Between his bouts of drinking with Richard Burton and courting pretty girls, Peter O'Toole was nominated for seven best-actor Oscars. Tomorrow he may finally win one, eighth time around, for Venus. He tells Kate Holmquistabout growing old gracefully - and growing up with abuse.
He may be a louche 74-year-old with translucent skin, a new hip, a slightly doddery demeanour and a nurse in attendance, but, wow, Peter O'Toole is still a great kisser. With one hand on my back he pulls me to him and, with the other hand, brings my face to his to bestow a tender kiss on each side of my mouth. My spine tingles all the way back to Heathrow.
He was a gorgeous young man. Old film stills and publicity shots challenge you to find a better-looking actor in any generation, but there is a bitter-sweet quality to his charm today that makes him a beautiful soul. He's the poster boy for ageing gracefully. So long, Johnny Depp: your smudged black eyeshadow in Pirates of the Caribbean fades in comparison to O'Toole's in Lawrence of Arabia.
It's impossible to imagine any other actor playing Maurice in Venus, the extraordinary new film written by Hanif Kureishi. The concept of the movie, which has already won O'Toole an Oscar nomination for best actor, is as simple as it is challenging: an octogenarian thespian is easing himself towards death by having one last great affair, and a world-weary 21-year-old, played by Jodie Whittaker, is experiencing true love for the first time. Together.
"When I read it first, the script, I thought: here is your typical dirty old man romancing the sluttish young woman," O'Toole says. "Those are the platitudes we commonly use about such situations. It's an examination of whether those two descriptions have any bearing on what is really going on between this old man and this young woman. I think that is the thing that intrigued me above anything. Yes, there's sex, there's violence, there's all sorts of things - a most intimately sexual thing goes on, and yet there is not one moment of smut."
"Prurient", the Time Out reviewer said, but most US reviews have been raves - partly because of the perfectly balanced script, which pokes fun at the ridiculous idealism of an aged Lothario who still believes he can pull a 21-year-old. When Maurice quotes Shakespeare - "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" - Whittaker's character, Jessie, refuses to be cowed. She hits back with a quote that he doesn't recognise: "I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky."
O'Toole's Maurice is in his last days in Venus, an actor who "has cornered the market on corpses". O'Toole has poured much of his own acceptance of death into the character, which appears to have been written for him, although Kureishi had another actor in mind for the role. "When he turned it down I was on a list of about 10 for the part. Kureishi let the cat out of the bag on that one. But if you worried about what parts you were up for and who else had got them you'd go potty," O'Toole says.
This late-life humility informs O'Toole's portrayal of Maurice, who speaks of being "guilty of old age" and says: "I am about to die, and I know nothing of myself." The message is profoundly depressing on one level: Venus doesn't shrink from the gritty, dirty, uncomfortable aspects of incontinent old age. We're all going to be there eventually, if, as Kylie Minogue sang, we're lucky, lucky, lucky.
Maurice meets Jessie when the sullen, knocked-about girl is drafted in to care for Maurice's friend, another ageing actor, played by Leslie Phillips - whom you could never imagine seducing a woman 50 years his junior. Maurice senses Jessie's weakness: like so many of her generation, she has been sexually exploited but never loved for her soul. Maurice takes her to the National Gallery in London to see The Rokeby Venus, Velázquez's ode to female beauty, and arranges for Jessie to pose nude, in the same position, for Maurice's painting class.
Gradually, Maurice shows Jessie what it is like to be loved and respected from afar, and she falls in love with him. Although Maurice's love remains courtly and even, at times, ridiculous (with a catheter in situ he has no choice), Jessie struggles to understand how anyone could love her for herself. In a disturbing scene, she commits an emotional assault on herself and Maurice by reaching under her skirt, then giving Maurice her fingers to smell and taste. When he grabs her arm and pushes it away with surprising strength, we know he has taught Jessie a lesson she will never forget: you are to be worshipped, but you are not a commodity.
When O'Toole and I meet, in a Mayfair hotel, he has been "talking non-stop for 10 days" and is still buzzing from an interview with David Letterman that brought out the raconteur and bad boy in O'Toole, who reminisced about some of his drunken escapades (you can see it on YouTube).
The wry and hammy anecdote, theatrically told, is O'Toole's specialty. "I know David of old. I knew David when he was a disc jockey. When he did one of his very early television pieces he used to dress in his jeans . . . It was anarchy and great fun, and I used to like going on it. My daughter Kate joined me on it and sewed a button on my jacket. That's how relaxed it was. What happened is we formed a kind of double act. He waited till I'd finished [a story], and I waited till he'd finished."
Official biographies say that O'Toole was born in Clifden, Co Galway. "No, darling. This is one of the great myths . . . It depends which document you read." O'Toole has two birth certificates and won't go into detail, except to say that it relates to the passionate romance of his parents, one Catholic and one Protestant, who were disowned by their families when they ran away from their betrotheds to be together and raise a family in Leeds. His father went from rags to riches and back again as a member of "the criminal class", O'Toole says.
The actor has always carried an Irish passport and turned down a knighthood because Ireland, and especially Connemara, is his spiritual home. "About five miles due west of Clifden. When I moved in there it had lost its proper name. My telephone number was Ballymaconree 5 in 1965, and Eirfort, that name has remained, thank God. Kate has just done it up beautifully for me."
Like Maurice, who wants to die at the seaside place he enjoyed as a young child, O'Toole thinks constantly of a stretch of coastline. "From my infancy I knew south Connemara. I wobbled around because my father had relations out there. He was an itinerant race-track bookie, and he used to love the big race in Leopardstown, and we always went to Galway - always."
O'Toole says he has had "maybe three" great loves, and he admits to his share of 21-year-olds. He still enjoys female company - his face takes on a rather enigmatic expression when he says this - but he refuses to speak about any of the women in his life. His marriage to Siân Phillips, who gave him two children, Kate and Patricia O'Toole, is well known. Subsequently he had a son, Lorcan O'Toole, with Karen Brown, a US model and actress.
As he approaches the end of his life, which woman does he expect to meet him on the other side? His eyes light up. "That's what we talked about when David Lean [ who directed Lawrence of Arabia] was dying in a warehouse in the East End," he says, referring to the trendy loft designed by Lean's younger wife. "Is there actually a heaven? Who's the girl we are going to meet? We were allowed to change our minds. He wanted Ann Todd at that point . . . I was juggling in my mind which one it was to be."
From this point on, we're in a situation where O'Toole insists, "change the names, darling". He was 16, playing the pipes and dancing at Carlscourt - a 1940s-style Michael Flatley before anyone had heard of the concept - with a troupe called Our Hibernians. O'Toole met a girl whose widowed mother ran a shop. O'Toole swept the yard in exchange for digs, and he and the girl became the talk of the town. Their love affair lasted several years, during which time O'Toole began his acting career, but when wedding cakes began to be mentioned he was relieved to be called up by the Royal Navy. Many years later, when he and Donal McCann were sharing digs during a production in Australia, a pink slip came under the door. His first love was making contact. They spoke on the phone. She was married and owned a shop, but the bond they shared was still alive - and remains so today. "Beat that," he says.
In the intervening years O'Toole drank his way through a career that ended up "in the rats" in the 1970s, when he had his pancreas and part of his intestines removed. He drank with the best, among them Peter Finch, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Rudolf Nureyev, and the stories of their exploits - which involved buying bars and courting pretty girls - became legends. "What passed for hellfire behaviour in England then was nothing compared to what would pass for normal in every village in Ireland today and would be unremarked," O'Toole says, rather defensively.
After Lawrence of Arabia, in 1962, and a handful of well-regarded screen performances, O'Toole's film career atrophied, and he concentrated on stage work. He became regarded by some as an old ham until he was redeemed by his performance in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, Keith Waterhouse's play about the late journalist, which borrowed for its title the line that the Spectator magazine ran each time Bernard was too drunk to write his column. O'Toole's performance prompted the Society of London Theatre, in 2000, to present him with a Laurence Olivier Award for outstanding achievement. "My happiest days were with Edward Hardwicke. The two of us shared a dressingroom for two years in the Theatre Royal in Bristol. Those two years were the hard bottle and the happiest and most carefree days of my life, aged 23-25. They were the least complicated and most rewarding."
That's not to say he isn't haunted, particularly about his Catholic education, at school in Leeds, where he says he was sexually abused. Afterwards, he took to defending himself by carrying a needle in his pocket. "I still look with shame and disgust at one memory. I was captain of the swimming team. There were two of us, a priest photographing us, in our swimming trunks, arranging us, helping us to rearrange ourselves. He kept in touch with me, and then I heard he had a stroke. I hope he died roaring. I was . . . I felt - still feel - great shame, by allowing it when I should have belted him in the mouth. I could take care of myself. I was my daddy's son."
He has no regrets about the lost years in the 1980s and 1990s, when, apart from a great performance in the 1987 film The Last Emperor, his Hollywood star had fallen. "I've always been a drinker," he says. "I've been through every phase. I've been in the rats, I've given up, I've drunk in moderation. Now I know I can have a little sip and I don't want to get pissed except every now and then . . . I believe I've been able to make amends."
Today he has one or two other film projects simmering, but he's realistic about whether they'll happen. On death he quotes Nietzsche: "Die at the right time." Then he adds: "We're not supposed to talk about dying, because it might put people off the film!" O'Toole received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at the 2003 Academy Awards, but he rebelled backstage when nobody would give him a drink. He finally agreed to accept it when a glass of vodka, which he shared with Tim Robbins and Christopher Walken, was produced. Despite being nominated seven times before this year, he has yet to win a best-actor Oscar. He would love to win one for Venus but refuses to campaign for it.
He admires Maurice's gracious acceptance of death: "One of the things we like about the character is he knows he's dying. He's going to go at the right time. He can put in a decent piece of work, earn a bob, enjoys his painting, can still enjoy literature and his friendships." You get the impression that O'Toole doesn't ask for a lot more than this. "It's been a good life. I'm a very lucky old girl," he says.
Venus is released on March 2. The Oscars are awarded tomorrow night