On 30 April 2011, O’Toole was joined by friends and family, including Kate and Lorcan, as he had his hands and feet enshrined in cement on the famous Hollywood walk of fame. It was a great honour and he was genuinely touched by the gesture.
In July 2012, not long before his eightieth birthday, O’Toole announced his immediate retirement from acting. He’d always said that one of the lovely things about being an actor was that you can go on for ever. ‘Although I have no intention of uttering my last words on the stage in fucking Macclesfield or something. No thank you. Room service and a couple of depraved young women will do me quite nicely for an exit.’
Typically, he penned the press release himself: ‘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. My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfilment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I’ve shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits. However, it’s my belief that one should decide for oneself when it’s time to end one’s stay. So I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell.’
Not long after this statement was released O’Toole’s friend Sarah Standing asked if he had any regrets about the decision. ‘I’m not bloody Edith Piaf you know,’ he answered. He did admit that he would miss the companionship. ‘We all had such larks. Yes, it was hard work but the friendships and the genuine respect we had for one another, that side I shall miss greatly.’ Other things, particularly the getting up at the crack of dawn bit, he wouldn’t miss. ‘And getting the old vocal equipment up to concert pitch at eight-a-fucking-clock in the morning, and keeping at concert pitch until eight at fucking night.’ In later life he’d taken to wearing a watch on each wrist so if he forgot which wrist it was on he would still be able to tell the time.
So, that was it. He’d done his bit, been a leading man for half a century. ‘That’s enough.’
What was he going to do now was the question. O’Toole had already produced two critically well-received memoirs, chronicling his childhood and his experiences at RADA. Certainly he took great care over them and was enthusiastic and dedicated to getting it right, as is vividly illustrated in a letter he wrote to his editor at Macmillan at the very beginning of the venture. It reads:
‘It is a tricky old lark this scribbling, isn’t it? Beginning being a particular bugger and it is finding and sustaining a tone which is mine, though you are right, the inky prattle of my letters is me, not a studied composition and that voice is hard to find when addressing no one in particular. I have found it though and the words are gently dropping off my pen. More, thus far I am enjoying this extraordinary adventure.’
Written in a Joycean stream of consciousness that some readers did find difficult to comprehend and follow, these jottings of a ‘demented poet’, in the words of Sheridan Morley in his Sunday Times review, were intensely personal to O’Toole. So personal in fact that he did have trouble letting go of it. He hated being edited. The rumour from those who worked on the book was that he argued over virtually every comma that was put in or taken out.
When it came time to produce an audio book of both volumes O’Toole was mortified to discover that they had been abridged. In a fierce letter to the publisher he let them know exactly what he thought of the situation. His letter ended with: ‘I shall now vomit.’
There was talk that now he had retired he would focus his attention on a third volume of memoirs, detailing his early film career and rise to fame. It was never to materialize. He also spoke of a desire to record all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. ‘They live at the side of my bed and are my constant companion.’ This was another ambition that would prove unfulfilled.
As he entered what turned out to be the final year of his life, O’Toole began to plan for what he knew was the inevitable. He certainly knew he was dying as he began to put his life in some kind of order. For some time Johnnie Planco had got the sense that O’Toole was beginning to distance himself. ‘Just at the point when I was beginning to take it personally, I looked around at our mutual friends and I realized he was pulling back from everybody, first emotionally and then professionally.’ Suddenly, and quite out of the blue, Planco was told by O’Toole’s lawyer that his services were no longer required. ‘Peter doesn’t feel the need for representation in America any more.’ Planco was understandably upset, more by the fact that it wasn’t O’Toole himself on the phone but his lawyer. ‘Can I talk to Peter, because we’ve been together for thirty years,’ said Planco. ‘No,’ said the lawyer. ‘He really wants me to do it.’ In the end Planco respected O’Toole’s wishes. ‘I think I sent him an email and that was it.’
Billy Foyle was at home in Clifden when he got a call that O’Toole was in town and wanted to see him. The two men had grown apart somewhat over the last few years. ‘We’d sort of gone our separate ways. I wasn’t socializing any more and he liked a bit of peace and quiet. So we’d met up every now and then but never went out boozing like we did in the old days.’ When O’Toole saw Foyle he threw his arms around him and hugged him tightly. Foyle was shocked, O’Toole had never been the most robust of men but there was hardly anything left of him but skin and bone. ‘He didn’t say anything to me but I had a feeling something was wrong because he looked terrible.’
As the two men walked slowly along the beach they talked. It was O’Toole who brought up all the old memories. ‘By this stage with me it was a bore – the drinks we drank, the songs we sang and the fights we had. I was tired of it all but we sat and remembered the old times. We talked about that first night he arrived in the town and how I’d helped him and how grateful he was. And when we parted that day with a hug I could see the tears in his eyes. Now, Peter wasn’t that emotional, he didn’t show his emotions, but I saw the tears that day when we parted. I think he knew then he wasn’t coming back. I think that’s why he wanted to see me.’
In the last few months of his life O’Toole was a virtual recluse, seeing people only in the company of Lorcan. The faithful Lucy was still around and his daughters were never far from his side. As he became frailer and too difficult to care for at home, he was moved to the Wellington Hospital in St John’s Wood where on 14 December 2013 he passed away; his body had finally given up on him. As arrangements were made for his funeral he lay in the same morgue as Ronnie Biggs, the great train robber, who died a few days later.
The wake was anything but a sombre occasion, remembers Martin Bell, who gate-crashed the event. ‘It was celebratory.’ And a proper old Irish wake with people playing the fiddle and having a few jars and sharing stories and memories. At one point O’Toole’s devoted cat Sydney jumped into the open coffin and sat on his master’s chest for the whole evening as people passed by paying their last respects.
By contrast the funeral service at Golders Green crematorium was low key, with just family and close friends in attendance, including Siân Phillips, to the surprise of many. In rehearsals for a play when the news of O’Toole’s death was announced, Siân felt she had no alternative but to go. ‘It was a big shock when he died,’ she told the press. ‘I somehow thought he would be there for ever.’
Lorcan and his mother Karen Somerville also attended, as did Kate and Patricia. Addressing the congregation with a eulogy, Kate said: ‘The world has lost a great actor, but I’m not concerned with that. I simply have lost a great dad and the best friend I ever had. Daddy made me laugh more than anyone else I have ever met in my life. He was always there for me in times of crisis and frequently danced with me in times of joy and celebration.’ When Noël Coward’s ‘Someday I’ll Find You’ was played at the end of the service, Kate and Patricia waltzed down the aisle together to the delight of the other mourners, in much the same way O’Toole himself had celebrated the life of his mother by waltzing in the chapel at her funeral.
In accordance with his last wish, O’Toole’s ashes were scattered on Eyrephort Beach near the home in Clifden where he spent some of the happiest times of his life.
O’Toole was once asked what he might like written on his headstone. He didn’t have to think long. It arrived early in his life, in the sixties when he owned an old leather jacket of which he was inordinately fond. It was covered in Guinness, blood, you name it. One day Siân had had enough and sent it to the cleaners. It came back and pinned on it was a large notice: ‘Sycamore Cleaners. It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.’ O’Toole thought that was ideal for his final message. While in the end he never had a headstone, you can’t deny it stands as a fitting epitaph.