By Anne Merino
Special to CSMS Magazine
In her heartfelt tribute, Peter O’Toole – A Writer’s Inspiration, Anne Merino reflects on the profound impact the legendary actor Peter O’Toole had on her creative life. Through personal anecdotes, historical context, and a deep appreciation of his artistry, Anne offers readers a glimpse into O’Toole’s enduring influence not only in cinema but also in her imagination as a writer. From his iconic roles in Lawrence of Arabia to lesser-known projects like Rogue Male, O’Toole’s legacy is one of brilliance, complexity, and a unique ability to embody reluctant heroes. In this piece, Anne highlights the actor’s charm, eccentricity, and talent, celebrating his career while drawing attention to how his unique approach to his craft shaped her work.
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On a December day in 2013, Peter O’Toole passed away. There’s a famous film clip of him blowing a dandelion into shimmering motes—a perfect metaphor for his departure from this world. Beautiful, complex, fragile, and a little wild… gone from our sight in a single breath.
I cried. I loved this man, though we never met. And I suspect, being profoundly Old School, O’Toole would be horrified by the notion. But to me, he was like a wonderfully eccentric uncle who was always off on some grand adventure. At eight or nine years old, I remember seeing him on television and asking my mother, “I know him, right? He’s family?” My mother laughed, shook her head, and said no, but added that she could understand why I thought so. After all, O’Toole was a Celt.
The great Welsh actor Richard Burton once wrote about Peter O’Toole in a way that completely resonates with what, I think, we saw in him.
“He looked like a beautiful, emaciated secretary bird… his voice had a crack like a whip… most important of all you couldn’t take your eyes off him… acting is usually regarded as a craft and I claim it to be nothing more except in the hands of the odd few men and women who, once or twice in a lifetime, elevate it into something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing. I believe Peter O’Toole to have this strange quality.”
David Thomsen of The Guardian wrote in his obituary of O’Toole that “… Even in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), when he was not quite 30, he looked like an elegant wreck, dipped in suntan, his eyes full of fever.”
From that moment long ago when I thought Peter O’Toole must be a member of our extended family, he’s been a part of my creative universe. The way he moved his head or picked up a book informed moments in my own performances and his DNA runs through some of my fictional beings.
O’Toole had a genius for illuminating that uniquely British character – the unexpected or reluctant hero. This creature appears diffident, fragile even frail but, in fact possesses a spine of steel and always makes the gallant stand. This persona can be seen in such fictional avatars as Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, Sir Percy Blakeney, Rudolf Rassendyll and Harry Faversham from The Four Feathers. Actual historical figures might include Richard II (a boy of tenuous health, he confronted Wat Tyler’s peasant army during the revolt and talked them into putting down their arms), Lord Horatio Nelson, T.E. Lawrence, George VII, R.J. Mitchell who designed Britain’s “Spitfire” the plane that helped her win the air above Europe in WW2 and Leslie Howard, the actor who portrayed Mitchell in a film. In an eerie bit of synchronicity, Howard, moved by the Mitchell’s story and anxious to aid Britain, signed up with the R.A.F. once war was declared and was lost in action over the English Channel.
To me this is a very appealing and poignant notion – the unexpected or hidden hero emerging to save the day. So much more interesting than the gung-ho action man to the rescue. Peter O’Toole’s talents lent beautifully to the creation of these heroes. Indeed, his breakthrough role as T.E. Lawrence (in David Lean’s Lawrence Of Arabia) introduced the world to a young man who seemed utterly unsuited, utterly wrong for either leadership or life in the hostile desert but who confounds everybody and rises brilliantly to the challenge.
My own favorite O’Toole performances are not among the most popular ones everyone has seen – Lawrence, The Stuntman, My Favourite Year etc.
I absolutely love a small television project he did in 1977 – an adaptation of Geoffrey Household’s excellent novel Rogue Male. A terrific thriller set in the late 1930s before Britain declared war, it concerns Sir Robert Hunter, a distinctly non-political English gentleman who enjoys country pursuits like hunting and shooting. His adored fiancé is inadvertently caught up in a crude roadblock while visiting friends in Germany and is shot dead by soldiers. Stung out of his idyllic rural reverie, Sir Robert goes into Germany to stalk and assassinate Hitler as if the Fuhrer was the ultimate big game trophy. Derring do, torture, escape, cat and mouse chases and political machinations ensue.
It’s a great adventure film but also – quietly and with considerable elegance – one of the best depictions of Britain’s intricate and extraordinarily subtle class structure. What I so admire about Rogue Male (and O’Toole’s incredibly deft handling of Sir Robert is a large part of why this works so well) is that it is completely tacit.
As a comparison, the appalling (and wildly inaccurate) Downton Abbey crudely serves up the concept of British social order as “Those” upstairs and “Thems” downstairs in hopes that the hoi polloi (as apparently the producers view their audiences) will “get it”. Rogue Male views class as a kind of secret code or language. If one possesses the arcane knowledge, then the quietly nuanced dialogue and actions reveal the full intent of the film. If not, it’s still a riveting action adventure.
As a theatre professional of some forty years, I am thrilled to the 1972 film, The Ruling Class. If there is a part out there more fun than the 13th Earl of Gurney (another benighted British aristocrat), a gentle lunatic who believes he is Jesus Christ but transforms – after ill-advised psychiatric treatment – into Jack The Ripper, I surely do not know what it is.
Peter O’Toole plays both Jesus and Jack with giddy conviction. His Jesus is effervescent, wide-eyed, loose limbed, goofy and charmingly dotty. He glows, quite literally, with joy and enthusiasm. He is, without a doubt, a prince of life.
Compare with the second half of the film in which O’Toole’s deluded Earl comes to realize that he is not the Prince of Peace after all but rather Prince Jack, the Whitechapel Ripper. He proceeds to prudently rid himself of various cruel and greedy relations. Like Jack, O’Toole’s vocal tones are sharp, precise and focused. His body language rigid, economical, and careful – the perfect predator.
This is acting at its most courageous. A theatrical tightrope act – one false step and the whole construction collapses into precious awfulness. That it doesn’t is a tribute to O’Toole’s talent and guts.
In his 70s, Peter O’Toole took on the role of a favourite character of mine. Lord Emsworth from P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle novels. Lord Emsworth is an aristocrat who remains steadfastly at home in the country and yearns only to be left alone to his agricultural interests, chiefly his prize sow, The Empress. In this, he is constantly thwarted by his domineering sister Lady Constance and various romantic relationships in crisis involving younger members of the Blandings set.
Usually, Lord Emsworth is portrayed on stage and screen as a genial idiot by a Robert Morley or Charles Laughton type. O’Toole, cast wildly against type, plays him as an aging beauty. Not dim but pointedly distracted as if he had suffered shell shock in WWI and had retreated from his nerves into the rural peace of Blandings. A typically daring choice, it courted controversy among Wodehouse enthusiasts, many of whom thought it rained down too much reality on P.G.’s comic soufflés. Others, like myself, thought O’Toole brought genuine poignancy and depth to Lord Emsworth, dusting Blandings Castle with a light touch of the bittersweet.
Here are a few things I adore about Peter O’Toole:
- His father was an Irish bookmaker named Joseph “Spats” O’Toole—a nickname as colorful as the man himself.
- He trained at RADA in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Brian Bedford. Imagine the workshop performances with that group!
- He was married to the stunning Welsh actress Sian Phillips.
- O’Toole knew all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart and recited them daily for inspiration.
- He despised the rise of “vocal fry” in modern voices, believing it destroyed the range and sincerity of young actors. Though he never said so, I’m sure he thought it made them sound like self-important fools.
When O’Toole passed, his children took him back to Ireland. His daughter, Kate, said, “We’re bringing him home. It’s what he would have wanted.” Like all Celts, O’Toole longed to return to his native soil.
Recently, I watched an old BBC adaptation of The Scarlet Pimpernel from the 1950s—flimsy sets, wobbly doors, and all. But then, there he was: Soldier Number One. A tall, willowy French soldier with a bemused grin. He had one line about the man getting away. Of course, he stole the scene.
Note: Anne Merino is the author of the critically acclaimed novel tiled Hawkesmoor: A Novel of Vampire and Fearie. To learn more about Anne Merino’s work, you can visit her website: Rivercliff Books and Media
