Profile:Peter O'Toole's new role in Venus, with its theme of decay, forms a neat bookend with the potent part he played in Lawrence of Arabia at the start of his career, writes Donald Clarke
Four years ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, noticing that Peter O'Toole was looking a bit frayed round the edges, suggested that the veteran actor, boozer and sort-of Irishman might wish to accept that premature headstone known as the honorary Oscar.
After all, among actors, only Richard Burton had received so many nominations - a startling seven - without laying hands upon a statuette. This might have been the academy's last chance to make amends.
Heart-warmingly irascible as ever, O'Toole greeted the offer with a mixture of outrage and scorn. "I'm still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright," he puffed. When the academy retorted that it was going to award him the blasted thing whether he turned up or not, O'Toole grudgingly made his way to the ceremony and delivered a perfectly charming speech. But he had already made his point: the blue-eyed rogue would not go gently into the night until he had been specifically honoured for one last great performance.
Some chance. It had, at that point, been 20 years since his last Oscar nomination (for 1982's My Favourite Year) and in the interim he had been reduced to playing too many charming old idiots in too many less than charming films.
But, against the odds, it looks as if he might still achieve his ambition. O'Toole, now 74, is receiving ecstatic reviews for his performance as an ageing actor obsessed with a 21-year-old girl in Roger Michell's upcoming Venus and, following a nomination for next week's Golden Globes, has been installed alongside Forest Whitaker as joint favourite to win the best actor Oscar. How was it O'Toole's Lawrence of Arabia responded to his fatalistic Arab comrades? "Nothing is written." Quite so.
O'Toole has been fighting against fashion, mood and the dying of the light for a significant portion of his career. Alongside late boozing buddies such as Richard Harris and Richard Burton, he was part of a gang that staggered, bright and confident, out of the 1950s, only to find themselves somewhat discombobulated by the swinging decade that followed. Fond of slacks, sports jackets, rugby and grog, the thirsty boys continued to work, but they never quite managed to regain their cool.
O'Toole did, it is true, receive a further six Oscar nominations after the one he was granted for 1962's Lawrence of Arabia, but the films in question, still dragged out by desperate broadcasters every Christmas, were consistently stodgy and out of date: Becket, The Lion in Winter, that horrendous musical remake of Goodbye Mr Chips.
Michael Caine was born only one year after O'Toole, but by the end of the decade, with Alfie and The Ipcress File under his belt, the Rotherhithe lad seemed a whole generation younger. When, in the early 1970s, O'Toole was preparing to play an ancient Don Quixote in the dull Man of La Mancha, Caine was stomping icily about Newcastle in Mike Hodges's perennially hip Get Carter.
Mind you, although he was knocking back the booze at a ferocious rate, O'Toole did, at this stage, still retain the best part of his heavenly good looks. After seeing those keen, blue irises and have-your-eye-out cheekbones advance towards the camera in Lawrence, Noël Coward was said to have remarked: "If you had been any prettier then it would have been Florence of Arabia." Coward would still have found traces of fair Florence in the O'Toole of 1972's The Ruling Class, the actor's most interesting film in this period, but eight years later, when he returned to play a deranged film director in The Stunt Man and Jim Larkin in RTÉ's Strumpet City, pretty Peter had been transformed into a sunken-cheeked, weary-looking geezer.
The break-up of his marriage to Siân Phillips, the sumptuously voiced Welsh actor, cannot have helped his mood any. Having been together since 1960 - during which time they brought Kate O'Toole, now an excellent actor herself, and her sister Patricia into the world - the two eventually parted in 1979.
More seriously still, in 1976 O'Toole was forced to undergo radical surgery to deal with a serious intestinal ailment. The condition has variously been identified as cancer or the side-effects of heavy drinking - both perhaps - but what seems certain is that he had his pancreas and part of his stomach removed, thus rendering him diabetic. Perhaps no coincidence, then, that his best-received performance of the last couple of decades was onstage, as the eponymous Soho rake in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.
What else? In 1980 he returned to the West End to appear in the most disastrously received production of Macbeth in living memory. No wonder he looked so grim. The Oscar nomination (yes, another) for The Stunt Man can have been of little consolation.
And yet. Who among us would dare to suggest that O'Toole is anything other than an ornament to his generation? He may not have had the career he deserved, but his sonorous voice and irrepressible theatrical twinkle never fail to fire the synapses of sensitive viewers. If nothing else, he has earned the right to be regarded as that most appealing of show-business phenomena: the survivor.
Although some reports say Peter Seamus O'Toole came into the world in Co Kerry or Dublin and there have been other whispers that his first breath was actually taken in England, the actor - who always identifies himself as Irish - originally claimed to have been born in Galway. At any rate, we know that he was raised by his father, an Irish bookmaker, and his mother, originally a nurse, in Leeds before and during the second World War.
He had a crack at journalism for the Yorkshire Evening News and then joined the Royal Navy, working on a submarine depot ship. "I was just a young kid with them, these hairy, wonderful men," he said recently, adopting a tone that might have pleased Noël Coward.
After stumbling among an arty crowd and somehow wangling himself a role in a professional production of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, O'Toole eventually wound up at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in a class that also included such future luminaries as Alan Bates and Albert Finney.
He first attracted serious attention in the West End production of Hal Willis's The Long and the Short and the Tall, a searing war play, and went on to appear in a few minor films such as Kidnapped and The Savage Innocents. Then came David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia.
The reputation of Lean's later films is less secure than it once was. Both Ryan's Daughter and Doctor Zhivago now seem bloated, confused and fatuous. But Lawrence of Arabia, dubious about the virtues of patriotism, intriguingly ambiguous in its approach to TE Lawrence's sexuality and politics, remains one of the jewels of British cinema.
Though Albert Finney was considered for the role, it now seems inconceivable that anybody else could have combined beady determination with enigmatic frailty as effectively as did the young O'Toole. It is little wonder that the actor's career has been so overshadowed by his first substantial film role.
Venus may never achieve the standing of Lean's movie, but, featuring a characteristically acidic script by Hanif Kureishi, Roger Michell's film does, at least, provide a neat bookend to O'Toole's career (or this first part of it). Forming a touching double act with the more ancient Leslie Phillips, who plays a theatrical colleague and the uncle of his young beloved, O'Toole, his own character long reduced to playing corpses, gleefully grabs the opportunity to give flesh to the mundane miseries associated with mortality. Venus is as intimate as Lawrence was epic. The new film is concerned with decay, while the older work tackled youthful potency. They are near perfect complements.
Will he finally win the Oscar? Well, the academy does enjoy rewarding perseverance and longevity. But O'Toole, who demanded (and eventually got) vodka at the supposedly dry ceremony in 2003, appears reluctant to climb aboard the chat-show charabanc that sets off in the months before the event. Meanwhile, his main rival for the gong, Forest Whitaker, fancied for his turn as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, continues to get glowing notices from all quarters.
Nevertheless, even if he fails to bag the award, he may still set a notable record. Presuming he is shortlisted - and nothing is written - a loss would see him leave Burton in his wake and clock up eight nominations without a win. And that might not be the end of it.
Burton and Harris are dead. Oliver Reed is gone too. But Peter O'Toole, last of the sports jacket and rugby union thespians, is still gloriously, stubbornly alive. Long may he remain so.
TheO'TooleFile
Who is he?Overpoweringly charismatic actor whose honeyed voice has enhanced such varied productions as My Favourite Year, The Lion in Winter and, most famously, Lawrence of Arabia.
Why is he in the news?After being nominated for a record seven Oscars without winning, he has been installed as joint favourite to take this year's award. His performance in Roger Michell's Venus has also garnered him a nomination for next week's Golden Globes.
Most appealing characteristic:Dogged determination to keep plugging away despite illness, changing fashions and a dearth of worthy roles.
Least appealing characteristic:A marked over-fondness for distilled spirits that, by his own account, has survived the surgical removal of a significant part of his innards in 1976.
Most likely to say:"How's your glass?"
Least likely to say:"It is, I think, time to retire from public life and cultivate sobriety."