He had a room in his house set aside for rehearsal and private study with a plaque proclaiming it "the Marcus Luccicos Room", named for a character mentioned early in Othello who never appears onstage. When he took on Macbeth, he tried to circumvent its infamous curse by referring both to the character and the play as "Harry Lauder", who was a popular Scottish entertainer from the early part of the 20th century. (It didn't work. The production was notoriously plagued by dark occurrences and opened to mortifying reviews.) When he retired, his statement read, "It's time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back."
All this is meant to point up that he was not only one of the great, completely original actors of our time, but also a man of charm, endearing whimsy, and great intelligence.
Here, from Nicholas Wapshott's 1984 biography, are some words of wisdom.
"I can't play inarticulates, I find. When I play reflective types I tend to reflect myself right off the screen."
"Success brings prizes, but most of them are consolation prizes. Mostly success has taught me to expect the right hand. Only now I know where to put my guard, because, believe me, it's coming, that right hand, and it's going to hurt. The trick is getting off the floor."
"What, am I older? Yes. Am I more profound? Not at all. All experience, in my experience, corrupts. You learn too many tricks. Tell me any experience you've had that has ennobled you?"
It is possible that one day Keith Richards and Tom Waits will die (although I am far from convinced of it). When they do, I'm certain I will suffer some kind of an existential crisis. That is not the case with O'Toole. I always knew he would die; I was, in fact, surprised that he outlived his drinking cronies Richards Harris and Burton. Still, it is a loss to be mourned, and if you have not followed his career, your life is poorer for it, and now's as good a time as any to explore. Be forewarned, however, that outside of two or three classics, he wound up in a lot of stinkers. (Katharine Hepburn, whose nickname for him was "Pig", used to tell him, "You're a bad picker, Pig." See Wapshott.)
Outside of the obvious (Lawrence of Arabia, Beckett, the Lion in Winter), you should watch 1980's the Stunt Man. It doesn't age particularly well, but his performance in it does, and it's an odd enough mélange of humour and dread and banality to leave a certain wake of possible greatness behind it. It was the last time he might have won an acting Oscar (I don't count My Favorite Year, because although he shines in the sending up of his own rakish persona, it is altogether too lightweight a project to tempt Oscar), and it was his misfortune that De Niro chose that particular year to play Jake LaMotta. Maybe my own favorite O'Toole performance is in the gargantuan, unwieldy, and utterly chilling Night of the Generals from 1967.
I wanted to mark his passing by watching Lord Jim and Murphy's War, two of his early, enigmatic films which I'd seen years previous and didn't much cotton to, give them a second chance to communicate, but Netflix is relatively O'Toole-poor, it turns out, so I settled on the three earliest available that were still unknown to me.
*SPOILER ALERT*
Zulu Dawn: (1979. dir: Douglas Hickox) I have a soft spot in my heart for these old nostalgia-for-the-empire British films. Before the English discovered they could make a mint on sentimental hogwash about the lower classes triumphing over hard times with the help of their mates (I think it was the Full Monty which kicked off that whole antic hay), the sixties and seventies followed up the success of Lawrence of Arabia with a ton of these old things: Young Winston, Conduct Unbecoming, this and Zulu come to mind. Hollywood pitched in, too, with my favorite, the Man Who Would Be King. Although they tend towards an elegiac quality and a general recognition of the political incorrectness of the whole demnable thing, this is the British version of Civil War movies which cast a wistful eye toward the Antebellum South. You know it's untenable; the way of the life was wrong and had to stop, but wasn't it pretty in its way? If your skin was the correct color, naturally.
Zulu Dawn recreates a particularly grim moment for the Empire: when hubristic governing aristocrats in the English colony of Natal, separated only by a river from Zulu lands, took it upon themselves to make war upon the natives, unleashing a horrific defeat at Isandlwana. It looks like an episode of Sharpe, as we spend time getting to know the various officers and lads, all played by stunningly good British character actors (Nigel Davenport, James Faulkner, Bob Hoskins, Simon Ward, Denholm Elliott, Ronald Pickup, to name only a few), then we spend a lot of time watching troop movements and observing the unwieldy nature of the English army traversing foreign ground. We come to know pertinent details, such as that the quartermaster plays exactly by the book, a habit which will be ominous in the heat and chaos of battle when he's handing out ordnance methodically, box by box, while the boys at the front are using it up as fast as they can shoot.
Although it's a grand and chilling moment when the hillsides darken with waves of barefoot, dark-skinned warriors, befeathered and chanting, the best part is the end: where they strive to save The Colours by riding them across the river, lose them to the enemy, then a downed officer manages to shoot the flag out of enemy hands and we watch it plunge into the water and curl down with the tide. After that, we ride with Peter O'Toole, the general most at fault for the massacre, who has taken his own sweet time to come to the aid of his central column, into a decimated, smoke-enshrouded camp, and end on a wonderfully lit view of his face as the enormity of the horror descends.
Zulu, from 1964, was Michael Caine's first role (and he's awfully good), and depicts the Battle of Roarke's Drift, a story just following this one, chronologically, but with a more upbeat ending for the denizens of the Empire. (And it's a better movie.)
How to Steal a Million: (1966. dir: William Wyler) Candy-coated sugar-flavored mid-sixties heist flick ala Topkapi and the Italian Job. O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn work easily enough together, but there's nothing earth-shaking here. It's edited for mega-panorama-epic-vision, so you get a ton of filler on either ends of scenes, always a screw-up as far as the precise dynamics of timing needed for both heist films and comedies, so neither aspect is entirely successful. The comedy is self-satisfied, over-written and heavy-handed. The whole movie, in fact, bears a feeling of weightiness, as if it were filmed using huge, unwieldy, immovable equipment, and it's just the opposite of the light touch such a venture requires. I believe O'Toole started taking these pretty-boy roles (starting with What's New, Pussycat?) because he wanted to be a heart-throb, and certainly to move away from the heavy-drama, man-alone impression he'd created with Lawrence of Arabia and Lord Jim. And he does have a nice, subtle touch with comedy. This is a failure, but not his fault, or Hepburn's.
Casino Royale: (1967. Multiple directors, including John Huston) It turns out that he just has the merest of cameos in this, a cameo in a movie made of cameos and schtick, and his may be the worst (he is playing bagpipes in a sort of hallucination sequence). It has more in common with Laugh-in and Get Smart than with the Bond films it's sending up. Some good actors give it a good try (special mention goes to Deborah Kerr for a fine but doomed effort), and Peter Sellers is the one who ends up shining most brightly. There's a bit in the middle done on mock German Expressionist sets which is amusing for a minute, it's got some very fine secondary turns by character actors you'll recognize, and, to its credit, it never claims to be anything but a schmaltzy tribute to psychedelic fun. Still, you'll probably fast-forward through some stuff.
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