He was attracted by its combination of drama and black comedy. Though O'Toole had not seen Shallow Grave he had been impressed by Hodge's discipline in adapting Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting, an achievement that won Hodge an Oscar nomination.

Hodge is working with a new team, both fellow Scots. Chris Young is the Skye-based producer of Gregory's Two Girls and 1989's Venus Peter, the portrait of a boy growing up in a Scottish fishing village in the 50s. Pat Harkins is a first-time feature director. He made The Last Ten Minutes (a short which Hodge wrote and which was shown with Shallow Grave) and he worked for years as a props man, serving in that capacity on both Shallow Grave and Venus Peter. But his first taste of film-making was as one of the schoolboys in the original Gregory's Girl, selling food at break in the toilet.

Scottish film is a small world. Hodge's regular producer Andrew Macdonald was a runner on Venus Peter; a decade later he is joint head of DNA Films, the lottery-funded "mini-studio" that is backing The Final Curtain.

O'Toole denies he has modelled his character on any individual game-show host, though he finds the phenomenon compelling. "I found myself in a car the other day and the taxi driver had the radio on and I was half-minded to ask him to switch it off. And then I thought 'Hang on, I know the answer to that question.' " He is particularly fascinated by Japanese shows. "They'll do anything just to be on television for a minute. They'll be humiliated."

Young suggests the film comes at a time in O'Toole's life when he can readily connect with JJ. He previously played a power-crazed film director in The Stunt Man and a drunken has-been actor in My Favourite Year. "In the film you are playing a showbiz legend, albeit in a different branch of showbiz, a TV celebrity," I suggest, "but were there aspects of your character that you could empathise with... as one of Britain's leading screen actors over the last four decades?"

"In a word," replies O'Toole, "no."

After a pause, he decides a few more words might be useful. "He describes himself at one point as being from the trashier end of popular culture. No. An actor's job is to have a disinterested sympathy for any character he plays."

It is in the nature of film production, that having shot a scene in the morning in which Adrian Lester's character attempts to resign, the actors should return to the penthouse after lunch to shoot the scene in which Stitch accepts the job in the first place.

JJ babbles away about his health, while Stitch lays down his terms for the job. Rehearsing the lines, the actors find it difficult to keep straight faces as the two conversations pursue their own courses, till Stitch refers to the story of JJ's life.

"The story of my life? Why, that is a brilliant idea, Mr Stitch."

Harkins, a short, shaven-headed figure in jeans and faded grey T-shirt, prowls the set, turning his head at odd angles, as his stars deliver the lines. Like the officer promoted from the ranks, Harkins is on familiar ground, though he was not even born when O'Toole rode across the desert to his first Oscar nomination. He shows no signs of being overawed by the great man, asking him to turn towards Lester only at the words "story of your life", explaining that they are the first he has heard.

O'Toole cannot remember when last he saw a script this good. My Favourite Year was good, but not this good, he says. Now it is a case of translating the quality of writing to film. There has been many a slip between page and screen in the past. O'Toole does not watch the rushes. "But I'm hearing nice things," he says. And might it be eighth time lucky? "You never know," says O'Toole. He positively sings those words. And there is a twinkle in those famous blue eyes.