They don't make them like O'Toole any more

Peter O’Toole, who has died at 81, was a mercurial, hell-raising actor who captured and lampooned the break-up of the English ruling classes. O’Toole was fiercely proud of his Irish roots, sharing shared Oscar Wilde’s uncanny grasp of the English characters he made his own.

He refused to kow-tow to the status-quo on the stage, in the cinema or in politics. He opposed both the Korean and Vietnam wars and turned down the offer of a knighthood in 1987.

O’Toole shot to cinema fame in the early 1960s, thanks to his brilliant performance as the enigmatic British officer who breaks from his own side to take a leading role in the Arab rebellion against the Turks – in one of the best-known films of all time, Lawrence of Arabia.

Born in Connemara, County Galway, the son of a Scot’s nurse and an itinerant Irish bookmaker, O’Toole was to describe himself as “not working class, but criminal class”.

Leaving school at 13 he began work in a variety of trades. Then he became an unsuccessful reporter for the Yorkshire Evening News. After completing military service in the Royal Navy, he was inspired by Michael Redgrave’s performance of King Lear to train as an actor. He won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

His close friends and colleagues included Welshman Richard Burton, Irishman Richard Harris and the actors who transformed the British stage during the 1950s. O’Toole said that they “heralded the 1960s.... We did in public what everyone else did in private then, and does for show now”.

And, as the new realism of the British New Wave transformed the theatre and cinema, O’Toole played – and simultaneously subverted – the archetypal ruling class character.

His role as T.E. Lawrence, in David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia, was the perfect vehicle for the 29-year-old actor. His performance, enhanced by astonishing camera-work plus the presence of acting icons like Alec Guinness, Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn, caught the imagination of a global audience.

The film’s ambiguous political message haunted an entire generation, mesmerised by O’Toole’s laid-back but thrilling performance, his lanky height, light blue eyes and blonde hair, combined with an exotic sheikh headdress. Through Lawrence’s mysterious persona, O’Toole projected an unforgettable gender-bending charm.  

So much so that Noel Coward said the movie might have been called “Florence of Arabia”. The film’s enormous success reflected the anti-authoritarian mood of a post-war generation that rejected the domination of the upper class ruling elite.  

His languid manner belied the stress of the two-year shoot in seven countries, during which O’Toole lost two stone, suffered burns, sprained ankles, torn ligaments and concussions. He lived in a Bedouin tent, learned Arabic and how to ride a camel. His approach blended  “magic with sweat”, he later wrote.

In 1964 he starred with Richard Burton in Jean Anouilh’s Becket, the story of a Norman King who falls out with his closest confident. It is a superb portrayal of tortured personal loyalties against the background of political and religious intrigue. Like Anouilh, O’Toole sought to show the contradictions of human reality.

In Peter Medak’s utterly surreal 1972 film The Ruling Class, O’Toole played the paranoid schizophrenic son of a decadent judge in an anarchic send-up of the English aristocracy and its hangers-on.

O’Toole’s legendary hard-drinking wrought havoc in his health and personal life. But in the 1980s he went on to make amazing comebacks, including the film Venus in 2006. He defended Venus co-star Vanessa Redgrave from political attacks, saying he shared her “loathing of injustice”.

Richard Burton remarked that O’Toole looked like a beautiful, emaciated secretary bird – “you couldn’t take your eyes off him” – and that he elevated acting into “something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing”.

Through his fearless if sometimes erratic performances on and off screen, he gave voice to a dramatically-changing world in which people sought to shake off class-bound authority. Do they make them like that any more in Britain? Russell Brand springs to mind. But his is a lonely, if powerful, voice in sea of conformity that O’Toole would be ashamed of!  

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

JFK - myth and reality

Beyond the speculation about who killed John F. Kennedy and the reasons behind his assassination 50 years ago today in Dallas, myths have endured about his supposedly liberal, even left-wing, views and policies. Oliver Stone’s film even suggests that’s why he was shot.

While the real truth behind the assassination remains elusive after a half a century – few accept that a lone gunman in the shape of Lee Harvey Oswald was responsible – it is possible to separate fact from fiction when it comes to Kennedy’s political life.

He was a conservative in social policy, a fervent anti-communist and a defender of America’s imperial power. In his early years in politics, Kennedy had a working relationship with the notorious Joseph McCarthy, whose witch-hunts divided America.

Kennedy had only been in power a few months when he authorised the previous administration’s plans for an invasion of Cuba in April 1961. The infamous Bay of Pigs operation was intended to overthrow Fidel Castro and reverse the Cuban revolution. As we know, it ended in fiasco and defeat. This did not deter Kennedy from other foreign adventures to stop “the spread of communism”.

Kennedy was the first president to send soldiers to Vietnam, 16,732 of them, supposedly as mere “advisers,” but many of them actually combatants. He was continuing a colonial war during which the French had been defeated. Kennedy had told the New York Times after the failure at the Bay of Pigs and the erection of the Berlin Wall: “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.”  

Throughout 1963, the war in Vietnam was intensified to the point where Kennedy himself decided that South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem needed to be removed  because he was seen as an impediment to winning the war. Kennedy authorised the coup that resulted in Diem's overthrow and assassination on November 1, 1963.

There have been attempts to distance Kennedy from the decision to remove Diem. But analysis of documents released by the National Security Archive in 2009 together with audiotapes, confirms that the decision to go for a coup involved the president and was not taken behind his back by officials and the CIA.

After Kennedy’s death, the war in Vietnam was stepped up to the point where 500,000 US soldiers were involved. Over 500,000 Vietnamese were killed, along with nearly 60,000 American soldiers. The United States pulled out in 1975 after defeat on the battlefield and the country was unified after North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon.

On domestic policy, Kennedy was a social conservative and lukewarm supporter of the civil rights movement. For example, he tried unsuccessfully to talk Martin Luther King out of his march on Washington in August 1963, which ended with a multi-racial rally of 250,000 demanding economic justice.

King held the crowd spellbound with his inspiring, momentous “I have a dream” speech about how “this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.

He rebuked the country’s leaders for breaking the promises contained in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, to guarantee the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Instead of honouring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad cheque, a cheque which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"
 

King was also gunned down, killed in Memphis where he was supporting a strike of low-paid municipal workers, in April 2008. Historically speaking, his loss to the American people has proved greater than that of a president who for all his charisma was a man who upheld the status quo.          

Paul Feldman

Communications editor