Speech at event to celebrate the life of Peter O’Toole
Old Vic Theatre, London, 18th May 2014
A chairde Gael, a cómhluadar na hEalaíne agus a dhaoine choír i gcoitinn atá bailithe anseo chun omós a thúirt do obair agus saoil Peter Séamus O’Toole.
[Dear friends, members of the artistic community and all gathered here to pay tribute to the life and work of Peter Séamus O’Toole.]
I am honoured by Kate’s invitation to speak at this event celebrating the life and work of a wonderful fellow Irish man and friend. In this joyful but also poignant task, I am honoured to have the opportunity to participate with many of Peter’s friends and colleagues who will recall and illuminate for us various aspects of his extraordinary life, talent and career.
On occasions like this in Clifden, County Galway, where Peter lived, the first thing a speaker might do is to thank the parish priest for the use of the hall. So, let me immediately express my gratitude to Kevin Spacey, Artistic Director, and the Old Vic Theatre for hosting us in a venue that Peter dearly loved and was the scene of many of his triumphs.
It is always a joy to be in the company of a fellow Head of State but I do hope that President Underwood confines his ambitions to the United States and never runs for office in Ireland.
As colleagues of theatre and film, many of today’s other contributors will talk about Peter’s work on stage and screen. I share their tributes and admiration but I wish simply to speak of the experience of a wonderful friendship with Peter over many decades in many circumstances and to pay tribute to his attachment and contribution to Ireland, its image, and its reputation.
Peter and I first met in Clifden in 1969 when we were introduced by a mutual friend, Frank Kelly, and thus began a friendship that lasted some 44 years. Sabina and I were to meet with Peter on countless occasions over the years, both in Clifden and elsewhere, and I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time with him in 1979 when, during a short sabbatical of mine from University College Galway, he was kind enough to provide accommodation for me and my family in Clifden.
Peter was then rehearsing the famous production of the Scottish play in Clifden. I have since often wondered whether the location of those West of Ireland rehearsals, which included the sword fights and the witches scenes, may have contributed to the critical response to that production’s unique nature. The response of critics to such matters was irrelevant to most of us. Peter’s performance was as mesmeric as we expected and of course the Clifden version triumphed at the box-office.
For those of you familiar with ‘Loitering with Intent’ I can tell you that I recall a conversation in his house on Heath Street when we discussed the problems of autobiography. I wondered if taking two volumes to get to the age of 21 might be a bit slow. Peter felt he shouldn’t rush things and, when he asked me, I was honoured to launch the publication of these two volumes of memoirs.
As to films, Peter was destined to be a star and others more qualified will speak of his contribution but, when he was a boy, Peter had written in his notebook:
“I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony.”
From his breakthrough starring role in Lawrence of Arabia to the end of his life this early reference to sands was somewhat prophetic.
We all know that time spent in Peter’s company could never be described as monotonous. He transformed the most routine or mundane experience into exciting drama. This extended to his recreation and his love of sport. I recall on many occasions watching football matches on the television with Peter and he shouting loudly and encouragingly at the screen.
Over the years I received many messages, always pithy, on matters political or cultural, or both. Rugby was, of course, one of Peter’s great passions. After I was elected President, he wrote to me to not only convey his good wishes but to impishly suggest that we could now both get good seats at the Six Nations test matches and to count him in for the Aviva.
Peter was always interested in reading and posing provocative questions about history and the tenuous suggestions of any inevitability. In one of his last interviews, Peter said:
“Actors have to stay optimistic. The moment we start thinking otherwise, we’re dead”.
Peter’s words are somewhat similar to what Václav Havel wrote about hope:
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
It was Peter’s great sense of hope, of belief in his craft, that kept him so productive during an acting career that spanned over five decades.
It was that affirmative sense of hope and sophisticated sense of what was important in his craft that allowed him to embrace with enthusiasm each of his eight Oscar nominations for an acting role without harbouring any resentment a lesser mortal would have felt when the cruel serendipities of timing snatched from his grasp, what others might have considered, the ultimate prize.
It was undoubtedly this sense of hope, and fun too – his flair for the exotic – that propelled Peter to involve himself in a sport in Galway that was not exactly native to the Irish soil – cricket. For a number of summers in the 1980s, Peter played Connacht Senior Cricket under the nearly anonymous name S.P. O’Toole – dubbed SPOT by his team mates. When, a number of years later, the cricket club was in financial peril, the same S.P. O’Toole sent a generous cheque.
While some might consider Peter’s embrace of cricket in the West of Ireland a futile gesture of hope, I like to think that he was playing it long – anticipating the 2nd March 2011 when Ireland would defeat England in a World Cup match in Bangalore. I imagine S.P. O’Toole was doing a lot of shouting at the television that day.
Cricket was not the only contest that Peter had to face in Ireland. He had other adversaries in Clifden who were upsetting his domestic tranquillity – namely rabbits who were causing a lot of damage to his garden. The man of action who played T.E. Lawrence quickly realised that, while war was inevitable, there was not sufficient time in the day to shoot all of the rabbits.
Guerrilla tactics were familiar to both sides with knowledge of the underground conditions favouring the furry ones! So embracing ecology he planted a particular grass – marin grass – that was sufficiently robust to survive the sea and wind of Connemara and also the depredations of the rabbits, who retreated inland.
It worked. Peter was suitably pleased and self-congratulatory. Brain had prevailed over brawn. Rabbits and landscape could harmoniously co-exist in a symmetry discovered.
Peter was very proud of his Irishness and always keen to avail of opportunities to embrace Irish theatre and film. For an actor who was so self-consciously Irish, it may have hurt that, at the outset of his career, he was rejected by the Abbey Theatre’s drama school – on the grounds that he could not speak Irish. But then in certain periods the Abbey Theatre, Amharclann na Mainstreach, was just as well known for what it rejected as what it accepted. The Abbey’s loss was of course the gain of RADA and the Bristol Old Vic, and the rest is history.
It is a measure of Peter’s generosity that this earlier rejection did not prevent him from taking to the Abbey stage in 1969 when, along with a great mutual friend, Dónal McCann, he starred in Waiting for Godot. Peter also loved the work of Shaw and O’Casey and acted in Juno and the Paycock and Man and Superman in the Gaiety Theatre in Dublin in 1966.
We were reminded of Peter again last year when we celebrated the centenary of the Dublin Lockout – that great confrontation between big business and organised labour that took place in 1913 and that had such a devastating impact on the largely impoverished people of Dublin. In 1980, RTÉ made a TV miniseries of James Plunkett’s magnificent novel dealing with the Lockout – Strumpet City. The series had some great actors – Cyril Cusack, Dónal McCann, David Kelly, Marie Keane, and even Peter Ustinov in a cameo role as King Edward VII.
But it needed a towering presence to play the iconic role of Jim Larkin, the charismatic trade union leader who led the struggle, and it got that actor in the tall, graceful, and powerful figure of Peter O’Toole. In financial terms, Peter was modestly compensated for taking the role but, in terms of his identity and his convictions, it was very rewarding – for Peter personally, and for all of us who are still moved by his magnificent performance as Larkin. In that year also he took some time off to canvass with Sabina and I and other Labour Party workers on the Shop Street in Galway, in one of the turbulent electoral confrontations of the 198os. What Irish voter could resist a canvass from Jim Larkin!
Peter worked right up to the end and maybe some roles were irresistible. As all of you know, relations between Ireland and Britain are currently at their best for centuries. As I can personally attest, the relationship between our respective Heads of State is very warm and cordial. Of course, it was not always thus.
One particular English sovereign who gets poor reviews in Irish history is Henry VIII – not least for his dissolution of the monasteries. In his papal role in “The Tudors”, and apart from the professional satisfaction of a role well delivered, it must have given Peter great pleasure to ex-communicate the said Henry VIII and it must have added to his sense of irony that the King was played by another Irish actor.
Peter’s great loyalty to the stage had an Irish benefit. We Irish will never forget his performances of Beckett, O’Casey, and Shaw in which he excelled, in the Abbey and the Gaiety in Dublin, or abroad with the Abbey.
Asked last year what were the best aspects of his acting career, Peter instantly replied – “the companionship”. Anyone who watched his dignified and eloquent Oscar acceptance speech in 2003 will know that the company, talent and friendship of fellow actors – the well established but also the young and emerging who had a great affection for him as well as awe – meant a great deal to Peter and he would be delighted that so many of his colleagues are here today in join in this celebration of his life, work and artistic legacy.
On all our behalf, I wish to thank Kate, Patricia and Lorcan for giving us this opportunity to loiter with benign intent as we recall and revere the life and work of their beloved father. I am also delighted that Peter’s sister Pat is with us, as is his grand-daughter Jessica and his nephew Fiann.
When Peter died in December, I felt a great sorrow but I felt too that there was an insufficient focus in some commentary on a life lived to the full, and delivered with grace and style on stage and screen that stretched from Lawrence of Arabia in 1962 to the very end.
The Peter O’Toole that I knew and loved was a man of immense charm, grace, intelligence and eloquence who was assiduously professional about the vocation of acting. To be in his company or to share his friendship was not an experience in the raising of hell – as some tabloids would have it – rather it was about the witness of great talent, mischief, and genius too.
Peter was above all ‘graceful’ in every fibre of his being. I see him stretching his long arms and fingers to say the word ‘fiasco’ as no-one ever enunciated it before or will again. I miss him. To have had his friendship was a great gift. I imagine Peter’s soul still walking the Sky Road in Clifden, on guard against the return of the rabbits, still coaching cricket and still shouting at the television.
Ni fheicimid a leithead arís – We will not see his like again.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis – May his soul always loiter on the right hand of his chosen God.
Go raibh maith agaibh go léir – Thank you all.