Peter O’Toole: 'He wasn’t some faux plastic Paddy either, he was very Irish'
Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.
When it comes to legendary actor Peter O’Toole, it is hard to distinguish the man from the myth. Do an online search for ‘where was Peter O’Toole born?’ and the first answer you will get is Connemara.
Archived pieces from respected news sources (including the New York Times obituary) will confirm this. However, there is only one birth cert in existence for O’Toole and that states he was born in the English city of Leeds.
It is testament to O’Toole’s love for performance that the misconception that he was an Irishman (by birth at least) has been cemented in the public imagination. The actor’s life is explored in the TG4 documentary, Peter O’Toole — Réalta & Rógaire, produced and directed by Brian Reddin of Dearg Films.
According to Reddin, when he began researching the documentary, he discovered that while O’Toole had often muddied the waters when it came to the place of his birth, he had never explicitly stated that he was born in Ireland.
“He never said ‘I was born and raised in Connemara’. His father was from Connemara and he always said it was family lore that he had two birth certs — one in Ireland and one in England, so he was never sure where he was born. The truth of the matter was that there was no Irish birth cert, because it doesn’t exist. There is a birth cert which shows very clearly he was born in a hospital in Leeds.”
There is no doubt, however, of O’Toole’s love for Ireland and the fact that he felt Irish to the core. The actor, who died aged 81 in 2013, built a house on the Sky Road in Clifden, Co Galway, and after his death, his ashes were brought there by his daughter Kate.
“He did very much identify as an Irishman throughout his life and always carried an Irish passport. He wasn’t some faux plastic Paddy either, he was very Irish,” says Reddin.
The filmmaker has made many programmes on stars who were Irish or had links to the country — his documentaries on Maureen O’Hara and Richard Harris were both huge ratings hits for TG4. He says there is a real appetite for such stories as people love to escape to a bygone era.
“There is the great holy trinity of Irish actors who broke through in Hollywood in the '40s, '50s and '60s, and they were Maureen O’Hara, Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole. Obviously before that, you had all the Abbey actors like Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields and all of those but in terms of proper big movie stars, there was only the three of them.
"Having done the documentaries on Maureen and Richard, I wanted to complete the trilogy with Peter O’Toole. These programmes hark back to a different time, when actors were characters and weren’t afraid to speak their minds and misbehave in public, certainly in the case of O’Toole and Harris.
"Now, everything goes through PR people and is sanitised. These guys were the complete opposite of that — the antics of O’Toole and Harris, today they would be cancelled.”
While O’Toole had a varied career on stage and screen, he is still probably best remembered for his iconic Oscar-nominated performance in Lawrence of Arabia. He wasn’t well-known at the time he was cast, with director David Lean taking a chance on him, after actors Albert Finney and Marlon Brando turned the role down. It is difficult to imagine anyone else playing the part now, with O’Toole giving a compelling performance.
“People fondly remember Lawrence of Arabia and the fact that there is an Irishman in one of the greatest films of all time is brilliant. And of course, he was so handsome. But what a performance — Lawrence was a complicated character and he really gets that across, the torture he was going through,” says Reddin.
Like his most famous character, O’Toole was a complex individual. According to his actress daughter Kate, who appears in the documentary, behind the loquacious raconteur that the public saw on his legendary chat show appearances was a shy and private introvert.
Says Reddin: “This eccentric, over-the-top personality did not come naturally or easy to him. For example, he went on the David Letterman Show, riding in on a camel to do the interview but apparently, he suffered from excruciating nerves before he did that. He would shake with fear backstage because he didn’t quite know how to be himself.
"That extrovert, chat show persona did not come easy to him. Harris was the opposite — he came alive when he had to be interviewed, he revelled in it. O’Toole preferred his private, quiet time and hated being trotted out a like a show pony to spew out anecdotes, even though he was brilliant at it.”
Reddin acknowledges that O’Toole was a ‘wild man’ in his early days. He was married once, to the actress Sian Phillips. “They had a difficult break-up. Back in the day, she wrote a couple of books and accused him of being an awful husband but recently I have seen her being interviewed and she talks about him with great fondness. Certainly, he wouldn’t have been an easy man to be married to.”
O’Toole was forced to rein in his drinking after he had part of his stomach removed in the mid-1970s — even if, for him, that meant cutting out the whiskey in favour of wine and beer. Reddin himself shared a memorable drink with O’Toole early in his career.
“I had a glass of wine with him once. I met him 22 or so years ago when I was doing a documentary for TG4 on Siobhan McKenna — O’Toole had been on stage with her in Dublin in a version of Juno and the Haycock in 1966."
Reddin interviewed him in the Dorchester Hotel. "He was so charming and full of fun. We got the camera and lights set up and I asked him was he ready to go. He said, ‘I am but before we begin, Brian, can I ask you a question — What the fuck is this about? I said ‘Siobhan McKenna’ and he said ‘Got you, okay, fire away’.
"As soon as he was reminded, off he went. Afterwards, we went to the hotel bar and I had a glass of whiskey and he had a glass of wine. He didn’t want a whiskey because he was off the hard stuff — he asked me to have it."
O’Toole talked effusively about Ireland, in particular Connemara and Clifden. "I was doing the doc for Teilifís na Gaeilge, as it was at the time, and I asked him if he knew any Irish and he said he knew the first verse of Óró sé do Bheatha Abhaile. He sang it for me and asked me if I could teach him the rest. So I did.”
- Peter O’Toole — Réalta & Rógaire, TG4, Christmas Day, 9.25pm
