The preferred epitaph of Peter O’Toole, the
playboy of the western world
Among the stories emerging about
O’Toole in Galway is the one of how a soiled jacket made for the perfect epitaph
•
Several decades ago, a man walked
into Foyle’s Bar in
•
Clifden, Co Galway. Few heads
turned. After an interval,
•
the man declared in apparent
frustration: “I’m Lawrence
•
of Arabia.”
“I don’t care who you are, sit down
and I’ll get you a drink,”came the barman’s response.
It’s one of many tales that have
been told of Peter O’Toole this week, as President Michael D
Higgins led tributes to his passing.
O’Toole cited Connemara and Leeds
as his birthplace, and had two birth certificates to prove it. Connemara was to
become his second home. He also had relatives in Galway city. Local architect Leo Mansfield
designed the house he had built at Eyrephort, at the foot of Sky Road, and his
son, also Leo, remembers how O’Toole wanted the building on top of a hill to
make the most of the Atlantic aspect. When the planners directed that the house
be built behind the hill, O’Toole “had the hill blasted away”, recalls
Mansfield.
O’Toole frequented local hostelries
such as EJ King’s (now owned by Terry Sweeney), where he made close friends,
but he was also an active member of the community. He supported the Connemara
Pony Breeders’ Society, and his horses were regular competitors at the
Connemara Pony Show.
Writing in The Irish Times
in August 1983, the then western correspondent Michael Finlan
noted that it was “a bit unfair” that nobody gave the actor an award for his
appearance at the show that particular summer. “John J Browne
got the top award for the best five onions, Mary Geoghegan
for the best three heads of cabbage and Anne Conneely
for the best six new-laid hen eggs (brown),” Finlan wrote. “But there was
nothing at all for the three psychedelic flowers sprouting from the tweed hat
band of Mr O’Toole.
“The Botanic Trillium blazing from
his head turned all other heads in his direction and set off a cacophony of
clicking camera shutters. All that was missing was a standing ovation, as in
the last act of Macbeth.”
Public relations
Back in
the mid 1970s, a young public relations professional, James Morrissey,
who was then a 24-year-old press officer for Dublin Theatre
Festival, was dispatched by director Brendan Smith
to collect O’Toole from the airport as he was performing in the festival.
O’Toole handed him his suitcase, and looked “rather disparagingly” at
Morrissey’s “beat-up car”.
Morrissey drove him to the
Shelbourne Hotel, and the actor seemed “irascible”. When Morrissey broached the
subject of interviews with several journalists, including the late Dr David Nowlan,
theatre critic of The Irish Times, O’Toole growled and “made it quite
clear that there would be no effing interviews”.
“I told him this was my first job
and asked him would he reconsider, but he shut the door of his room in my face,”
Morrissey says. “I walked as far as Quinnsworth on Baggot Street, and decided
to go in and buy him a bottle of whiskey.
Eventually O’Toole invited
Morrissey in, and “spoke very emotionally about Connemara”. He also “obliged
with various interviews”, to Morrissey’s relief.
In 2008, the actor gave one of his
last public interviews at the Galway Film
Fleadh, where his daughter Kate is the chairwoman. “He was 76 years
old, very funny, still had the glad eye about him, and I remember he made
straight for Jessica Lange
at the Irish Film Board’s dinner at the fleadh,”director Miriam Allen
recalls.
“An absolute original” who was
“full of life and verve” is how film-maker Lelia Doolan
remembers him, and she notes that he donated a silk Hermès neckerchief in July
this year to raise funds for the Picture Palace arthouse cinema, currently
under construction in Galway city. It was bought at auction by musician and
performer Aindrias de Staic, who would, Doolan says, be cut from the same cloth
as the original owner.
Irish Times photographer Brenda Fitzsimons recalls how she bumped into
O’Toole in Clifden many years ago, and how the talk turned, after an hour or
so, to what he would like carved on his tombstone. He launched into a lengthy
explanation involving his favourite jacket, a buckskin suede number that had
marked on it every drop of tear, blood, sweat and whatever else from his long
career. He made the mistake of sending it to the local dry cleaners, where it
promptly disappeared, and he assumed with some regret that he would never see
it again.
Years later, a package arrived at
his house, and when he unsheathed it from its cellophane, there was his
laundered jacket, with a label attached by the cleaner saying, “Distresses me
to return soiled”.
O’Toole looked at the label and
thought, as an epitaph, that will do nicely.
The Galway Film Fleadh public
interview with Peter O’Toole is on galwayfilmfleadh.com
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