Thursday 11 February 2010

Peter O'Toole and Venus

Trivial in the great scheme of things but this evening I achieved four successive wins at hearts for the first time, making the dark days of losing twenty five games in succession a distant memory. As anticipated this run enable me to achieve 20% wins for the first time. Again leaving the days of 11% long ago. Cards remain a game of chance but paying close attention, not making silly mistakes and taking the occasional risk has achieved the recent success.

I saw Venus in theatre without having read about its subject matter, except that it involved the relationship between two grumpy old men and a young women. I added it to my DVD service list and had to wait a couple of days before viewing as its arrival coincided with problems with the TV.

The advantage of seeing a film on DVD comparatively soon after experienced in theatre is that one can compare reactions, and less emotionally engaged, make a more detached critical assessment. The film is essential a vehicle for Peter O'Toole, who most people continue to hold images from his performance in Lawrence of Arabia and in particular telling Omar Sharif, "Nothing is written." In the film Peter appears to play himself in that the character is a recognised successful actor with a liking for drinking hard and hankering for a young female body despite a body wracked with illness and needing to wear a catheter.

Without Peter and Leslie Phillips, also supported by Richard Griffiths, this could easily have been a commercial film about a dirty old man and an uneducated young woman with sluttish tendencies. While not a great film, because of Peter, and the two female characters, Jodi Whitaker as the girl, and Vanessa Regrave as the ex wife and mother of his three children, this is a brilliant study of what it is like to be an old man living alone and contemplating death.

Peter O'Toole an extraordinary actor, from a class at the Royal Academy which included Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford. He had an Irish Bookmaker as his father and his mother was a Scottish Nurse. He supports Sunderland Football club along with his Rugby and Cricketing interests. Although only seven years older than me I regard him as of my generation although there are only some very broad general characteristics which can compare with my own life.
However like me there has remained a query about his birth as some sources give his birth place as Connemara in Ireland and others, at Leeds, England. He has birth certificates from both countries one dated June and the other August, both 1932.

Peter spent his preschool years with his father going to the horse racing tracks of Northern England, and like me went to a Catholic school where it was nuns which put the fear of God into him and no doubt also created a guilt approach to sex given the denial of their femininity which was the feature of the sisters until recent times, and which included the shaving of the head. Peter has remarked that nuns are now sipping gin and tonics in the Dublin pubs (along with the priests). After national service he was rejected by the Abbey Theatre Drama school because he did not speak Irish.

His career commenced as a Shakespearean actor with the Bristol Old Vic and then he moved to the English Stage Company where I and I first saw him perform in the Long and the Short and the Tall by Willis Hall in 1959 at the Royal Court Theatre in London, and where a couple of years later I sent my play and where the readers of the company asked to see what else I had written, and I had not and decided to go to Ruskin and subsequently to become a child care officer. The following year, 1960, he appeared in the films Kidnapped and the Day they Robbed the Bank of England, a film I only saw for the first time last year, and then after Marlon Brando was unavailable and Albert Finney turned down the role, he was asked to be T E Lawrence and he won an Oscar and the rest, as they say is now legend. In 1964 he played in Becket for which he won a Golden Globe, and then in the sixties, Lord Jim, What's new Pussycat, The Sandpiper, The Bible the beginning, The Night of the Generals, Casino Royale, The Lion in Winter ( Golden Globe), Great Catherine and Goodbye Mr Chips ( Golden Globe) followed , Also during the 1960's he had moved to the Royal Shakespeare for three plays, and then Hamlet for the National Theatre 1962 and then to Ireland for Juno and the Paycock and Man and Superman at the Gaiety and Waiting for Godot at the Abbey Theatre.

Given this level of success on stage and screen many actors cease to command similar attention after their first successful decade, but not so Peter with in the 1970's the films Under Milk Wood, The Ruling Class, The Man of La Mancha, Rosebud, Zulu Dawn and Caligula, films which I went to see in theatre at the time. On stage he returned to the Bristol Old Vic and then went to perform in Toronto, Washington and Chicago although it was not until 1987 that he made New York. His last stage performance was in 1992. In the 1980's he continued to appear in films and I remember seeing My Favourite Year and The Last Emperor, as well as three films as Sherlock Holmes and in Fairy Tale 1997 he appeared as Arthur Conan Doyle. This decade I remember him for Bright Young Things and Troy. He received a total of eight Academy Award nominations and also won a Lawrence Oliver Award for Jeffrey Barnard is unwell 1989 the famous writer of a weekly column who occupied the Coach and Horses bar in the West End for most of the rest of his day. It was not until the 1980's that he engaged in Television films with Strumpet City, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Sherlock Holmes, Svengali, Kim, Gulliver's Travels, Joan of Arc, Hitler the rise of evil, Casanova and the Tudors.

In his personal life he was married to the outstanding Welsh actress Sian Phillips with whom he had two daughters and where his wife revealed into her autobiographies that she was subject of mental cruelty, fuelled by his drinking and jealousy. She left him and eventually married a younger man. One of his daughters has become and award winning actress. His son by a second relationship also became an actor. Among close friends are Albert Finney and Omar Sharif and he also was close to Richard Burton and Katherine Hepburn, all larger than life characters and most of those they portrayed on screen and stage.

It is therefore understandable that Director Roger Mitchell selected Peter as the actor to play the key role in the film of man needing a prostate cancer operation, needing lots of pills to keep him going and with inclinations which his body count not meet. For me the best performance in the film belongs to Vanessa Redgrave as the wife he abandoned for the first of what the film implied was a succession of young lovers. In three short scenes, two with Peter and one after his death , when she provides a home for the 20 year old young woman he becomes infatuated, she communicates a lifetime of their relationship and the depth of her continuing friendship to a man who evidently rejected her for a succession of lovers.

Leslie Phillips. who together with Peter expressed their thrill at being offered such parts, plays his best friend, also an actor who continued to go to the theatre and make occasional visits to the gentleman's club of the acting fraternity and who meet together every morning for breakfast with Richard Griffiths, playing another former actor, in a simple side street neighbourhood café bear where they lives modestly on their own. In the openings sequence the men are examining each other's pills and medication, checking on the morning paper to see which of their contemporaries has died and how many column inches does their career merit.

Lesley Phillips plays a man finding it increasingly difficult to manage on his own, and looks forward when his niece decides to send her daughter to help with his care, although we quickly learn she is really wanting to get the girl off her hands after she has an unsuccessful love affair and forced upon her an abortion. The girl is no beauty, without further education and only interested in clothes, partying and being a model. She has no housekeeping skills or interests and regards her host and his friend as disgusting old men.

Peter is at the stage when any young woman coming across his path takes his fancy and his attentions horrifies her although she goes along with his interest when he takes her out drinking and shopping and impresses her by taking her on a an acting job, insisting on a limo and a cash payment so he can buy her an expensive gift. His attentions cause a break up in the relationship with Leslie. However the girl is impressed at finding he is a highly regarded actor and after a fling with a young man of her own age decides to look after Peter on his discharge from hospital and affection rather than lust develops between them. Peter shares with her the places and memories of his childhood and dies while making an unseasonal visit to the seaside, a simple shingle beach, filmed at Whitstable. In accepting the offer of a home by Peter's ex wife the girl shows she has matured, widened her horizons and gained from her brief relationship with the old man.

The film has several magic moments with for me the observation that for men the greatest expression of beauty is that of the body of a young woman, while for a woman it is the sight of her first child. A critic, Mark Leaper, whose work I constantly admire along with that of James Berardinelli, comments that the approach of decline and death comes almost imperceptibly over a long period. I know this all too well, but one morning you wake up and you know you are there at the beginning of the end and you start to focus more on what has been than what is to come.

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