The greatest.
Met him once at an after party in London for a play called The Apple Cart.
Got his autograph, went partying to celebrate his autograph, lost his autograph at a bar that same night.
Anyway, he was quite an gentleman. When I spoke to him he answered ; "that's a Spanish accent but not from Spain, sounds like CentralAmerica". So we talked a little about the Noriega situation. So that's my Peter O'Toole story. My all time favorite actor.

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2015-03-28 16:20 by camper88.

"I am not an actor, I'm a movie star".
My favorite year.

"The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise."

Peter O'Toole



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2013-12-16 17:31 by reg thorpe.

Quote
ChefGuevara
"I am not an actor, I'm a movie star".
My favorite year.

I love that film. O'Toole played a character inspired by Errol Flynn. In that context the line makes sense, but as a stand alone quote doesn't seem quite apt.

O'Toole was a fine actor indeed.

"this, madam, is for ladies only, as well, but sometimes, I must run a little water through it.."

The tremendous patience in the episodes of this movie is mesmerizing. I think the narrative breaks down a bit in the 2nd half, but only because the 1st half is so wonderful. Here is a famous example: "YOU are welcome.....He is nothing."

Quote
loog droog

Quote
ChefGuevara
"I am not an actor, I'm a movie star".
My favorite year.

I love that film. O'Toole played a character inspired by Errol Flynn. In that context the line makes sense, but as a stand alone quote doesn't seem quite apt.

O'Toole was a fine actor indeed.

Yes, great movie. The role must have come very natural to O'Toole, at least the classy drunk part of it. And obviously he was the opposite to that quote, much more an actor than a movie star.

Quote
pmk251
The tremendous patience in the episodes of this movie is mesmerizing. I think the narrative breaks down a bit in the 2nd half, but only because the 1st half is so wonderful. Here is a famous example: "YOU are welcome.....He is nothing."

And to think that David Lean intended that scene where Shariff emerges on the horizon to be twice as long. He got impatient and cut half of it, admitted in an interview later he regretted that decision.

I saw LoA with a friend in a cinema near the Champs Elysees in my late teens. Unforgettable. Still my best movie experience.

----------------------------
"Music is the frozen tapioca in the ice chest of history."

"Shit!... No shit, awright!"

Quote
ChefGuevara

Got his autograph, went partying to celebrate his autograph, lost his autograph at a bar that same night.

Such an O'Toole story in every sense, I love it!

My Favorite Year is one of my favorite films. RIP Mr. O'Toole.

Really nice article from The New Yorker magazine:

Postscript: Peter O’Toole


The deaths, over the weekend, of Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine reminded us, once again, what a strange principality movie stardom is. Think of it as a kind of Monaco: few are born there, but many arrive, some to disport themselves at the watering holes and gaming tables, others to cultivate that notorious anonymity that is the last redoubt of fame. The church mouse may be the neighbor of the libertine. Costs of living (not merely financial) can be exorbitant, and personal loyalties prone to decay; expulsions are cruel and common, and you dare not appeal against them, for they are ordained not by a court of the land but by the judgment of the world beyond. On the other hand, re-admittance to stardom, after exile, is not unknown; in the case of O’Toole, he would drift away, out of sight but never quite out of mind, and then, just as we—and, by all accounts, he himself—started to ask if he were technically alive, he would stroll back into the light.

A fertile start to the nineteen-eighties, for example, with “The Stunt Man” (1980) and “My Favorite Year” (1982), was followed by five years of near-drought; then came “The Last Emperor,” much of it confined to the Forbidden City, where O’Toole played a Scotsman who is employed to tutor a living god. This was just the kind of role he relished—courteously stiff but pliably amused, far too urbane to be shocked, and perfectly at home with modes of life that other men might shy from as surreal. “Nothing is written,” he had declared, as T. E. Lawrence, and here was a new twist on that dictum: no city was forbidden. As the Chinese emperor played tennis, O’Toole sat in the umpire’s chair and called out the score, with such aplomb that a stranger, wandering past the court, might have wondered who was the deity here, and who the hired hand. A small army intruded, interrupting play and giving the Emperor an hour to pack and leave. The Scotsman remained aloft, alone, and aloof, while, all around, a dynasty hastened to its end.

O’Toole was not Scottish, of course; nor was he the fair Englishman who, on a starlit night in the desert, in the midst of David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” informs his Hashemite guide that he hails from Oxfordshire—“a fat country.” He was Irish, as tall and slim and unsnappable as a Malacca cane, and one regret, for his moviegoing fans, was that they saw and heard far less of O’Toole the Celt than their theatre-loving counterparts were privileged to enjoy. Onstage, he did a lot of Shaw: Peter Shirley in “Major Barbara,” Jack Tanner in “Man and Superman,” King Magnus in “The Apple Cart,” and Henry Higgins in “Pygmalion.” The part of Tanner—the bachelor anarchist who assumes the part of Don Juan, in the third act, for a debate with the Devil—was close to O’Toole’s heart; it was filmed, but only for TV. Shavian testiness became him well, as you would imagine, but no less important was a profound belief that the gab was more than a gift; it was a glory, to be polished and brandished as Joyce and Shaw had taught us, and it was also a passport that helped you to cross all frontiers and sail through the most trying or chastening of situations. As the tutor pointed out, in old Peking, “If you cannot say what you mean, Your Majesty, you cannot mean what you say; and a gentleman always means what he says.”

The obituaries that latched onto O’Toole’s misdeeds as a boozer missed the point, or grabbed only half of it. Like many stars, he was actually twin stars, fused together; within his nature, the gentleman cohabited with the fearsome rake, just as, within his Lawrence, something fey and dreamy, bordering dangerously on the camp, consorted with the unappeased ferocity of the warrior. Both facets shone in his sapphire stare. And that voice! By what miracle of instinct did Lean manage to cast a man who sounded, even before he reached the desert, as though his words had been naturally sanded? He could strike his consonants hard, as Laurence Olivier did, but with less of a cluck, and that soft, rasping croon of his, when he chose to deploy it, had the ominous effect of making you want to stop the action and offer him a drink. This may be sheer coincidence, but one thing that bound O’Toole to the pack that he ran with, in his lurid years, was that all of them—Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Oliver Reed—had speaking tones so rich and nectared that the rest of us could get drunk on them as they poured into our ears. What drove the hell-raisers, heaven knows; were they wasting talent, drowning sorrow, making hay, or raising their glasses as a complaint against the world for not being a fraction as beautiful as their words would have it be?

To watch O’Toole and Orson Welles on the BBC’s “Monitor” program, in 1963, as they ruminate at length on “Hamlet” and his father’s ghost, is to realize what a real talk show is, or what it could be, when the airwaves were still haunted by the grand talkers. What takes you slightly aback, however, is not that O’Toole seems willing and able to discuss seventeenth-century Catholic doctrines of the afterlife but that, with his dicky bow, dark shirt, and thick-rimmed black spectacles, he looks like a man in disguise. His face and frame were those of an El Greco saint, caught between temptation and penance; scan his filmography and you see how seldom he made an impact in modern garb, and what elegant shelter he sought in period dress. Twice he played King Henry II, in “Becket” and “The Lion in Winter.” He was Don Quixote; he was King Priam, trembling at the sack of Troy; he was Tiberius, attending the even greater disaster of “Caligula.” He also played Conan Doyle, in “Fairy Tale: A True Story,” which only reinforced one’s disappointment that he was never fully unleashed as Sherlock Holmes. His résumé does list four appearances as Holmes, but those were in low-rent, animated versions for TV, and, for once, the voice was not enough; we needed to observe him in his finery, unfurling the long limbs, the languor, and the dread of boredom that we associate with Baker Street, not to mention the neurosis that twitched below the skin of the sleuth. Sometimes unmade films, like unmade beds, tell stories of their own.

Outside the gossip columns, then, and away from the stage, what connected O’Toole to the here and now? The up-to-date capers, like “What’s New, Pussycat?” and “How to Steal a Million,” have dated poorly. “The Stunt Man,” his most cheerful project, has fared better, and O’Toole, with a grateful nod toward Lean, enjoyed himself to no end as a tyrannical film director; even then, however, the echo of his more dandified selves proved difficult to dispel. Who was this guy, so casually clad, his hair cut and combed a touch too long? What had he done with his robes—those seraph-white ones that Lawrence sported atop the ambushed train, turning this way and that to catch the light, as if the sun were a blazing mirror? The truth is that, like many of the major stars, O’Toole was not altogether of this world, being at once indisputably present, yet with a mind dreaming of elsewhere. He seemed happiest when granted the freedom to transport himself, through drama and drink alike, out of what Tennyson called “our bourne of Time and Place.” Now he has crossed the bar.

by Anthony Lane

[www.newyorker.com]

RIP Peter & thanks for some fine movie moments!

Keith could've used Peter O'Toole during moments like these:

From today's L.A. Times:

Op-Ed

Hollywood Confidential: The actor, the comic and LAPD vice

They jumped from the cab like it was on fire. Left behind on the back seat was a bag of pot and uppers.

By Joseph Wambaugh

December 22, 2013

A prominent obituary in The Times last Sunday took me back to a night in 1962 when I was working the vice detail out of Wilshire Division. We were trying to bust after-hours drinking spots engaging in illegal alcohol sales, prostitution and drug activity. I had been the undercover operator on a recent takedown, and on this particular night our sergeant and one vice team were trying the same tactic on a second persistent offender, this time in a residential area. My partner and I, along with another vice team, were providing backup, out of sight but on the tactical radio frequency.

It was a simple gag: A likely car leaving the target location would be pulled over, and the scared, not-quite-sober male occupant would be threatened with arrest and told that we would need to phone his wife to pick up the car, and of course, we were obliged to inform her of all the nocturnal naughtiness taking place in that after-hours spot. That did it almost every time. As a quid pro quo, the mortified motorist would eagerly agree to take one of us back inside and introduce us as a cousin from Covina, so that the undercover operator could observe law code violations.

Instead of stopping a car that night, the sergeant and his team chose a taxi that had picked up two players from the stakeout address. When it was pulled over, both passengers jumped from the cab like it was on fire. Left behind on the back seat was a bag of pot and uppers — not much of a violation today but in those days a felony booking.

Even then I was having thoughts about a writing career sometime in the future, and I constantly scribbled notes and saved them. As best I can recall from those old notes, here is how it was related to me from the moment both men produced identification.

Vice Cop No. 1 said: "Hey, this guy is Lenny Bruce! Lenny freaking Bruce!"

Indeed it was. Lenny Bruce, the notorious stand-up comic who specialized in obscene attacks on establishment figures (including cops), was standing on the curb and shaking his head when asked if the bag of dope belonged to him.

The other passenger, a tall, fair-haired young man with an upmarket Brit accent, was volubly denying any knowledge of how the bag could have gotten onto the taxi seat. They were told that since neither claimed ownership, they would both be booked for felony possession. The taxi was about to be sent on its way when the tall guy said, "Wait!"

He went straight to the sergeant and asked his name. When he heard an Irish surname, he informed the sergeant that he too was Irish and that he had labored long in British theater with limited success, but that he was in Los Angles to promote a soon-to-be-released movie, "a role of a lifetime," that would make him and the film known throughout the world. He mentioned the name of the movie, but it was no more familiar to the cops than was the actor's name.

Then, in an obvious sympathy ploy, he held up his fist and said: "This hand isn't working properly yet. I was bitten by a camel while we were filming."

He did not garner sympathy from either of the young vice cops. In fact, Vice Cop No. 1 sneered and said: "Role of a lifetime, my tush. Even the damn camel didn't like it." Then to the sergeant, "Come on, let's book these guys."

Vice Cop No. 2 said to the sergeant: "Boss, let's stop wasting time. We're looking at Lenny Bruce here, world-class cop hater. We pop him, we'll be on TV tomorrow!"

Vice Cop No. 1 said, "Hey, Lenny, let's hear some of your pig jokes. Make us laugh."

Bruce stood mute, but the actor lasered his unforgettable blue eyes at the older cop and said: "Sergeant, my career is in your hands. You have the power to damage me irreparably."

And maybe it was the sergeant's Irish name or his watery orbs blinking, but the actor pressed on and said, "Haven't you ever had a human weakness over which you sometimes had little control?"

Chalk it up to thespian instinct, but he seemed to sense that he was talking to a guy who tossed down at least three 80-proof doubles at the Blarney Castle just about every time we were in the neighborhood.

In any case, the sergeant said to the vice team, "Throw the bag down the sewer and put them back in the cab."

And of course there was much grumbling from the young cops who reluctantly did as ordered, and the taxi drove away with the passengers. When I was given these details after the encounter, I too was incensed because the release of Lenny Bruce had cost us all our 15 minutes of fame.

However, I have always believed that Bruce tempered his performances, at least as far as cops were concerned, from then until the day he OD'd in 1966.

As to the obscure actor, everything he said that night came true. And we were all better off for having him in bars rather than behind them. R.I.P., Mr. O'Toole.

Joseph Wambaugh, a former LAPD sergeant, is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction about police and crime.

Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times

link: [www.latimes.com]

Quote
Title5Take1
Keith could've used Peter O'Toole during moments like these:

From today's L.A. Times:

Op-Ed

Hollywood Confidential: The actor, the comic and LAPD vice

They jumped from the cab like it was on fire. Left behind on the back seat was a bag of pot and uppers.

By Joseph Wambaugh

December 22, 2013

A prominent obituary in The Times last Sunday took me back to a night in 1962 when I was working the vice detail out of Wilshire Division. We were trying to bust after-hours drinking spots engaging in illegal alcohol sales, prostitution and drug activity. I had been the undercover operator on a recent takedown, and on this particular night our sergeant and one vice team were trying the same tactic on a second persistent offender, this time in a residential area. My partner and I, along with another vice team, were providing backup, out of sight but on the tactical radio frequency.

It was a simple gag: A likely car leaving the target location would be pulled over, and the scared, not-quite-sober male occupant would be threatened with arrest and told that we would need to phone his wife to pick up the car, and of course, we were obliged to inform her of all the nocturnal naughtiness taking place in that after-hours spot. That did it almost every time. As a quid pro quo, the mortified motorist would eagerly agree to take one of us back inside and introduce us as a cousin from Covina, so that the undercover operator could observe law code violations.

Instead of stopping a car that night, the sergeant and his team chose a taxi that had picked up two players from the stakeout address. When it was pulled over, both passengers jumped from the cab like it was on fire. Left behind on the back seat was a bag of pot and uppers — not much of a violation today but in those days a felony booking.

Even then I was having thoughts about a writing career sometime in the future, and I constantly scribbled notes and saved them. As best I can recall from those old notes, here is how it was related to me from the moment both men produced identification.

Vice Cop No. 1 said: "Hey, this guy is Lenny Bruce! Lenny freaking Bruce!"

Indeed it was. Lenny Bruce, the notorious stand-up comic who specialized in obscene attacks on establishment figures (including cops), was standing on the curb and shaking his head when asked if the bag of dope belonged to him.

The other passenger, a tall, fair-haired young man with an upmarket Brit accent, was volubly denying any knowledge of how the bag could have gotten onto the taxi seat. They were told that since neither claimed ownership, they would both be booked for felony possession. The taxi was about to be sent on its way when the tall guy said, "Wait!"

He went straight to the sergeant and asked his name. When he heard an Irish surname, he informed the sergeant that he too was Irish and that he had labored long in British theater with limited success, but that he was in Los Angles to promote a soon-to-be-released movie, "a role of a lifetime," that would make him and the film known throughout the world. He mentioned the name of the movie, but it was no more familiar to the cops than was the actor's name.

Then, in an obvious sympathy ploy, he held up his fist and said: "This hand isn't working properly yet. I was bitten by a camel while we were filming."

He did not garner sympathy from either of the young vice cops. In fact, Vice Cop No. 1 sneered and said: "Role of a lifetime, my tush. Even the damn camel didn't like it." Then to the sergeant, "Come on, let's book these guys."

Vice Cop No. 2 said to the sergeant: "Boss, let's stop wasting time. We're looking at Lenny Bruce here, world-class cop hater. We pop him, we'll be on TV tomorrow!"

Vice Cop No. 1 said, "Hey, Lenny, let's hear some of your pig jokes. Make us laugh."

Bruce stood mute, but the actor lasered his unforgettable blue eyes at the older cop and said: "Sergeant, my career is in your hands. You have the power to damage me irreparably."

And maybe it was the sergeant's Irish name or his watery orbs blinking, but the actor pressed on and said, "Haven't you ever had a human weakness over which you sometimes had little control?"

Chalk it up to thespian instinct, but he seemed to sense that he was talking to a guy who tossed down at least three 80-proof doubles at the Blarney Castle just about every time we were in the neighborhood.

In any case, the sergeant said to the vice team, "Throw the bag down the sewer and put them back in the cab."

And of course there was much grumbling from the young cops who reluctantly did as ordered, and the taxi drove away with the passengers. When I was given these details after the encounter, I too was incensed because the release of Lenny Bruce had cost us all our 15 minutes of fame.

However, I have always believed that Bruce tempered his performances, at least as far as cops were concerned, from then until the day he OD'd in 1966.

As to the obscure actor, everything he said that night came true. And we were all better off for having him in bars rather than behind them. R.I.P., Mr. O'Toole.

Joseph Wambaugh, a former LAPD sergeant, is the author of 21 books of fiction and nonfiction about police and crime.

Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times

link: [www.latimes.com]

Cool story. Thanks for sharing.

We should also spare a thought for Joan Fontaine who was an exceptional actress back in the 1940's.