Peter O'Toole R.I.P.

[Petrushka]

My own favourite Peter O'Toole role is General Tanz in Night of the Generals. It is gloriously over the top but the book (by Hans Hellmut Kirst) is also a favourite and P O'T captures the character to perfection.

[jean]

Perhaps not the time to mention his Macbeth but here it is anyway

I took a class of thirteen-year-olds to see that - they loved it (and I don't mean as comedy!)

[gradus]

A friend understudied him in an early eighties production of Pygmalion at the Shaftesbury in which the much-missed John Thaw also played. Mr O'Toole played Higgins wonderfully well and with great tenderness in a scene with Eliza that remains with me. Imv a great actor.

[Stillhomewardbound]

I was re-reading one of the O'Toole obituaries (Telegraph) which spoke of a trail-blazing career that " ... never fulfilled his early promise of true greatness". It's is a judgement that could be passed in the case of POT, but where I wondered was the context that ought to have provided a caveat to such begrudgement.

What is often overlooked in the career of an actor who is deemed not to have fulfilled his early destiny in the times in which he lived.

'Lawrence of Arabia' which marked O'Toole's a-star-is-born moment was released in 1962 and yet just eight years later the British film industry was on the brink of a tragically quick death with the ailing patient finally killed off by the oil and energy crisis of 73/74.

It wasn't a much better picture in Hollywood which struggled to compete against the dominance of television and could only respond by feeding that mini-monster instead of producing big films.

So, in that environment, O'Toole, who was indisputably a big screen actor, found himself in a much diminished industry and, according to Imdb, producing less than one film a year, only a trio of which deserve to be remembered.

By the time Hollywood did manage a resurgence with the likes of Jaws and Star Wars, O'Toole was an older man and perhaps somewhat 'quaint' for a film business the themes of which had become altogether less epic. Urban, even.

Scarce wonder that he could sustain a career launched from the grandeur that was Lawrence of Arabia, so that when he came to be re-discovered in The Stunt Man he found himself in a very different world, indeed. His chances of film 'greatness' disappeared in a sea of cameos (most of them excellent, in my opinion) to the extent that he could almost have borrowed Norma Desmond's line for his epitaph, 'I am BIG! It's the pictures that got small'.