”The script sits in front of you. The writer’s translated into ink what is in his spirit and his soul and his mind. I come along, I pick it up, and the ink goes into my eyes, into my mind, into my body, flows around and that part starts to inhabit me. And I know a good part when I see one,” so said Peter O’ Toole in the book , Hellraisers: The Life And Times Of Burton, Harris, O’Toole & Reed by Robert Sellers.
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No one could have described his acting process better. He was a man possessed in front of the camera and in the process he possessed us and inhabited us with those searing blue eyes, that throw in that booming voice, the molten lava in his veins. Very few actors take to acting like this man did. He did not have a plan, he was the plan, the story, the length and breadth and depth of it and it is our great luck that we saw him in a few parts that inspired him enough. That were as majestic as him. Some he was made for. Some chose him.
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The role of Thomas Edward “T. E.” Lawrence in David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia was infact supposed to go to Albert Finney but he thankfully turned it down. Brando refused it too and Anthony Perkins and Montgomery Clift were considered in passing as well. But O’Toole was destined to play it and so he did. It so happened that Lean had seen O’Toole in The Day They Robbed the Bank of England and so he was asked to give a screen test at the end of which Lean is supposed to have said, “This is Lawrence!”
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Let us for an instant stop exclaiming over the artistic merit of this choice and just focus on what O’ Toole’s presence brought to this film. One close up of those desert heated blue eyes and you knew that you would sit through two intervals and an interminable narrative just because this man was driving it. When was the last time an actor was this powerful, this beautiful, this compelling. This was not craft, artifice or just talent. This was magic.
My personal O ‘Toole moment came in the 80s when Doordarshan brought to us the replay of a film made for television, Svengali. O’ Toole was way past his physical prime in this retelling of Trilby, a novel by George du Maurier published in 1894. With obvious resemblance to My Fair Lady and A Star Is Born, this film wove a familiar story about a mentor and a protege and their complex relationship. Jodie Foster played the night club singer O’Toole chooses to refine and polish and in the process, invests in her emotions that throw his and her life out of balance. It was so long ago but I remember O’ Toole’s Anton Bosnyak booming, “Art is a form of bondage.” This was not an actor who would ever willingly be in the bondage of any thing or anyone but even he recognised that acting came from a life force that cannot be tamed, that must be let loose and even in a lesser-known film like this, O’ Toole was magnificent. Though his Hungarian accent was panned and his emaciated looks jeered at. He was called bizarre and theatrical. Well, what do critics know anyway. Wasn’t he booed in his West End debut in 1957? So much for criticism.
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During the TV screening of Svengali, I was a teenager and still remember him filling every room in the house with the chant of , “Svengali..Svengali..Svengali.” Or had I imagined it? All I remember is the awe I, an untutored student of cinema felt in the presence of this supremely gifted actor.
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He never won an Oscar for films he was nominated for ( Lawrence of Arabia, ‘Goodbye, Mr Chips’, ‘The Lion in Winter’, ‘My Favourite Year’, ‘Becket’, ‘The Ruling Class’, ‘The Stunt Man, Venus) though they did give him an honorary Oscar to possibly save their credibility. He was his own man till the end. Uproarious, recklessly self-indulgent and eccentric but his work always sparkled because he gave it his all. His seriousness. His madness. His bondage. His freedom. His unpredictability. Film lore says that at the end of Lawrence of Arabia, O’ Toole had suffered third-degree burns, sprained his ankles and neck, torn his ligaments, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb and had lived through two concussions!
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