Just once, Peter O’Toole, who died on Saturday at age 81, seemed like the most beautiful man the cinema had ever dreamed up. With his burnished skin and his faraway blue eyes, offset by a white Bedouin robe and burnoose, O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) was the apotheosis of the desert visionary — the quintessential English gentleman-adventurer, whose ecstasy and agony reminded us how novelettish had been Rudolph Valentino’s sheiks.
If Valentino was a shopgirl’s dream ravisher, O’Toole, as Lawrence, is a more intricate gay fantasy figure. David Lean’s film indicates how Lawrence, generally believed to have been asexual, was traumatized by being beaten and raped in captivity by Ottoman Turks in 1916. Whether or not the experience left him a masochist, the film hints at the exquisiteness of his suffering, magnified by O’Toole’s pristine handsomeness and his neurotic intensity.
Lawrence’s personal anguish is echoed in the disillusion that grasps him once his vision of an independent Arabia is thwarted by the Allies’ encouragement of factionalism on the peninsula. Gregory Peck won the 1962 Best Actor Oscar for his noble Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but O’Toole, a fellow nominee, gave the more nuanced performance.
His eight nominations in that category are the most by an actor who never won the award, though in 2003 he was awarded an honorary Oscar. Had he have refused it, which he nearly did, stating he still wanted to win one for an individual performance, he would have echoed Lawrence’s refusal of the Victoria Cross and a knighthood.
In the public mind, O’Toole’s alcoholism placed him on the same runaway train as Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Oliver Reed — they were the subjects of Tim Sellers’s 2009 book “Hellraisers.” Yet his early glamour more persuasively links him to Sean Connery as James Bond, the Terence Stamp of “Billy Budd” (1962), the Michael Caine of “Zulu” (1963), and the Albert Finney of “Tom Jones” (1963). The 50 years since have not produced such a raft of British Adonises.
Inevitably, O’Toole played more conflicted or compromised men after Lawrence — the disgraced seaman in “Lord Jim” (1965), Henry II twice, in “Becket” (1964) and “The Lion in Winter” (1968) — while his charm particularly suited Arthur Chipping (“Goodbye Mr. Chips,” 1969), Don Quixote (“Man of La Mancha,” 1972), Henry Higgins (on stage and then on TV in “Pygmalion,” 1983), and young Puyi’s tutor, Reginald Fleming Johnston, in “The Last Emperor” (1987).
In keeping with the dissolution O’Toole relished, an aura of decadence — exaggerated by his rhetorical flamboyance — pervaded his work, thus the extremes of “What’s New Pussycat?” (1965), “The Stunt Man” (1980), and “Caligula” (1979). In the “Zulu” prequel “Zulu Dawn” (1979), he played the desiccated Lord Chelmsford, whose superior British forces were devastated by assegai-bearing indigenous warriors at Isandlwana in 1879. It was an unsubstantial role in an epic, but O’Toole’s epitomizing of imperialist hubris made the character a kind of anti-Lawrence.
Having portrayed the mad British aristocrat with a Jesus complex in “The Ruling Class” (1972), O’Toole was at his elegant and outrageous best channeling Errol Flynn in “My Favorite Year” (1982). He died more or less with his boots on, earning the last of his Oscar nominations for his tender evocation of late-flowering lust in “Venus” (2006) and voicing the restaurant critic Anton Ego with heartfelt epicurean hauteur in “Ratatouille” (2007). There was a consistency to O’Toole’s tortured romantic persona that carried over from his love of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, all 154 of which he knew by heart.
His theater career, meanwhile, spanned 44 years and included Jimmy Porter in “Look Back in Anger,” Henry Higgins, Shylock, an Olivier-directed “Hamlet,” “Baal,” Vladimir in “Waiting for Godot,” John Tanner in “Man and Superman” (he also starred in the film), and the title character in “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell,” for which he won an Olivier Award. Despite O’Toole’s disastrous Macbeth in 1980, the stage was perhaps his true medium as it often is with larger-than-life actors.
No one around can match his magnificence or his cool.
