Part of me still loves her

He claims to still love his ex-wife but calls her a ‘silly cow’. He’s rude about Hugh Grant and says British films are awful. In an exclusive interview, Lina Das meets an outspoken Peter O’Toole.

Night & Day, April 2001

Peter O’Toole shouldn’t be here – if you believe all you read. Consider his legendary drinking sprees with the likes of bibulous Richard Burton and his old hellraiser pal Richard Harris. Added to this, he smokes like a chimney, has suffered near-fatal pancreatic inflammation and his love life has been one of turmoil. You expect him to be, at the very least, on his knees. Yet, in comes the great man, still very much on his feet, oozing charisma and, for some reason, determined to demonstrate spin-bowling techniques. So full of pep does he seem that you wonder if he’s had a livener already, though the sun is not yet over the yardarm.

“Darling,” he insists, “of course I haven’t had a drink this morning. I’m much more modest then I was as a young man. I keep reading that I’m meant to have given up drinking for good, which is just not true. But you have to decide if you to live and, if you do, you just have to cool a bit.”
Having said which, he adds, (and it sounds half treat, half heady promise), “Come the right night, the right occasion, the right people, the right place, I’ll be there. In fact, Harris and I went to the rugger not long ago – Harris and I were young together, did you know? We’ll take you out with us next time,” he offers, when I murmur that it sounds like fun. “We could share you – or you could share us.” And he utters the most extraordinary tee-hee sort of giggles.

O’Toole is 69 and, for all the years of hellraising, he looks quite good. When he fixes you with those vivid blue eyes, you are hard put not to blush (I fail miserably). He dresses like an eccentric toff.

Today, he sports a green jacket, burgundy waistcoat, yellow patterned tie and a slightly mismatched top pocket hankie. Beside him, his public relations man, in trainers and with a shirt hanging over his trousers, looks dull indeed.

But then, they don’t make stars like this anymore – compulsive actors, huge characters who dress like gents and party like animals. O’Toole himself seems rather disappointed that his great profession has taken this turn.

“Oh, it’s all become a bit dull, really, hasn’t it?” He agrees. “And I’ve joined the chorus of those saying what a dreary bunch of ugly people there are about just now. Just a dreary bunch of mumblers. So unattractive – though, by attractive, I don’t mean you have to have regular features – you just need to have some purpose and something that makes people want to watch more.”

He has a thing about London’s Royal Nation Theatre (the ‘Third Reich’, as he calls it) which for him, seems to stand for all that is wrong with theatre today. “God help us, it has to be the ugliest thing in the world, and it’s getting uglier, too. How can you walk under all that cement? Cement takes about 200 or 300 years to dry.

And then there was all that fuss when [the former head of the National] Richard Eyre said that theatre in England was boring. Well, yes, baby, it is boring, but we’ve know that for 30 fucking years.”

Would he never work at the National, then, no matter what the play? O’Toole considers me with not a little disgust. “Oh, come one, sweetheart, come on. I worked at the Old Vic a year ago, with proper people, in a proper play, and not in the dull kind of play that goes on in this great big lump of cement. And there are such boring people that go there.”

He is not, however, in total despair about British film and cinema and all who sail in them. “Maybe it’s cyclical,” he muses, brightening. “Maybe we’ve been through this awful through, and we’re now coming out of it. I made a lovely little film two years back, called Coming Home, and an actor called Paul Bettany played my son. Such a fine, good-looking boy, no pretensions, wicked and I thought, ‘You’ll do as my son’. I had a marvellous time socializing with them, but they had to put me to bed because I couldn’t keep up. No, I just can do it any more, darling – only for about a day, and that’s it.

I made a film in Canada just before Christmas, and I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. I worked with seven young people who took me to jazz clubs and had me up on stage singing Georgia. Oh yes, occasionally I wish I was 25 again. Yes, yes!”

So who does he rate among the current crop of actors? I try a couple of name on him. Russell Crow? Any good? “Yes, he’s good.”

Hugh Grant? “Ugh!” O’Toole groans, rolling his eyes, “that twitching idiot! Ooh, I mustn’t say that, must I? But he’s just a floppy young stammerer in all his films. How far is that line going to go? I watched that Four Weddings and a Funeral and thought, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’ Dull. British films? They’re a bit samey, aren’t they? But the Americans seems to lap them up. I find them all so boring.

Jamie Bell? I haven’t even seen Billy Elliot. I have children who tell me ‘You don’t want to go – it’s British.’ But, having said that, Lawrence of Arabia is a British film – technically.”

Lawrence of Arabia was, of course, the film that made O’Toole a star, some 40 years ago, playing young lieutenant TE Lawrence. It is still the piece of work most often associated with him, and has been released on DVD – much to O’Toole’s excitement, because the technology fascinates him. “I began as an apprentice photographer, so in my lifetime I’ve gone from plate glass to celluloid to video to DVD. Ideally, Lawrence should be seen with chums in a huge cinema. But that’s the ideal, and you’re not going to get the ideal all the time, so this is the best solution.”

All these years later, he still loves talking about it. “How could one not, since it was the touchstone of all things excellent and changed my life completely? Completely. I remember the director, David Lean, coming up on me on the first day of filming in the Arabian desert. We were way, way out in some uncharted part – if may be charted now – and we were living in tents, having been flown out there on some huge operation. He stood next to me and said: ‘Well, Pete, off we go on a great adventure.’

And it was! I was a young man, keen to get on in the business, working with great people, living in a part of the world that fascinates me and, forming an enduring friendship with Omar Sharif.
I remember when the film was re-released after 20 minutes of footage that had been previously been cut out were restored, and I met up with David and Omar in New York. There weren’t many of us from the film still around, but I could meet up with them and nothing would be forgotten. The picture was two years in the making and when you’re that close to a bunch of men, the years mean nothing.”

O’Toole gets slightly misty-eyed talking about the film (“Watching it on DVD, I could smell the desert.”), but mention of his old chum Sharif animates him. One can only imagine the havoc these two men, at the height of their physical beauty, must have caused when they were out on the town together.
“Did we get up to no good? Oh, darling, do you consider it to be no good? We considered it very good in-deed,” he says, and giggles again. “But, remember, we were 400 miles from the nearest water, which had to be trucked out to us in great big bowsers, which meant that we were also 400 miles from the nearest night club.

What we’d do was, we’d film non-stop for ten days, and then have three or four days off. We had the use of a private plan to Beirut – this was in its better days - and misbehaved ourselves appallingly. Terribly! You should have been with us! Omar loved gambling, too, so we’d lose all our money at the casino - we once did about nine month’s wages in one night - and then get up to the usual things young men get up to.

Of course, I look back on it and wish I could do it all again. The last time Omar and I were together was in Cairo a few months backs, and we misbehaved ourselves all over again. Even though we’re venerable gentlemen, we can still misbehave ourselves appallangly, and we did what young men do, only perhaps marginally more slowly.” A delighted whoop precipitates a coughing fit.

What kind of a life, I wonder, did O’Toole lead Sian Phillips, the actress whom he married in 1959 after he proposed with the word, “Will you have my babies?”.
She bore him two daughters, Katherine and Patricia, nursed him through the aftermath of one too many drinking bouts, then left him after 20 years, when his bachelor lifestyle became too much for her. At times, clearly, he behaved appallingly. It is said that O’Toole’s agent told Phillips she could continue with her acting career only if it didn’t inconvenience her husband. O’Toole was once supposed to have remarked, slightingly: “Sian doesn’t have a career, she just does jobs.”
“Ooh, I was a hopeless husband,” he concedes, throwing one leg over the arm of his chair and scrabbling frantically in his pockets for a cigarette.
“Hopeless! Well, I’m a loving man, but not a particularly well-behaved one, and I wasn’t always at home when I needed to be. But it’s part of the territory when you’re a professional, and everyone who is a professional knows that’s going to happen. But she does bang on about it so. Silly cow. I mean, leave it alone for God’s sake.” The two have little contact now. Phillips once revealed that this was O’Toole’s wish because he was still furious that she had left him.
“Oh God, no,” he sighs, “no, I’m not furious at all. In fact, I bumped into her in the street in Picadilly some time ago, and she didn’t even recognize me. Hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. I said ‘Hello’, and she looked at me and said ‘Oh!” Was that embarrassing? Not to me it wasn’t.”
But then, you feel, this man is not big on embarrassments. If he gives a damn (and, if Phillips is to believed, he does) he certainly doesn’t show it. Does a part of him still love her? “Well, of course a part of me still loves her,” he says, “because she’s the mother of my children. I see her in my children, and that’s the strongest connection you can have, and one which will always endure. We were very close, a unit, but once that unit had ended, there was no point.

It was very passionate but once that falls apart - boom! It’s gone. You see this?” O’Toole bounds up from his chair to turn on a lamp. “When that feeling goes, it’s gone just like that,” he switches the lamp off again. “And it’s never coming back. You can’t switch it back on again, no matter how hard you try.”

So there’s no chance that they might get back to-get her again? O’Toole explodes once more into peals of laughter. “No, no way. I mean, you’re talking about something that happened 25 years ago. Am I tempted to marry again? Oh, I think once is enough. I enjoyed marriage, yes, because it’s a notion of excellence and, when it works, it works well.

But it would be appalling if I were to marry and it failed again. Though it hasn’t put me off long-term relationships, I admire the confidence of people who go on doing it. I just don’t quite have the apple-cheeked, bright-eyed optimism that is required.”

O’Toole lives on his own (apart from a housekeeper) and prefers it that way. “I get lonely. Of course I do, but I like being on my own. I love to read and write but, though I have no difficulties being alone, I love company, too.”

Isn’t it a bit of a waste, though, when he might be shedding the light of his great personality upon another human being? At this, he nods vigorously: “Oh, it is, darling. A shocking waste. But I’m absolutely fine. I’m just fine.” And he really isn’t seeing anyone? “No, but it’s none of your business.”
In fact, after his marriage ended, he did have one further attempt at a lasting partnership, with an American former model called Karen Sommerville. The relationship lasted two years and produced a son, Lorcan, now 17.

When Lorcan was five, his parents fought a bitter custody battle, with Sommervillle accusing O’Toole of using her as a “brood mare” to produce a longed-for son. The dispute was eventually resolved when the courts ruled that Lorcan should stay with his father in London during term time, but should return to his mother in America during the holidays.

Whatever his shortcomings as a father - and one would imagine he has few - O'Toole took his responsibility to his son seriously. He cut down on the drinking, made films only during the school holidays and, if appearing in the West End, would insist that the curtain went up no earlier than 8.15 am, so that he could put the boy to bed.

It may seem odd to us that a man so essentially selfish and egotistical as O’Toole should fight so vigorously for custody, then devote himself so thoroughly to his son. To the actor, that came naturally. “Of course it was right for me to have done that. And, yes, it was hard bringing up my son on my own. But what else should I have done? I’m very close to all my children. Kate lives in Connemara (Galway) and she was touring in a play in Belfast recently when her dog was killed. Poor love. Poor baby. She was very upset by it.

But I don’t like talking about my children. They have their own voices and their own minds, and my son is not yet 18, so when he is, he can talk about himself. But they’re all professionals, and even the one who’s still at school (Lorcan) is going to be a professional, too. We’re a professional family.”
O’Toole was born, depending on which source you believe (he seems disinclined to confirm either) in Connemara or in Leeds. His father, Patrick O’Toole, was an Irish bookmaker nicknamed “Spats” for his fancy foot-wear. A story goes that one Christmas, when young Peter asked him if Santa Claus was coming to deliver his presents, Spats ran outside, burst a paper bag, and came back proclaiming that Father Christmas had just shot himself.

It’s probably fair to say that O’Toole Jnr inherited this father’s sense of humour - though not his attitude to marriage. Patrick and his wife, Constance, were together for 50 years - “a long time”, remarks their son, “but whether it was always happy and light is another thing entirely. I was very close to my father, though.”

One of his most abiding childhood memories is of posters proclaiming “Hitler will use poisonous gas without warning. It will smell of geraniums.”

“We didn’t have childhoods,” says O’Toole. “They all came to an end when we were about 13 or 14. There were many restrictions during the war - no meat, no food, no booze - and, of course, you didn’t mind so much. But the post-war restrictions were worse, in a way, and we were told that it was our moral imperative to remain sober.

Well, “he adds with complete, if somewhat theatrical disdain, “we had absolutely no intention of doing that. I keep reading about the dreary Fifties. Don’t you believe a word of it, sweetheart!” Oh, I don’t!
It was then when O’Toole and Harris began hanging out together. “And you know that famous line about how, if you could remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there? Well, we’re doing that in the Fifties. I can remember how the decade started, and how it ended but, sadly, nothing in between.” He squeals with laughter.

“We had no money, and we were young and silly, so we’d keep warm by having parties on the Circle line on the London underground. And why not? It was warm, we had chairs and we’d take a battery-operated gramophone and play our 45s. Did we drink? Of course we did, baby. We’d get off at Sloane Square, pop out to the pub, get some more booze and get back on again. Great fun! And the Sixties were only a continuation to that.”

One imagines that O’Toole and Harris could have had fun wherever they found themselves and, indeed, Harris continues to do so, still engaged in a long-running feud with Sir Michael Caine that you suspect he really quite enjoys. Caine recently dismissed Harris, Burton and O’Toole as “drunks”, while Harris retaliated by saying that Caine’s attempts at playing though guys were a “joke”.
For O’Toole, it’s all rather amusing. “I remember when he [Caine] made those comments because Harris got on the phone to me straight away, saying, ‘This asshole, Jesus, fuck!’ I hadn’t read the piece, and I still haven’t, though I read what Harris said about him and croaked with laughter.”
But he has no intention of weighing in on his old pal’s part. “He and Michael Caine have had a public up-and-down for years, and the last thing either of them needs is for someone to take their side. They can both handle themselves perfectly well without me. Though,” he adds, with a hint of menace, “I think a caution to ‘watch your big mouth’ is in order.”

Caine’s comments were not too hurtful, then? O’Toole flicks some imaginary dust from his sleeve: “Pah!” But, then, someone who has spent his adult life not only drinking, but cultivating the image of a drunk, could hardly find the epithet offensive.

For someone so naturally articulate and give to grand gestures - someone, it must be said, slightly camp - it seems odd that acting wasn’t O’Toole’s first career choice. Initially, he was a photographer on the Yorkshire Evening News, reporting on stories with the likes of Keith Waterhouse and “Barbara Thingy [Taylor Bradford] who I hardly remember at all. But I soon found out that, rather than chronicling events, I wanted to be the event.”

So he pitched up at Euston Station with a friend “and, just as we walked past the Rada [he insists on the definite article], he said, ‘That’s the kind of shop you’re interested in, isn’t it?’ So I thought I’d better have a look. I met the principal, and, within two or three days, I got an audition.”

He accepted a scholarship to “the Rada for the birds I would meet”, but soon started taking the job more seri-ously, spending three years at the Bristol Old Vic and undergoing two nose jobs before promptly landing the part of Lawrence.

Nothing he has done since has ever eclipsed that early triumph. And, unlike contemporaries such as Sir Anthony Hopkins, Harris and the dreaded Caine, he hasn’t gone on to take Hollywood by storm, as he might have done in recent years - but, then, much he cares!

“I never had a Hollywood career to begin with. Never liked the place - it just wasn’t my cup of tea. After doing Lawrence, I went far and high. Becket, the film I did afterwards, went through the roof. Then, I had to deal with the ordinary things such as playing Hamlet or Henry II. But I did a couple of films last year, so let’s just wait and see. I’m not dead yet, you know.”

He has also, in his time, appeared in some fabulous films - Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969), My Favourite Year (1982) and the 1980 version of Caligula (fantastic for its sheer tawdriness, and for Sir John Gielgud’s comment during filming ‘Are we in a blue movie?”) - as well as some absolute howlers. King Ralph (1991) with John Goodman, John Hurt and Leslie Phillips spring to mind (“It was meant to be a light-hearted, quick little frolic, that suddenly turned into this dull, plodding nightmare.”).
But it was his 1980 stage performance of Macbeth which went down in the theatrical folklore as one of the worst productions ever.

“My nose starts bleeding the minute I even think about the reviews,” he shivers. “Those critics were abso-lutely crucifying, and deservedly so. It’s not a bad play, after all, and it wasn’t a bad company, but we just had a bad first night and, when you do, you’re absolutely fair game. I blew it.
The next morning, my housekeeper told me I’d had some bad reviews, and that there were one of two jour-nalists outside the front door. When I opened it, there were about 100. Anyway, I tried to rally for the show tat day, only to find there was a bomb scare.
We cleared the whole theatre, then bomb turned out to be a bottle of holy water left at the stage door. Some-one obviously thought we needed a blessing.”

Well, they have been right. What’s more, it must have worked. For all the years of abuse, he’s still going strong. Many of his friends have been less fortunate - they have been, he says, dropping like flies. “I buried ten friends in less than two years, a while back.” (One of these, of course, was Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard, whom O’Toole played brilliantly in the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell).
“And I lost two of my closest chums from the RADA very quickly, which made me very gloomy. I went to my lawyer and made a will because I don’t want to be a burden to anyone.
Do I want to go out with a big party? Of course I do, darling, and I don’t mind the odd dirge either. Regrets? Yes, I’ve done a few things that are regrettable, but I’m not going to sit and moan about them.”

Instead, O’Toole plans to watch cricket, and start on the third part of his autobiography (“Memoirs, actually - I’m sorry to make such a fine distinction.”)

As I get up to leave, he helps me into my coat and smoothes my hair. “You get everything in life while you can, baby,” he urges. “Get it while you can.” That is certainly what O’Toole did. And will continue to do so - while he still can.