literary lives Inside Peter O’Toole – Part I The beginning of a great adventure

“I will not be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon … If I can I will stir the smooth sands of monotony. I do not crave security. I wish to hazard my soul to opportunity. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed…to refuse to barter incentive for a dole…I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence, the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopias.”

– Peter O’Toole

Peter Seamus O’Toole was born on August 2, 1932, the son of Constance Jane Eliot, a Scottish nurse, and Patrick Joseph “Spats” O’Toole, an Irish metal plater, ex-footballer, and bookmaker.

He was born in St James’s University Hospital in Leeds, Yorkshire, England. He had an elder sister, Patricia, and they grew up in the south Leeds suburb of Hunslet.

He spent the first five years of his life with his family, touring the major racecourse towns in Northern England. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he went to the Catholic St Joseph’s Secondary School in Hunslet.

“I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood – the black dresses and the shaving of the hair – was so horrible, so terrifying. Of course, that’s all been stopped. They’re sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles to me just the other day.”

– Peter O’Toole

When he left school, he was hired as a trainee journalist and photographer on the Yorkshire Evening Post, until he was called up as a signaller in the Royal Navy. Questioned by an officer, he said he would like to be a poet or an actor.

After he was rejected by the Abbey Theatre’s drama school in Dublin, he was admitted to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1952 to 1954 on a scholarship. At RADA he was in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford.

O’Toole remembers his time there “as the most remarkable class the Academy ever had, though we weren’t reckoned for much at the time.” The school thought they were crazy – but they fed off each other.

Early in the 1950s, O’Toole gained recognition as a talented Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic, before making his TV debut in

1954 playing a soldier in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

During the three years at the Bristol Old Vic, O’Toole appeared in King Lear, The Recruiting Officer, Major Barbara, Othello, and The Slave of Truth in 1956. He was the lead in Pygmalion, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oh, My Papa, and Look Back in Anger in 1957; Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman, Hamlet, The Holiday, Amphitryon ’38, and Waiting for Godot in 1958. During the production of Holiday, he met his first wife, the Welsh actress Sian Phillips. These were O’Toole’s formative years, and he learned his craft well.

“Life turned out much better than I thought: I knew after a little while that I could act.”

– Peter O’Toole

He continued to appear on television – in episodes of Armchair Theatre - The Pier (1957) and the BBC’s The Laughing Woman (1958).

He made his London debut in a musical Oh, My Papa, and gained considerable fame in The Long and the Short and the Tall at London’s Royal Court Theatre in January 1959, before transferring to the West End in April.

O’Toole won Best Actor of the Year in 1959.

He was much in demand and received several long-term contracts, but turned them all down, preferring to play in Disney’s version of Kidnapped (1960); The Savage Innocents (1960) with Anthony Quinn; and Siwan: The King’s Daughter (1960) with his wife Sian Phillips, for TV.

He also spent a season with the Stratford Royal Shakespeare Company in 1960 as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew; as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice; and as Thersites in Troilus and Cressida.

He formed a company with the producer Jules Buck who cast O’Toole in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England, and appeared in several episodes of the TV series Rendezvous.

But he lost the film role of the film adaptation of The Long and the Short and the Tall to Laurence Harvey, which greatly disappointed him.

However, in November 1960, he was chosen to play the war hero TE Lawrence in Sir David Lean’s epic film Lawrence of Arabia (1962).

It was a major break for O’Toole which introduced him to a worldwide audience and earned him the first of eight nominations for the Academy Award Best Actor.

He received the BAFTA Award for Best British Actor, and his performance was ranked in Premiere magazine as being among the ‘100 Greatest Film Performances of All Time’.

Later, in 2003, Lawrence, as performed by O’Toole, was selected as being the tenth greatest hero in cinema history by the American Film Institute.

“To be perched nine feet up in the air on a camel, covered in vermin, at a hundred and thirty in the nonexistent shade, trying to be Lawrence of Arabia and speak – I thought, ‘Well, this is not exactly the Old Vic. I mean, how am I gonna do this?’ And we lived in tents, and David Lean came up to me – on the very first day, Robert – and he said, always smoked with a cigarette holder, and he said, ‘Pete, this is the beginning of a great adventure.’”

– Peter O’Toole to Robert Osborne

And it certainly was a great adventure. The film is now listed as one of the ten greatest film epics in cinema history.

O’Toole played Hamlet under the direction of Laurence Olivier at the Royal National Theatre in 1963; and performed in Baal (1963) at the Phoenix Theatre.

In November 1961, O’Toole and Jules Buck formed a production