Since the mid-sixties O’Toole had been taking Siân across the water to visit the town of Clifden in Connemara, real O’Toole country, with hundreds if not thousands of people bearing that surname dotted about the place. He first arrived there alone on a cold October evening in 1964. Billy Foyle was with some of his friends in the smoke room of the Clifden Bay Hotel, as it was known then, when this knock came at the door. ‘And this big, tall, lanky stranger was standing there with an English accent and he wanted to get a room for the night.’ Although they were closed Foyle invited him in. With not one cinema in Clifden nobody had seen Lawrence of Arabia nor had the first clue who Peter O’Toole was. ‘He came in and my friends were having pints of Guinness and I introduced him and we got talking and we got drinking, and drinking, and drinking perhaps more than we should.’
O’Toole wanted some cigarettes so he and Billy Foyle walked to the pub across the street. There had been a funeral that day and the place was heaving with mourners and the drink was flowing. ‘We stopped to have a few pints and Peter got to know everyone and he bought drinks on the house. As the revelry started they all sang rebel songs for all the people that died for Ireland. You could almost hear the bullets going into the wall. And Peter was delighted and egging them on.’ Somebody then suggested Peter have a go at a song. He made a few grunts and then got up on a table. This bar had a very low ceiling and he was almost bent over. ‘And it sticks in my mind forever this day,’ says Billy Foyle. ‘Now, to appreciate what he did, the atmosphere in that pub that particular night was heated, these were all Irish rebels dying for Ireland every five minutes. And I heard this song coming across and I was certain I knew it but I thought it was an out of tune Irish ballad he was singing. It must have taken about ten seconds before I realized the song he was singing was “God Save the Queen”. I grabbed Peter and yanked him off the table and he hit the floor with a moan. Then I bundled him out of the door and into the street. “For Christ’s sake run, Peter,” I yelled, because they’d have beaten me up more than they would have beaten O’Toole up.’
Both men ran back to the hotel and into the safety of the smoke room. Inside O’Toole delighted in telling everyone what had happened and suggested to Foyle an encore the following evening. ‘I’m sorry, Peter, I’m very busy tomorrow. But if you do go out, for God’s sake don’t sing that song again.’ He did go out, starting off in several pubs before going to a private house party, where he brought all the drink, bottles of whisky, gin and vodka. Sometime in the night there was the obligatory singsong and O’Toole was asked to have a go. ‘Of course, what did he do,’ says Billy Foyle. ‘He sang “God Save the Queen” again, only this time I wasn’t there to save him and they kicked seven kinds of bejesus out of him. The next morning I was going across the road to get the newspaper when I saw this image come up the street. He said, “William, old boy.” I said, “Peter, is that you? What happened?” I thought I’d saved him once. And he was so proud, he had a broken nose, his eye was black and blue and there was congealed blood. I don’t know where he slept that night. He didn’t sleep at my hotel. I took him in and cleaned him up and then sent him on his way.’
A few months later O’Toole was back, saying he wanted to trace his ancestors. Although for all the time he knew O’Toole, Foyle can’t recall him ever managing to locate a single one. ‘I think he was probably hoping he wouldn’t find any. But when people asked, what are you doing over here, he’d say, I’m looking for my relations.’ What did happen was that O’Toole fell in love with the wild and desolate beauty of this piece of Ireland, battered by the torrents of wind that sweep off the Atlantic. He told Billy Foyle that he wanted to build a house for his family there and to let him know when he’d found the perfect plot of land.
It was partly by accident, partly by design that O’Toole’s next film was made in Ireland. He’d seen James Kennaway’s play Country Dance at the Hampstead Theatre and become fast friends with the author. When Kennaway tragically died in a car accident, driving back from O’Toole’s home, the actor was determined to bring some kind of permanence to the work and make it into a film, changing its Scottish locale to Ireland. In it he plays a crazy alcoholic who has an incestuous relationship with his sister, played by Susannah York. It was a controversial premise and on the first day of filming O’Toole told producer Robert Ginna, ‘You know we’re not going to make a buck on this, don’t you? But let’s have a bloody good time.’
Bringing his usual diligent research to bear upon a role, O’Toole got regularly smashed. It was not uncommon for him to be absent Monday mornings in order to sleep off the exertions of the weekend’s festivities. Filming at Ardmore Studios, county Wicklow, he often drank at the nearby Harbour Bar and donated a large moose head (a prop from What’s New Pussycat) as a gesture of gratitude to the owners for making sure he was returned in one piece to his hotel each night.
One evening O’Toole took some of the crew out on one of his customary pub crawls through Dublin which ended in a restaurant at 3.30 in the morning. When things got a little too boisterous for the owner he asked them to leave and when they refused brought out his Alsatian dog to reinforce the point. When O’Toole demanded more drinks and was bitten for his trouble he punched the landlord in the face. It just so happened that an off-duty policeman observed the whole incident and O’Toole was arrested. In the end the landlord refused to press charges, though O’Toole still humbly accepted a fine of £30 the next morning in the Magistrates’ Court.
Another night in Dublin he got into a fight and arrived on the set the next morning sporting a black eye. ‘We had to rejig the shooting in order to hide it,’ remembers co-star Michael Craig. ‘He didn’t seem to take much notice of it really, it was just one of those things that happened in his daily life.’ Craig went with O’Toole one afternoon to the Curragh Racecourse in nearby Kildare, where they met up with a whole gang of film people who had been in Ireland for months working on Ryan’s Daughter. ‘I remember I lost £700 on the day and I never saw a horse race because we were in the bar all the time. Then we went back to our hotel in Dublin and Peter insisted on staying up all night and carrying on.’ After that experience, and a couple of others, Craig decided not to go out on the booze any more with O’Toole. ‘I knew there would come a point when the pub would shut and he’d be looking for somewhere to make on to, and I’d be thinking, I should get my head down because I’ve got a call at six in the morning, but that didn’t bother him.’
O’Toole’s drinking was yet again a cause for concern and the effects it was having on his general health. He’d taken to recording his morning cough for posterity, so impressively repulsive was it. Siân told of one distressing incident when her husband turned up at the theatre where she was performing only to pass out drunk in the corridor backstage requiring the actors to step over his crumpled form in order to get on the stage. Medical opinion was once again sought and the same advice delivered, lay off the drink, which prompted the same reply as before – he wouldn’t, despite a recurrence of his stomach pains.
That October, Burton and Liz Taylor saw O’Toole quite by chance in the paddock of Longchamp Racecourse outside Paris. In his diary that night Burton did not paint a very flattering portrait of his old friend: ‘We were standing there when suddenly a tall man appeared emaciated and ill and stubble-faced and smiled a lot and was quite incoherent, and had a right hand which was burned to the bone between the index finger and the next. It was Peter O’Toole.’ Other friends and colleagues were equally concerned. Phyllida Law, who had acted with him at Bristol, was one: ‘To be quite honest, at one point in his life I seriously didn’t think he’d live. I’d see him about looking as white as anything and thin. He did look so ill that I used to think, he’ll never make it, he can’t live.’
When Country Dance finished filming in the autumn of 1969 (it would eventually meet with an uninspired reception in cinemas), O’Toole and Susannah York remained in Dublin since both had been invited to appear in a production of Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Gaiety Theatre. O’Toole was reprising the role of John Tanner that he had played years earlier at Bristol. Directed by his old mentor Nat Brenner, it ran for only fifteen performances and demand for tickets was extraordinarily high. ‘The finest thing I’ve ever seen,’ remarked fellow cast member Nigel Stock. Brenner remembers being alone in his office one night and the telephone ringing. It was the Irish Prime Minister trying to get tickets.
There was talk of a London transfer but O’Toole had already committed that December to appearing in a production of Waiting for Godot at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, once again playing Vladimir. Appearing opposite him was another Irish drinking pal, Donal McCann. When in London, McCann was a regular visitor at Guyon House. Siân remembers one extraordinary episode when McCann, on his second bottle of vodka, fell asleep in an armchair in the drawing room and somehow managed to set fire to his hair with a cigarette. Calmly, by now used to such eccentricity, Siân walked over to the drinks cabinet, picked up a soda siphon and drenched his head with it. McCann merely blinked, then held out his empty glass for a refill.
Godot lasted just eighteen performances, since O’Toole was due to start shooting a new movie. An offer had arrived to appear in a film directed by Peter Yates, then a hot talent after helming the Steve McQueen classic Bullitt. The location was South America, a part of the world he’d never been to before and was keen to explore. The money was good too, a quarter of a million dollars. He quickly accepted.
Murphy’s War was based on a novel by Max Catto about the sole survivor of a British merchant ship sunk by a German U-boat who becomes obsessed with sinking the submarine to avenge his companions, shot as they floated in the wreckage. When the film rights were snapped up by Paramount, producer Michael Deeley and Yates were handed a list of ten actors and told to make their choice. Amongst the usual suspects were a couple of left-field choices, chief amongst them O’Toole. A Sean Connery or a Lee Marvin would have given a perfectly fine bravura performance, but Yates was aiming for something a bit more quirky than your regular war movie. In that regard O’Toole was the perfect fit, though after reading the script he insisted on playing the part as an Irishman, necessitating a slight rewrite.
Deeley and Yates had hired O’Toole fully aware of his reputation, but came up with a cunning plan to keep him under control. In a film that was distinctly macho, there was just the one female role, that of a nurse who befriends Murphy. ‘Because of one’s fear that Peter might be unreliable, pissed out of his mind or something,’ says Deeley, ‘we decided to cast Siân to play opposite him. Of course she’s a great actress, but stuck in the jungles of Venezuela, we thought she would be our insurance. In the event it was totally unnecessary. Actually, he was the glue that held that film together.’
For Deeley, Murphy’s War remains a particular favourite, it was fun and challenging but also the most hazardous film he ever worked on. The location was an absolute killer. Shooting on the Orinoco River, the unit were miles from any kind of civilization and surrounded by hazards – piranha fish in the shallows and poisonous snakes everywhere else. ‘It was a dangerous location because if you fell into the water you’d be dead.’
To make matters worse the Belfast to Liverpool ferry that had been converted to accommodate the film crew, having crossed the Atlantic, got stuck on a sand bank as it approached the mouth of the Orinoco, a mile short of the location site, demanding the use of small flat-bottomed boats to move everyone back and forth. One morning a party that included O’Toole and Siân, along with Deeley and his wife, were halfway across when the weather turned bad and the sea began to cut up rough. ‘The fella who was driving the boat suddenly had hysterics and got down on his knees and started praying,’ Deeley recalls. ‘The boat was now completely out of control. Luckily our stunt arranger Bob Simmons knocked the guy out, seized the wheel and took over. But it was very nasty for a moment.’
This, as everyone soon discovered, was par for the course on Murphy’s War; if something could go wrong it invariably did. O’Toole, at times non-communicative and grumpy, due to more stomach problems, persevered, indeed flourished in the hostile surroundings, living it like some kind of adventure. ‘Peter was the absolute soul of the picture,’ confirms Deeley. ‘And I’ve never seen this with an actor before.’
After a couple of weeks O’Toole and Siân were re-housed in a hotel in the town of Puerto Ordaz and a helicopter took them into the rainforest for filming. The chopper was manned by a French stunt pilot called Gilbert Chomat and on weekends O’Toole would command Chomat to pilot him round the area, landing on mud banks to search for pre-Columbian artefacts. O’Toole was determined to explore the region, having read up on Eldorado, pre-Columbian art and the revolutionary Simón Bolívar.
One weekend they passed near the famous Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world. It was a spectacular sight and when the pair met later in the hotel bar they began a long discussion about the possibilities of landing the chopper directly on the falls, on a flat-topped plateau just above where the water flows out in a huge gush and drops for about a mile; an aerial feat so far as they knew never attempted before, probably for good reason. ‘We had a few more drinks,’ remembered O’Toole. ‘And it became infinitely more sensible.’ They decided to do it the following weekend.
Chomat had the chopper stripped down, leaving just the skeleton, and O’Toole brought along Siân and the photographer Bob Willoughby. Once at Angel Falls the helicopter began its ascent up this sheer wall of water until Chomat had it hovering over the top. Carefully he eased the machine down until it gently but uneasily settled on what was little more than a smooth patchwork of rock. Everyone got out, save for Chomat who kept watch for any sudden change in the weather that could spell disaster. Willoughby took some pictures for posterity, Siân collected a few wild flowers, while O’Toole lay prostrate on the ground, looking over the edge, down at this mile of water. It could only have been minutes when Chomat urged everyone back in the chopper. It was time to leave, clouds were coming in.
While the landing had been tough enough, their exit was white-knuckle stuff. Chomat couldn’t start the engine for fear the helicopter might shudder off the rock out of control. The trick was to fling the craft off and as it hurtled down like a rock the rotor blades started and Chomat piloted them all to safety. It was a masterful piece of flying.
Following the river for some distance they came across a compound owned by a former German officer, ‘who clearly decided not to hang around after the war was over for fear of his record emerging’, says Deeley. ‘The crew often went there. It was amazing. My wife and I were walking down to his hut one night when a huge anaconda wound its way out of a tree into one’s path.’ It was that kind of place, and the man himself a genial host, despite being eaten away by leprosy. This was where Chomat landed and O’Toole and his party spent a riotous evening. ‘We drank every single drop the man had had stored for over a year,’ the actor reported. ‘And then we had a shooting competition.’
When location filming wrapped, O’Toole and Siân had some spare time before they were required for studio work back in England. O’Toole had made his mind up to track down some Yanomami Indians, which entailed a long and deep trek into the jungle. Siân was once again game, Willoughby too. Chartering a boat, and hiring a couple of guides, off they went up the Orinoco, into the wilds of the Amazon basin, the land of head-hunters and goodness knows what. After just a couple of days’ travel, one of the guides refused to go any further, and nerves were tested again when a Greek missionary working at a small settlement they passed through advised them all to go back. Still they ploughed on, up river, in blasting heat and then torrential rain.
After another day O’Toole spotted a young child playing on a beach and they pulled in. Far from displaying shyness or fear the girl ran up to O’Toole, took his hand and pulled him into the jungle. They ran further and further inside as Siân and Willoughby tried desperately to keep up, arriving eventually upon a large encampment. They’d found their Indians. It was a once in a lifetime experience as they were invited to eat, play and rest with the tribe and exchange gifts. O’Toole even embarked on a spot of archery, his sheer ineptitude drawing merriment from the men of the village. It was only after making it back they learned they’d managed to get four hundred miles further up river than a recent BBC documentary team who travelled in a hovercraft with armed guards.
The gruelling circumstances Murphy’s War was made in certainly paid dividends on screen as the film is wholly authentic, and O’Toole delivers a whimsical and hard-edged performance. But it didn’t fare particularly well with the public or the critics. Deeley himself feels the film is flawed due to Peter Yates’ insistence that O’Toole’s character be killed off at the end. ‘Yates had this passion to make a picture which mattered, but this was not a film which mattered, it was a film which was meant to be a lot of fun, an adventure movie. Yates wanted to have this great sad ending, this anti-war message or something, which is such shit.’
On his return from Venezuela, O’Toole was exhausted and recuperating in hospital when director Peter Medak paid him a visit. In spite of strict instructions that he was not to drink, Medak was surprised to see O’Toole sat up in bed eating caviar and downing vodkas. Medak had recently seen Peter Barnes’ scurrilous new play The Ruling Class, which gleefully laid into the decaying institutions propping up Britain’s rotten Establishment, and thought it would make an ideal film. As for the dazzling central role, that of the 14th Earl of Gurney, who is clearly out of his mind, first believing himself to be Christ and then Jack the Ripper, it was made for O’Toole.
At Medak’s insistence O’Toole saw the play and was so captured by it he instructed Jules Buck to buy the film rights without delay. Promising Medak that he could direct him in it, there followed a worryingly lengthy period of inactivity as O’Toole busied himself on other projects. Worried, Medak would think the film was on, only for it to get bogged down or cancelled. ‘Finally, one night we came back from seeing Waiting for Godot at the theatre. And to go home with O’Toole meant stopping at every pub between Soho and Hampstead, and it didn’t matter that it was after closing hour because he would knock on the door and just say, “Peter’s here,” and every door opened for him. So about three o’clock in the morning we staggered into his house and he said to me, “Come on, let’s do Ruling Class.” And I said, “You say you’re going to do it but then nothing happens, it’s like Waiting for Godot.” I ripped into him a little bit. I said, “You will never make this fucking film.” And he leapt out of his chair across the room and jumped on my lap and picked up the phone and called Buck and said, “I’m with the crazy Hungarian and I know I’m drunk but I give you twenty-four hours to set this movie up, otherwise I’ll never make another film.” ’
In order for the deal to happen, according to Medak, O’Toole had to agree to make the musical Man of La Mancha. ‘They wanted him to do La Mancha first,’ claims Medak. ‘And we said, no, no, no, first we do Ruling Class.’
Before filming was due to begin O’Toole wanted Medak to fly with him to Ireland to work more on the script. ‘I remember the plane for some reason couldn’t land,’ recalls Medak. ‘And it made three passes, we thought we were going to fucking die.’ Finally landing, they were picked up by a chauffeur and driven to Clifden, where O’Toole had rented a cottage. ‘We were alone there for a week in this cottage. One night he said, “Come on, let’s go to the pub.” We hopped in the car, I don’t think he had a licence any more, we drove and I didn’t think I was going to be alive the time we got to this pub. And we sat in this wonderful little pub and everybody was the missing link to the IRA, and everyone was listening to Peter telling all these wonderful stories. We used to spend hours there. But then we also worked through the script, read it to each other and talked it out.’
Medak had learnt all about O’Toole’s relationship with alcohol and come to the opinion that because of the sheer amount of drink he consumed it often only needed a small amount to put him over the edge. This was only too apparent on the occasion Peter Barnes came over and all three of them went to this quiet restaurant in Dublin. ‘We were having lunch and in deep discussion about the film when the waiter arrived. “No, no, no, no drink for me,” says O’Toole. Nothing. He didn’t touch a drop. When I asked for the bill the chef came over to our table with a bottle of champagne, “With the compliments of the restaurant.” He opened it and Peter just took a sip. I turned away to pay the bill and when I turned back he wasn’t there any more. I looked around and he’d fallen all the way down these stairs, he just went, whoops!’
Filming began in May 1971 at Twickenham Studios, where O’Toole was largely a detached presence, some might have interpreted it as aloof. Actress Carolyn Seymour found him to be intensely private, happy to tell stories about himself (‘They all involved bars and pubs, and a lot of them were chauvinistic’), but never revealing any of his emotions or feelings. There was always a barrier. He’d been quite different at her audition. Carolyn arrived absolutely terrified only to be put immediately at ease by O’Toole. ‘He gave me everything at 150% and supported me throughout; it was quite an intense screen test. Then he found out that I’d already started a relationship with Medak and he never really looked at me again. He wasn’t a playboy or anything, Peter, he didn’t play around, but he liked to know that if he wanted to, the ingénue was available.’
There may have been other contributory factors since O’Toole was at the height of his alcohol addiction. On an average day Medak was lucky to get four or five hours out of his star. He wasn’t much use very early in the morning and even worse after lunch. It probably didn’t help that O’Toole installed his own bar in his dressing room. ‘But in those days everybody was drinking,’ insists Medak. ‘Each of us used to drink a bottle of wine at lunchtime at the studio and I don’t know how we went on working after that, but that was the culture.’
What is interesting is that even in this state O’Toole was capable of putting together a performance that was later Oscar nominated (losing of course, this time to Marlon Brando for The Godfather). ‘That is the measure of his talent,’ says Carolyn. ‘And being prepared. He was always prepared. For somebody who was so un-sort of put together in his personal life, he was incredibly professional.’ Certainly he never drank on the set, but at the end of the day off he would go drinking with co-stars James Villiers and Michael Bryant.
It was a long and strenuous shoot that lasted fifteen weeks and wore pretty much everybody out. ‘Peter was incredibly intelligent and bright, on a genius level,’ says Medak. ‘He also had a photographic memory so it took him only one reading to remember a script, and everybody else’s lines. Working with him wasn’t easy though. Sometimes he really got upset with people but it was always for a reason. All these great actors were incredibly demanding but once they knew that the person directing them is not a total idiot then you can get anything done.’
Carolyn, too, has never forgotten the experience: ‘O’Toole was one in a million, they don’t come along very often, that talented. He could have read the phone book and I think everybody would have fallen on the floor.’
When The Ruling Class opened it divided opinion amongst critics, some loved it, some despised it. In London at an early screening Carolyn remembers, ‘All the Sloane ranger types got up in a block and walked out.’ The New York Times thought the film acquired another dimension by O’Toole’s mere presence. And Time magazine believed O’Toole’s performance to be of such intensity ‘that it may trouble sleep as surely as it will haunt memory – funny, disturbing, finally devastating’. While it flopped badly on initial release (O’Toole took no salary and put money into the film and lost out quite heavily), The Ruling Class has gained admirers over the years and is today widely regarded as a minor classic.
By the early seventies O’Toole’s career was in pretty poor shape, The Ruling Class was his fourth commercial flop in a row and there was a sense he was drifting out of fashion with little prospect of ever again attaining the fame he commanded in his sixties heyday. The emergence in recent years of a new breed of American actor typified by Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Al Pacino had rendered O’Toole’s theatrical performance style almost prehistoric and certainly affected the kind of films he was being asked to appear in. O’Toole never had much truck with ‘gibberish spouting’ Method actors. He knew nothing of the Stanislavski school, nor did he wish to know anything about it, that kind of introspective style of acting he felt did not fit in with what he believed to be the actor’s main job – the telling of a story.
As promised, O’Toole had signed on to play Don Quixote in the film version of the hit Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Based on the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, it told the story of an eccentric Spanish knight and was essentially a play within a play performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners as the writer awaits trial before the Spanish inquisition.
O’Toole’s Becket collaborator Peter Glenville had agreed to direct the film provided the original Broadway script by Dale Wasserman was jettisoned in favour of one by British writer John Hopkins. He’d then set about surrounding O’Toole with top talent, Sophia Loren as the cliché whore with a heart of gold, and James Coco playing Sancho Panza, Cervantes’ manservant. Setting up the movie in Rome, Glenville heard that United Artists intended to go back to the Wasserman treatment, since the Hopkins script, which leant heavily on the Cervantes book, would necessitate a much higher budget. Glenville walked and the project was thrown into temporary disarray. As he waited for the studio to sort itself out, news reached O’Toole that writer/director Andrew Sinclair had acquired the rights to Dylan Thomas’ classic 1954 radio drama Under Milk Wood, about the day in the life of an imaginary Welsh fishing village and its curious inhabitants. O’Toole knew Sinclair slightly, their paths having crossed around the time of The Long and the Short and the Tall when John Osborne and Tony Richardson wanted O’Toole for the lead in a planned musical version of Sinclair’s first novel, The Breaking of Bumbo, a satire on the modern military. While nothing came of the idea, O’Toole and Siân did travel up to Cambridge to meet Sinclair, who was then sharing a grotty flat above a cafe with future satirist John Bird. ‘O’Toole sang songs all night in Gaelic, or thereabouts,’ Sinclair remembers. ‘When a policeman came up the stairs towards dawn to stop us disturbing the peace, O’Toole persuaded him to drink whisky from his helmet and join in the choruses. Peter always had enough charm to steal the brass off a bobby’s badge.’
Dylan Thomas was something of a hero to O’Toole and Burton and both men had tried without luck to bring Under Milk Wood to the screen. Now, Sinclair was offering O’Toole the chance to play Captain Cat, a part he’d performed years before in a RADA production. He couldn’t resist the idea and committed immediately to the venture. By a stroke of good fortune Burton and Liz Taylor just happened to be in the country. ‘And once he heard O’Toole was on board and it was going ahead, Burton had to do it,’ says Sinclair. ‘How could he not do it.’
A few days later Sinclair was sat in his office when the phone rang. It was Jules Buck. ‘Andrew, you’re a lucky bastard. You haven’t got the two biggest stars in the world, you’ve got all three.’ Elizabeth Taylor had consented to appear.
‘But what bloody part,’ said Sinclair, rather ungratefully. ‘It’s Under Milk Wood. She’s not Welsh.’
‘Your problem,’ said Buck. ‘You’ve got her or no picture.’
Incredibly, O’Toole, Burton and Taylor agreed to appear for a paltry fee of £10,000 each, although their representatives demanded a hefty chunk of any potential profits. But Sinclair was going to have to work fast, with Burton and O’Toole only available for five days each, and Elizabeth even less, just the two days.
Fishguard, a charming fishing town in Pembrokeshire, had been selected to act as Dylan’s mythical village and Sinclair brought with him the Debrett’s of Welsh thespian talent: Glynis Johns, Ryan Davies, Victor Spinetti and also a young David Jason. Siân Phillips also appeared, wearing her own wedding ring. Burton arrived in grand style in his Rolls-Royce but indisposed. The next morning he collared Sinclair. ‘I am not drinking on your film, Dylan was one of my greatest friends.’
‘What’s sober mean, Richard?’
‘That’s only two bottles of vodka a day, not four.’
O’Toole made much the same promise and remained the ultimate professional, insisting on wearing milky-blue contact lenses to play the blind Captain Cat, taking them out after half an hour when the pain became unbearable. ‘If he had not been capable of five-minute takes hitting an unseen mark without a wrong word, we could never have completed the shots on him without his sight,’ says Sinclair. ‘He played the whole part word-perfect literally as a blind man. Absolutely stunning.’
Once work was finished for the day it was a different story, with O’Toole leading the nightly singing and dancing at the Fishguard Bay Hotel. Sinclair remembers it was ‘The Cuckoo Song’ that was his favourite. ‘In the middle of a line of a dozen cavorting grave men, who had all dropped their trousers, he high kicked and belted out the words like a soubrette.’
Midway through the shoot Sinclair had to dash off to the Lee Studios in London to film the few scenes involving Elizabeth Taylor, who due to continual back problems hadn’t been able to travel to the Welsh location. The role of Rosie Probert, the sailors’ whore, had been assigned to Elizabeth and her main scene would be played with O’Toole. Arriving on the set that morning Sinclair was informed that Elizabeth would not be making an appearance for several hours. With time short (the Burtons had to leave the country by midnight the next day for tax reasons), Sinclair braced himself and went to her dressing room. There before a mirror, slapping on the rouge and big eyelids, was Elizabeth, every inch Cleopatra. ‘That won’t do,’ said Sinclair. ‘You’re a Welsh sailors’ whore of the fifties. You can’t look like that!’
‘I always look like Cleopatra,’ said Elizabeth and waved the director out of the room.
It was noon before she arrived on the set, and there was O’Toole as the young Captain Cat, all eager beaver on a brass bed ready to make hay with his Welsh whore. When Elizabeth snuggled in beside him, he lifted his shirt and there scribbled across his stomach in biro was the legend: ‘I love you Rosie Probert.’ Elizabeth burst out laughing.
After three takes the scene was done and everyone broke for lunch. As Sinclair sat in his office making preparations for that afternoon, O’Toole popped his head round the door. ‘You’ve lost your filum, Andrew,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘Liz is not appearing after lunch. But for what I am about to do for you, I deserve the Victoria Cross and bloody Bar.’
All that was required of Elizabeth was to stand in front of a microphone and dub her lines but she had resolved not to do it. ‘So off they went, O’Toole, Burton and Taylor, and they all got drunk from one till four over lunch,’ says Sinclair. ‘They must have drunk six bottles of wine, and in the end O’Toole and Burton carried a dead drunk Elizabeth into the studio and held her up between them, an arm over each shoulder while she read out her dialogue. In that moment O’Toole saved the film.’
Sinclair liked O’Toole, without his initial and continued commitment the film would never have been made. He judged him to be amongst the most intelligent and witty men he ever met. ‘And irrepressible, unpredictable and daring. Of all the stars I worked with he was the greatest by a long way. He had a terrific life-force, an incredible inner charisma which made him a meteor.’
After a brief rest O’Toole flew to Rome in January 1972 to begin preparations for Man of La Mancha, which now had a new director in Arthur Hiller. To his utter delight O’Toole discovered he was sharing a hotel with Burton, who was in the Italian capital working. One evening Burton had arranged a quiet meal at a discreet restaurant with a young actress. Suddenly O’Toole burst in, making something of a grand entrance. Not to be outdone, Burton leapt onto a table and broke into a song in Gaelic. O’Toole leapt atop another table and sang the second verse, and on it went; so much for a quiet, unobtrusive meal.
They met up several times after that for the odd snifter, activity frowned upon by Elizabeth, who was trying to keep her wandering husband on the wagon. One evening assistant director Norman Priggen received a call from Liz explaining that Burton would not be working tomorrow. ‘Why’s that?’ asked Priggen. ‘Well, you’d better get back to our hotel and look in the bar and see for yourself.’ Priggen drove quickly to the hotel and found Burton and O’Toole, both as drunk as lords, lying on the floor fondly embracing each other and singing ‘Happy Birthday’. They had been there since lunchtime.
It was exactly this kind of hell-raising that Liz hoped to put an end to. When Burton had a place in Hampstead, O’Toole would often be round or Burton would pay Guyon House a visit. ‘And then we’d carry the other home,’ explained O’Toole. ‘Elizabeth wasn’t keen on that. She probably thought I led him astray. I don’t know. She didn’t approve. That was a bone of contention between me and Richard.’
One afternoon O’Toole put a call through to Burton’s suite at the hotel. As always a secretary answered. Mr Burton was busy, could he try again later. For two days Burton didn’t return his calls until finally a member of his entourage came with a message and led O’Toole to a clandestine meeting in the corner of a dark bar tucked in the back of the hotel. ‘Elizabeth,’ said Burton, in a meek voice, ‘does not approve of our racing around together.’ And that was pretty much it. ‘I didn’t see him again for many years,’ claimed O’Toole. ‘Poor soul.’
Henceforth O’Toole referred to Elizabeth Taylor only as ‘That Woman’, though according to Andrew Sinclair hostilities between the two dated back to the days of Becket. O’Toole told Sinclair that he was in the back of a limo with Liz and Burton on their way to London from Shepperton Studios. Also in the car was Eddie Fisher, Liz’s ex, who was attempting a reconciliation. They were all crammed inside when O’Toole nodded to the chauffeur saying that he was the only one here who hadn’t fucked Elizabeth Taylor. ‘I was thrown out of the car,’ O’Toole told Sinclair. ‘Somewhere towards Twickenham.’
When filming began on Man of La Mancha, O’Toole quickly made an impression on Hiller, the director who had made 1970s box office hit Love Story, having immersed himself in Cervantes and the historical period. ‘I didn’t do very much directing because he was so well prepared.’
The pair had very nearly worked together before. In 1959, when Hiller was in London with his wife, they’d gone one evening to see The Long and the Short and the Tall. ‘About ten minutes into the first act this private came on stage and sort of took over, and I was just bowled over. I took out a piece of paper and I wrote down – Peter O’Toole. Of course, not long after that he was in Lawrence of Arabia.’
What surprised Hiller the most about O’Toole was a reluctance to interact socially with the other members of the cast. He was very private and kept himself largely to himself on the set, save for the odd game of poker with his co-stars. Despite his gregarious nature, O’Toole had always loved being alone, relaxing in his own company, but in recent times had started to become a much more introverted person, something that Siân had noticed. Over the years O’Toole had become much more withdrawn, not a recluse by any means, but certainly spending more time alone than he had done. This was to be largely the pattern for the remainder of his life.
As for his relationship with Sophia Loren, cast as Dulcinea, whom he playfully took to calling ‘silicone’, it was complex. To the press O’Toole was generous in his praise for the actress, but Hiller remembers one incident in particular that struck him as rather odd. One afternoon, as the cameraman was setting up a shot, a visibly distressed Sophia walked over to him. ‘What’s wrong?’ said Hiller, taking her hand. ‘Don’t worry, Sophia, you’re playing the part just right.’
‘I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about Peter!’
‘What about Peter?’
Sophia caught her breath. ‘Every time you say ready and you’re going to say action, Peter says to me – “What makes you think you can act.” ’
‘Sophia,’ said Hiller reassuringly. ‘He’s just trying to get your adrenalin up for the scene.’
Sophia shook her head. ‘I’ve been acting long enough to know when somebody’s trying to get my adrenalin up, or when they’re trying to put me down.’
‘I’ll speak to him if you want, but it would be much better if you can show him that it doesn’t bother you.’
‘Easy for you to say,’ Sophia replied. ‘Not so easy for me to do.’
Hiller had a quick think. ‘I’ll tell you what to do. The next time he says it you smile and say – “Fuck you!” ’
About twenty minutes later Sophia came running over to Hiller, her face beaming. Hiller guessed what had just happened. O’Toole never said it to Sophia again.
It was odd behaviour to be sure, especially since O’Toole was genuinely impressed by Sophia’s professionalism. And yet friction was never far from the surface. They’d sometimes play poker between takes. After one match Sophia playfully accused O’Toole of trying to cheat as she took the winnings and put them in her expensive Gucci bag. Amidst a torrent of abuse O’Toole grabbed the bag and ripped it to shreds. Calmly Sophia sat back down and dealt out the cards again – and won.
One of the film’s most touching moments is when Sophia holds the wounded O’Toole in her lap. For her close-up, Sophia had expressly asked for O’Toole not to be present, he might distract her, and she wanted to focus totally on the marker representing her eye line that had been positioned at the base of the camera. As luck would have it O’Toole waltzed into the studio that morning asking what was happening. Hiller told him and O’Toole offered to stay.
‘No, we don’t need you. It’s fine. Sometimes when you have a mark you prefer the other person not to be there.’
‘She’ll want me!’ boomed O’Toole.
‘She doesn’t. I asked her,’ said Hiller flatly.
‘We’ll see about that!’
O’Toole began to make strong strides towards the set when Hiller grabbed hold of him. Sophia was huddled in a corner alone working on her emotions. ‘This is not the time to get into a discussion about this,’ advised Hiller. O’Toole finally saw sense and turned away, making towards the camera crew instead and asking where Sophia’s mark was. An assistant showed him and O’Toole took off a shoe and placed it right on the camera base before leaving. This was no prank, or laddish jape, believes Hiller, but a deliberate act of sabotage. ‘He meant that to disturb Sophia, to say – you don’t need me, but I’m there.’
In spite of admitting that his singing voice was akin to ‘a broken bottle going under a door’, Man of La Mancha was O’Toole’s second film musical in just a few short years. This time, however, he realized that his voice was not up to the task of singing most of the songs, including the standout track, ‘The Impossible Dream’, and that he would have to be dubbed by a professional singer, Simon Gilbert. The usual procedure for this was for the actor to lip-sync the singer’s version on the set, but Hiller was keen to use O’Toole’s artistry and asked the actor to give his own version of each song, even though it wouldn’t be used, so Gilbert could achieve the same level of emotion.
Man of La Mancha flopped at the box office and received such poor reviews that Hiller was personally affected by it: ‘I couldn’t work for eight months. I kept thinking, what had I done wrong?’ Analysing the film today, Hiller believes he didn’t quite get the mix of reality and fantasy right. O’Toole himself received mixed notices, too. David Robinson of The Times thought he had turned into ‘a very strange performer, spitting and mouthing his lines with the excessive vowels of a twenties stage juvenile’, while Arthur Knight in the Saturday Review thought he played Cervantes’ hero ‘with extraordinary delicacy and restraint’.
One doubts O’Toole read the reviews; according to Hiller he never even saw the film. By the end of its production he had grown disenchanted with the filmmaking process and with the film industry itself, principally the people behind it – the suits, the executives who’d no creative bone in their bodies. ‘The business is run by the cornflakes men,’ he grumbled. ‘And they’re only in it for the girls. You used to join amateur dramatics to get at the crackling. These men buy up studios to achieve the same end.’
Mostly though he was tired and fed up with acting, he’d been at it since Bristol, ‘twenty years of it in one uninterrupted lump’, and he wanted a rest. His fortieth birthday seemed as good a time as any to reassess what he wanted out of life and where he was going. Right now his life was drawing him back to Clifden, where preparations had begun on his dream home. Taking Siân and the kids with him, nothing would be heard of O’Toole for the next twelve months.