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Peter Seamus O'Toole (Peter James O'Toole) (b. August 2, 1932 (accepted but
presumed date) is an eight-time Academy Award-nominated Irish actor.
He has received three Golden Globes and an Emmy Award. He was also awarded an
honorary Oscar for his body of work (2003). Despite eight nominations, he has yet
to win a Best Actor Oscar.
 Early
life
Peter O'Toole was born in 1932, with some sources giving his birthplace as
Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, and others as Leeds, in West Yorkshire, England,
where he also grew up. O'Toole himself is not certain of his birthplace or date,
noting in his autobiography that while he accepts August 2 as his birthdate, he has
conflicting birth certificates in both countries, with the Irish one giving a June,
1932 birthdate. He was the son of an Irish bookmaker father and a Scottish-born
nurse mother. When O'Toole was one year old, the O’Tooles began a five-year tour of
major racetrack towns in northern England. Peter O'Toole went to a Catholic School
for seven or eight years, there he was "implored" to become right handed. “I used
to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood—the black dresses
& the shaving of the hair—was so horrible, so terrifying,” he later commented.
“Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin & tonic in the Dublin
pubs now, & a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other
day.” O'Toole later took pride in his Irish ancestry, even to the point of
apparently always wearing at least one item of green clothing - usually his
socks.
O'Toole was called up for National Service in Britain and served as a radioman in
the Royal Navy. As reported in a radio interview in 2006 on NPR, he was asked by an
officer whether he had something he'd always wanted to do. His reply was that he'd
always wanted to try being either a poet or an actor. Fortunately for him, acting
worked out.
O'Toole attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) (1952–1954) on a
scholarship after being rejected by the Abbey Theatre's Drama School in Dublin by
the then director Ernest Blythe, because he couldn't speak Gaelic. At RADA, he was
in the same class as Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford.
O'Toole described this as "the most remarkable class the academy ever had, though
we weren't reckoned for much at the time. We were all considered dotty."
Career
He began getting work in the theatre, gaining recognition as a Shakespearean actor
at the Bristol Old Vic and with the English Stage Company, before making his
television debut in 1954 and a very minor film debut in 1959.
O'Toole's major break came when he was chosen to play T.E. Lawrence in David Lean's
Lawrence of Arabia (1962), after Albert Finney turned down the role. His
performance introduced him to U.S. audiences and earned him the first of his eight
nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor. For further information, see
Academy Award nominations below.
O'Toole is also one of a handful of actors to be Oscar-nominated for playing the
same role in two different films; he played King Henry II in both 1964's Becket and
1968's The Lion in Winter.
O'Toole played Hamlet under Laurence Olivier's direction in the premiere production
of the Royal National Theatre in 1963. He has also appeared in Sean O'Casey's Juno
and the Paycock at Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, fulfilling a lifetime ambition when
taking to the stage of the Irish capital's Abbey Theatre in 1970 to play in Waiting
for Godot by Samuel Beckett, alongside the stage actor Donal McCann. His 1980
performance as Macbeth is often considered one of the greatest disasters in theatre
history, but he has redeemed his theatrical reputation with his performances as
John Tanner in Man and Superman and Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, and won a Laurence
Olivier Award for his performance in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (1989).
In 2005, he appeared on television as the older version of legendary 18th century
Italian adventurer Giacomo Casanova in the BBC drama serial Casanova. O'Toole's
role was mainly to frame the drama, telling the story of his life to serving maid
Edith (Rose Byrne). The younger Casanova seen for most of the action was played by
David Tennant, who had to wear contact lenses to match his brown eyes to O'Toole's
blue.
O'Toole won an Emmy Award for his role in the 1999 mini-series Joan of Arc.
In 2004, O'Toole played King Priam in the summer blockbuster Troy. He was once
again nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Maurice in
the 2006 film Venus, directed by Roger Michell, his eighth such nomination. Most
recently, O'Toole co-stars in the Pixar animated film, Ratatouille, an animated
film about a rat with dreams of becoming the greatest chef in Paris. Jeffrey M.
Anderson of Combustible Celluloid praised O'Toole's performance in Ratatouille,
"Peter O'Toole's performance as the critic Anton Ego is worthy of another Oscar
nomination."
Personal
life
In 1960, he married Welsh actress, Siân Phillips, with whom he had two daughters,
Kate O'Toole (an award-winning actress and resident of Clifden, Ireland) and
Patricia; the couple divorced in 1979. He and his ex-girlfriend, Karen Brown, have
a son, Lorcan O'Toole, born when Peter was in his fifties.
Severe illness almost ended his life in the late 1970s. Due to his heavy drinking,
he underwent surgery in 1976 to have his pancreas and a large portion of his
stomach removed, which resulted in insulin dependent diabetes. O'Toole eventually
recovered and returned to work, although he found it harder to get parts in films,
resulting in more work for television and occasional stage roles. However, he gave
a star turn in 1987's much-garlanded The Last Emperor.
He has resided in Clifden, County Galway, Ireland since 1963 and at the height of
his career maintained homes in Dublin, London and Paris (at the Ritz), but now only
keeps his home in London.
He is perhaps the only one of his "London" acting contemporaries not to be
knighted. While a glaring omission at first glance, it is one that, according to
London's Daily Mail in 2006, is one of his own making. According to the paper's
Richard Kay, he was offered an honorary knighthood in 1987, but turned it down for
personal and political reasons.
He is a noted fan of rugby and used to attend Five Nations matches with friends and
fellow rugby fans Richard Harris and Richard Burton.
O'Toole has written two books. "Loitering With Intent: The Child," which chronicles
his childhood in the years leading up to WWII, was a New York Times Notable Book of
the year 1992. His second, "Loitering With Intent: The Apprentice" is about his
years spent training with a cadre of friends at RADA. His writing is infused with
his love of language, poetry and literature, and much usage of rhyme and tempo is
woven into the prose. The books have been praised by critics such as Charles
Champlin in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, who wrote: "A cascade of language, a
rumbling tumbling riot of words, a pub soliloquy to an invisible but imaginable
audience, and the more captivating for it. O'Toole as raconteur is grand
company."
O'Toole is taking the rest of 2007 to finish his third installment. This book will
have (as he described it) "the meat," meaning highlights from his stage and
filmmaking career.
Academy Award
nominations
Peter O'Toole has been nominated eight times for the Academy Award for Best Actor
in a Leading Role, making him the most-nominated actor never to win the award. His
nominations were for:
1962 - Lawrence of Arabia
1964 - Becket
1968 - The Lion in Winter
1969 - Goodbye, Mr. Chips
1972 - The Ruling Class
1980 - The Stunt Man
1982 - My Favorite Year
2006 - Venus
In 2003, the Academy honoured him with an Academy Honorary Award for his entire
body of work and his lifelong contribution to film. O'Toole initially balked about
accepting, and wrote the Academy a letter saying he was "still in the game" and
would like more time to "win the lovely bugger outright." The Academy informed him
that they would bestow the award whether he wanted it or not.
Further, as he related on The Charlie Rose Show in January 2007, his children
admonished him, saying that it was the highest honor one could receive in the
filmmaking industry. And so, O'Toole agreed to appear at the ceremony and receive
his Honorary Oscar. It was presented to him by Meryl Streep, who has the most Oscar
nominations of any actor (14).
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Peter
O'Toole - Manifesting Generator - Biography
