Peter O’Toole: the last of the hellraisers?

Peter O’Toole was a brilliant performer, garnering many Oscar nominations. He never won, and initially refused an honorary gong from the Academy because he was “still in the game and might win the lovely b***** outright”. Receiving the lifetime achievement in 2003, he added: “Always a bridesmaid never a bride my foot!”

But his off-stage exploits have stuck in the public mind perhaps as much as his star turns on the stage and screen. This should not really have come as a surprise – he predicted his future in an early poem: “I will not be a common man because it is my right to be an uncommon man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.”

Along with Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, he cultivated a reputation for erratic behaviour and gathered an impressive collection of anecdotes along the way.

He once woke up in Corsica after a particularly heavy drinking binge with little memory of the previous evening. Not particularly impressive, perhaps, except his night started with a drink in Paris.

How he made his way there is a mystery. However, he was once quoted as saying: “I can’t stand light; I hate weather; my idea of heaven is moving from one smoke-filled room to another.”

Never mind what time it is. What day is it? Peter O’Toole

In 1959 he took his understudy – a young Michael Caine – out to a restaurant. The pair reputedly woke up in broad daylight in a flat Caine did not recognise. “What time is it?” he asked. “Never mind what time it is,” replied O’Toole. “What f****** day is it?”

It was two days later, and they were due on stage. To top it off, the pair later discovered they had been barred from the restaurant.

Probably because of the brandy…

There is another story, unconfirmed, that he once went to see a play with friends. The curtain had been raised before he realised he was supposed to be in it.

One of his regular party pieces was to try to scale the wall of a bank in London’s Covent Garden “in his Sunday shoes”. His future wife was initially taken aback, but soon learned it was relatively modest behaviour by his standards.

All of this also came at a cost. While filming, he severed the end of one of his fingers. Undeterred, he placed the dismembered digit in a glass of brandy and replaced it. He later found he had “put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank”.

By the mid 1970s, his alcohol consumption had brought him to the brink of death and he required emergency surgery. Doctors told him he could not stand another drink.

But he was not to disappear into obscurity just because the doctors told him to stop the alcohol-fuelled benders though. He appeared on Channel 4’s TFI Friday in a segment entitled Peter O’Toole Delivers Lines That Are Plainly Beneath Him. In it, he recited the lyrics to the Spice Girls’ hit Wannabe with mastery and wit (watch below).