elviscostello:Happy 83rd birthday, Peter Seamus O’Toole! (2nd August 1932).Peter O’Toole was a large
elviscostello:Happy 83rd birthday, Peter Seamus O’Toole! (2nd August 1932).Peter O’Toole was a larger-than-life character, both off-screen and on-screen, and is remembered for various things: his drunken escapades with Richard Burton and Richard Harris, his irreverent and irresistible wit, and of course, for having the most Best Actor nominations (8) without winning an Oscar. He was once described as having more comebacks than “a phoenix with repetitive strain injury”, and it is true; after every failure, he has returned with a success to silence his detractors. Not that Peter cared too much about critics anyway; In the man’s words, “today’s reviews are tomorrow’s fish and chips paper.” His drunken escapades have become the stuff of legend; Peter O’Toole got up to the kind of stuff that most people merely wish they could get away with. He went drinking in Paris and woke up in Corsica, he threw a drink in Sam Spiegel’s face at the premiere of Lawrence of Arabia, he drunkenly passed out during an interview with Johnny Carson… the list goes on. He personified a devil may care attitude and never looked back on his life with any regrets. “Nothing that is going to fester, anyway,” as he said. But beyond the insane drinking and drug usage, Peter was also an undeniably brilliant actor. His star-making role in Lawrence of Arabia regularly makes it onto film historians’ lists of best performances ever, and he played kings, soldiers, charming bastards on-screen with equal ease. In The Ruling Class, he played a man who believed he was Jesus Christ, and a man who believed he was Jack the Ripper. Peter O’Toole could make it all look like the easiest job in the world.His reputation as the enfant terrible of cinema earned him scorn from some members of the stuffy older generation in the 1960s and 1970s, but even as he grew older, Peter never became like those disdainful elders. Up till the very end, he was still mischievous, still ready to tell a dirty joke or two, and still advocating some healthy misbehavior. That’s what makes him so special, and so unforgettable. He was a wonderful actor, but also, truly, a wonderful man. -- source link
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