Some 20 people in thick Puffa jackets and clumpy boots crouch behind a wooden
sea wall on a shingle beach in Whitstable. Or Islington-on-Sea, to give it
its modern name. The north coast of Kent glitters in the sun, but this is
the coldest week of the winter. Across the Medway, you can see the contours
of Essex in stark outline. The shelled-out husk of a matinee idol, silver
mane flying wildly in the bitter wind, hobbles to his mark on the other side
of the sea wall. He is on crutches after breaking a hip in a Christmas
tumble. When the first assistant director calls “Action!”, Peter O’Toole
begins to play out his last scene on the last day of the shoot in probably
the last leading role he will ever have.
You don’t need to be a sentimentalist to note the significance of this moment.
The film is called Venus, and it is about a beautiful actor growing
undignifyingly old. In an idealised story of O’Toole’s life, this would be
the natural terminus to a career that began 44 years earlier with that
prophetic credit, “And introducing Peter O’Toole as TE Lawrence”. He carried
all before him in the 1960s. But he won the last of his seven Oscar
nominations in 1982 for My Favorite Year, in which he played a washed-up
swashbuckler who can’t be trusted to turn up on set sober. His most
successful role since, as the celebrated tippler in Jeffrey Bernard Is
Unwell, also played on the perception that he, too, is fond of a drink.
When O’Toole reprised the part at the Old Vic in 1999, it was his way of
bidding farewell to the theatre and laying to rest the ghost of his infamous
Macbeth on the same stage, which even he concedes was “one of the great,
great first-night disasters. Anything that can go wrong in that play will go
wrong and did for us. There’s a whole school of thought that I did it
deliberately. But in Jeffrey Bernard, I was able, at the end of the 20th
century, to do a formidable part that was full of energy, of diction, of
movement, full of everything I used to be able to do. I don’t want to
shuffle on stage as a butler”.
For O’Toole’s admirers, their favourite year will always be 1962, when he
embodied in Lawrence the fascinating ambiguities of a man terrified by his
own moral passion. Who would have thought he could still hold together a
movie in 2006? Only he himself. Three years ago, when the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences chose to confer on him an honorary Oscar,
initially he turned it down. “I’m still in the game,” was his magnificent
retort. After all those near misses, to pass up on the offer of a free
statuette — this showed the steely resolve of a high roller. His last truly
great film performance was in The Last Emperor, in 1987. After that, there
have been several emperors, plus kings, dukes, lords and knights. But his
turn in the spotlight seemed to have been and gone. Troy was still to come,
but, O’Toole ruefully admits, it was a rotten effort. “Good script,” he
says, shaking his head. “Badly made.”
In the end, he went to the Oscars anyway. “It was all right,” he says. “I
enjoyed it, and my children were with me. The only thing that wasn’t
enjoyable was in the green room. I said, ‘Can I have a drink?’ ‘We have
lemon juice, apple juice, still or sparkling.’ I said, ‘No, I want a drink.
No drink?’ I said, ‘All right, I’m f***ing off. I’ll be back.’ A man with
earphones said, ‘No! No!’ Eventually, this vodka was smuggled in. I had to
turn it in for a while and cut down considerably. I still like a drink.”
Then, last year, he was sent a script about an old actor who refuses to accept
the dying of the light. It could have been written for him. In fact, it
wasn’t, although he was mentioned in dispatches early on by writer Hanif
Kureishi and director Roger Michell. Their previous film, The Mother,
portrayed an older woman’s affair with a much younger man. Although a much
warmer work, Venus is its photographic negative. It chronicles the curious,
tender, almost wholly platonic romance between Maurice, a jobbing thespian
who has been reduced to playing corpses in cheap television dramas, and
Jessie, a 21-year-old northern girl (played by Jodie Whittaker), who has
been sent to London to tend to her valetudinarian great uncle, Maurice’s old
acting mucker (Leslie Phillips). The uncle can’t stand her, but Maurice is
charmed by Jessie — or Venus, as he calls her, after the Velazquez he takes
her to see at the National Gallery. So he proceeds to charm her back.
“I’ve not been in anything quite like this before,” says O’Toole. “As a study
of humans cavorting with a finite limit, the script is superb. I thought,
wouldn’t it be wonderful if someone really had a go at it, because these
anarchic, arbitrary sexual urges are disturbing things, and one copes with
them. No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young
woman. Jodie,” he adds, “is a remarkable young girl. A remarkable young
woman, I beg her pardon. She’s a good actress, and she’s game.”
She needed to be. Maurice’s sexual interest hits the barrier of Jessie’s
revulsion, but slowly, as the characters reveal their vulnerability to each
other, she starts to reward him with tiny tokens of favour. She bares her
breasts for him when he’s ill in bed and, in a scene only Kureishi would
dare write, she slips a finger between her legs and allows him to smell,
although naturally he wants to taste, too. “Oh boy,” says O’Toole when
reminded of it.
Venus is the antidote to all those market-driven Hollywood films that posit as
entirely normal the idea of a pensioner copping off with a woman young
enough to be his granddaughter. It’s inevitable some people aren’t going to
like the sheer honesty of it. “The film,” replies its 74-year-old star, “is
an examination of whatever statement anybody may make about that.”
I meet O’Toole at a photoshoot. He and Whittaker, a no-nonsense Huddersfield
girl (O’Toole grew up in Leeds) fresh out of drama college, are evidently
close. After the shoot, they sit down for a quiet chat — he on a chair, she
on his knee. I ask him if, in real life, he were to meet a 21-year-old...
“I’ve done that,” he interrupts, and slips wistfully into Shakespeare. “In
delay there lies no plenty, Then come kiss me, Sweet and twenty, Youth’s a
stuff will not endure.”
Of course, nobody knows this better. He and Richard Burton once went to see
their 1964 film Becket, “to watch ourselves 20 years after the event.
Richard said, ‘We want to watch the disintegration of our flesh.’ That’s
what you start doing if you start making movies in your twenties. Lawrence
of Arabia, for example: I was 27, 28, when it began and 29, 30 when it
finished. Two years is a long time. So I can see the decomposition of the
flesh. You can’t see it, but I can”.
But Burton died before he could entirely wither. In Venus, Kureishi and
Michell make capital from the collective memory of O’Toole’s stolen beauty.
“My God, how handsome you were,” says Vanessa Redgrave, playing his former
wife, when one of Maurice’s old films comes on the television.
Coincidentally, How to Steal a Million was on soon after I met him, and even
in a frothy romantic comedy, William Wyler knew exactly how to introduce his
leading man: with a close-up of those preternaturally blue eyes. They are
now the only remnant of the Adonis who freed Arabia, and their owner is
inclined to make light of them.
