She's the daughter of famous parents, but Kate O'Toole has a strong and individual presence with a style that's all her own. Deirdre McQuillan meets the actress at her Connemara home.
The actress Kate O'Toole, daughter of Peter O'Toole and Siân Phillips, is something of a Celtic cocktail. She has Irish, Scottish and Welsh blood, but her heart lies firmly in Connemara, where she lives for most of the year when she is not working or travelling. Home is a delightful seaside cottage outside Clifden, shared with two handsome and very energetic companions, a Jack Russell called Toulouse and a Boston terrier called Bessie Smith. Now in her early 40s, O'Toole is a woman of commanding style and presence, and the day we meet she has just swung in from a poetry reading in Galway, looking as if she has stepped out of the pages of Vogue. She is active in the arts generally, and has been appointed to the board of Galway Film Fleadh.
Dressed in a brown print Issa dress, with brown platforms by MaxMara and bright red lipstick, she admits that she inherited her love of clothes from her very fashionable mother, who dressed her in couture from childhood. "I learned a huge amount from just watching her; she was one of the best-dressed women of her time - still is." O'Toole has stylish friends, one of the closest being Joan Juliet Buck, former editor-in-chief of French Vogue, whom she often visits in Mexico
O'Toole is a performer. She relishes an audience both on and off stage, and she is very entertaining company, a captivating storyteller and a great mimic; her imitations of Yoko Ono are legendary. Her adoring dogs clamour for attention, too, and bounce around in her car as she negotiates Connemara's boreens. Boston terriers, she says, were the dogs of choice of Yves Saint Laurent and Dorothy Parker.
Her great passion when it comes to clothes is shoes. "I am the Imelda Marcos of Connemara," she announces, displaying a pair of tomato- coloured stilettos with paw-shaped fronts that Vivienne Westwood gave her to wear to the Oscars "with a Heinz-tomato-soup-red dress". She has "quite a lot of Manolos", doesn't like Jimmy Choos and tends to look for comfort. Can we see more of the shoes, I ask. "It would take all day," she says, sighing, so we leave it.
O'Toole shops mostly in London. She hates department stores such as Harvey Nichols, preferring instead little places on Marylebone High Street and one-off boutiques, and her nose "is always pressed against Vivienne Westwood's window". Westwood's clothes "have something to say, and she understands that clothes are about costume more than function."
O'Toole admits to being a fan of Prada, because the clothes suit her, but, as with her shoes, she tends to value comfort, wearability and adaptability above everything else. "I believe in having a couple of good pieces that will last. I become attached to things and like to wear them as much as possible." She detests visible labels and logos and has been known to cut them off or, if she can't remove them, refuse to buy.
She is a woman with very different lives, and she dresses to suit each as appropriate. "I have my life in Connemara, in Wellingtons and waterproof Timberlands, and I have another life in work and rehearsal, where comfortable shoes are important, and there's the glamour and city life." She has some "amazing" vintage frocks from her mother, which she wears occasionally, though she finds "full-tilt glamour" a bit tiresome. "I like fashion because I see it as costume. I am interested in shape and form, but full-on glamour is not interesting and not stylish. I wouldn't dream of wearing sequins in my normal life, but I have a sequin jacket, because there are times when you have to project. It's a bit of theatre."
In her professional life, clothes "are absolutely crucial to the part you play. Even undergarments are vitally important in period pieces. In The Dead, the costumes were real and we were laced into the corsets every day for l5 hours at a stretch. It had the most extraordinary effect. I lost three inches off my waist, but it went to my bottom, which developed a wiggle I never had before. I absolutely love wearing corsets. They are fantastic supports for the back." Playing Donna Elvira in a production of Don Juan in Manchester, "our corsets and shoes were handmade, and I wore an extraordinary dress with hoops and at least four heavy, heavy petticoats underneath - two people were needed to put it on", she says. "When you moved, you built up a momentum as you walked. I could fall backwards and it was like landing on a beanbag. I must say I do love period clothes."
One 20th-century staple that she hates is denim. "I don't look good in jeans; denim doesn't do anything for me. When I put it on it draws all the life out of my skin tones." And though she's a vegan, she has no hang-ups about leather and fur. "I have to wear them in work, so I can't be too precious about it. I don't particularly like fur, even though in my last play at the Abbey, Drama at Inish, I was covered in fusty old dowager mink."
Style, she says, is not being a slave to fashion and knowing what suits you. "Fashion is not style. There is an artistic and creative side to personal style, and the danger is when it spills over into flamboyance and gets eccentric. I love those Gainsbourg girls" - Charlotte and Kate. "They are drop-dead stylish, and so is Gwen Stefani."
O'Toole's house shows a strong and confident sense of colour. The kitchen, with its hot orange and pink walls and a blue-and-white dresser, is sunny and vibrant. As for wearing colour, her preferences are for brown and black, and the eight years she spent in New York made her trust the "old black-grey-white-and-red combination that just looks great against those skyscrapers, so I have a lot still left over from that. It looks dreadful here". She says she resembles both her mother and father in looks, and reveals that they met when they were cast as brother and sister. But when it comes to clothes, whatever she puts on, whether it's a red-carpet vintage evening gown, or dungarees and torn T-shirts, she manages to look unmistakably, quintessentially and inimitably herself.
Kate O'Toole is currently filming Stand By Your Man, a drama for Channel 4, followed by Adrian Noble's West End production of Summer and Smoke, by Tennessee Williams