Peter O'Toole

• 1. Introduction

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  Peter O'Toole holds a record no actor would wish for. He received eight Academy Award nominations for Best Actor across four decades, and never won a single competitive Oscar. When the Academy finally offered him an Honorary Award in 2002 for his entire body of work, he wrote back asking for more time. He wanted, in his own words, to "win the lovely bugger outright." The Academy told him the honour was coming whether he liked it or not.

  What kind of man turns down an Oscar? The same man who performed Shakespeare on the Bristol Old Vic stage before he was famous, who played T. E. Lawrence in the desert and made the world stop, who spent a year earning five hundred pounds a week at the Old Vic performing Macbeth and received what many called the worst reviews of his career. O'Toole was born on the 2nd of August 1932 in Leeds, raised in the south Leeds suburb of Hunslet, and he died on the 14th of December 2013 at the Wellington Hospital in London. In between, he lived enough lives for a dozen actors.

• 2. Leeds to RADA

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  Patrick Joseph "Spats" O'Toole, Peter's father, was an Irish metal plater, football player, and bookmaker who kept the family moving through Northern England's racecourse towns for five years when Peter was still a toddler. His mother, Constance Jane Eliot, was a Scottish nurse. O'Toole was not even certain of his own birthplace, holding birth certificates from both England and Ireland. He eventually settled on the 2nd of August 1932 as his birth date.

  St Joseph's Secondary School in Hunslet was where O'Toole spent seven or eight years under the watch of Catholic nuns. He remembered the experience vividly: "I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood -- the black dresses and the shaving of the hair -- was so horrible, so terrifying." After leaving school, he worked as a trainee journalist and photographer at the Yorkshire Evening Post before national service called him into the Royal Navy as a signaller. A 2006 NPR radio interview recalled the moment an officer asked what he had always wanted to do. O'Toole said he had always wanted to be either a poet or an actor.

  He applied to the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin and was rejected by director Ernest Blythe because he could not speak the Irish language. Instead he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, attending from 1952 to 1954. His RADA class included Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Brian Bedford. O'Toole later called it "the most remarkable class the academy ever had, though we weren't reckoned for much at the time. We were all considered dotty."

• 3. The Stage Before the Screen

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  From 1956 to 1958, O'Toole was based at the Bristol Old Vic, playing King Lear, Othello, Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, among others. It was during a touring production of The Holiday that he met Sian Phillips, who became his first wife.

  His West End breakthrough came in January 1959 at the Royal Court, in Willis Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall, directed by Lindsay Anderson and co-starring Robert Shaw and Edward Judd. The play transferred to the West End in April and brought O'Toole the Best Actor of the Year award for 1959. He was reportedly offered five long-term contracts and turned them all down. A small role in Disney's Kidnapped arrived in 1960, with O'Toole playing the bagpipes opposite Peter Finch, followed by The Savage Innocents with Anthony Quinn, though his voice was dubbed by another actor.

  In 1960 he spent nine months at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, playing Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida. He explained why he chose Stratford over more lucrative film work: "You've got to go to Stratford when you've got the chance." That insistence on the stage, even when film money was available, would define how O'Toole approached his entire career.

• 4. Lawrence and the Weight of a Role

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  In November 1960, O'Toole was chosen to play T. E. Lawrence in Sir David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, released in 1962, reportedly after Albert Finney turned the part down. The film earned O'Toole his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and the BAFTA Award for Best British Actor. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote in 1989 that "the then unknown Peter O'Toole, with his charmingly diffident manner and his hair and eyes looking unnaturally gold and blue, accounted for no small part of this film's appeal to impressionable young fans." Premiere magazine later ranked the performance number one on its list of the 100 Greatest Performances of All Time. In 2003, the American Film Institute named O'Toole's Lawrence the tenth-greatest hero in cinema history.

  That role launched a run of Oscar nominations that became almost mythological. He played King Henry II opposite Richard Burton in Becket in 1964, then again in The Lion in Winter in 1968, making him only the second actor in history nominated twice for playing the same character in two different films. In 1969 he received a nomination for playing the title role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy. Four more nominations followed across the next four decades, for The Ruling Class in 1972, The Stunt Man in 1980, My Favorite Year in 1982, and Venus in 2006.

  Each time, the Oscar went elsewhere. By his final nomination he shared the record with Glenn Close for the most acting nominations without a win.

• 5. The Hellraiser Off-Stage

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  O'Toole's 1980 Macbeth at the Old Vic is one of those theatre stories that travels. He took the role for five hundred pounds a week and was rewarded with notices that became legendary for their savagery. He was never known to wilt under bad reviews, but the production became shorthand for a kind of fearless, sometimes reckless self-belief that defined him off-stage as much as on.

  His health collapsed in the late 1970s under the weight of serious illness. A severe stomach ailment was initially misdiagnosed as the product of alcoholic excess. Surgery in 1976 removed his pancreas and a large portion of his stomach, leaving him with insulin-dependent diabetes. In 1978 he nearly died from a hematologic disease. He recovered and returned to work, but the years had cost him.

  Married to Welsh actress Sian Phillips in 1959, O'Toole had two daughters with her before they divorced in 1979. Phillips later wrote in two autobiographies that O'Toole had subjected her to mental cruelty driven largely by drinking, alongside bouts of extreme jealousy. His son Lorcan was born on the 17th of March 1983 to his girlfriend, model Karen Brown. O'Toole was fifty years old at the time and told friends he wanted Lorcan raised as an Irishman. Lorcan later attended Harrow School and became an actor himself.

• 6. Ireland, Identity, and the Long Way Home

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  O'Toole's relationship with Ireland was something he returned to repeatedly and could never quite resolve. His father was Irish. He held an Irish passport. He believed he may have been born in Connemara. In a 1992 interview with Charlie Rose he described Irishness as "almost the centre of my very being," saying that "everything I think of is coloured by its history, by its literature, by its people, by its geography."

  He owned a house in Clifden, County Galway, and resided on the Sky Road just outside Clifden from 1963. He recalled a visit to County Kerry in 1946 as the moment the feeling of being "a bit of a misfit, a bit of an odd man out" finally lifted. In 1969 he met the future Irish president Michael D. Higgins and the two developed a lasting friendship.

  He also played a role in shaping one of Ireland's best-known folk songs, "Carrickfergus," relating the tune to Dominic Behan, who put it in print and recorded it in the mid-1960s. When he died in December 2013, his family stated their intention to fulfil his wish and carry his ashes to the west of Ireland.

• 7. Final Acts and a Lasting Archive

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  O'Toole voiced Anton Ego, the imperious food critic in Pixar's Ratatouille, in 2007. The same year he appeared in Stardust. In 2008 he played Pope Paul III across seven of ten episodes of Showtime's The Tudors. He had won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999 for playing Bishop Pierre Cauchon in the CBS miniseries Joan of Arc, the only competitive acting award of that magnitude he ever collected.

  He never received a knighthood. He was offered one and declined it, in objection to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's policies.

  On the 10th of July 2012, O'Toole issued a statement announcing his retirement, citing a recurrence of stomach cancer. He died on the 14th of December 2013, aged 81, at the Wellington Hospital in London. His funeral was held at Golders Green Crematorium on the 21st of December 2013, where he was cremated in a wicker coffin.

  On the 21st of April 2017, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced that O'Toole's daughter Kate had placed his entire archive at their Humanities Research Centre. The collection holds his scripts, published and unpublished writings, props, photographs, letters, and medical records. It sits alongside the archives of Donald Wolfit, the actor O'Toole credited in DVD commentary for Becket as his most important mentor, and Sir Tom Stoppard, Eli Wallach, and Dame Edith Evans.