PETER O'TOOLE

Not the first choice for many people, but The Stunt Man by some distance, especially in any scene in which he's on a floating chair.

Hahaha yes.

My vote will always go to The Ruling Class.

bounce bounce bounce I met him when I was 19.

First vote for King Ralph here. What have I done?

I voted for Lawrence of Arabia, even though when you watch it now you can't help wondering how the hell Lawrence just didn't die of face cancer as a blondey Englishman running around the desert with no sunscreen on.

My Favorite Year is not his best but it's damned hilarious.

I almost voted for LoA but then I realized this poll contains Caligula.

Am I the only one on this board who loves The Ruling Class?

I voted for Becket, lots of quotable dialogue and in classic fiery Peter O'Toole mode (even though arguably his performance is cancelled out by Richard Burton, who puts in a subdued performance).

Lawrence, Lion in Winter, Ruling Class, and Stunt Man are all ace as well.

I love The Ruling Class too, enough to vote for it.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Abbott, READ UPTHREAD re The Ruling Class. I had to pick it because it is sooooo camp.

That excluded I adore The Lion In Winter because of sheer fuckbitchery of K Hepburn and O'Toole arguing with each other.

The Ruling Class. It is not camp.

I forgot he was in Club Paradise! Kael's review is like 1000 words long.

Becket

RULING CLASS FTW

love this succession:
Caligula
The Stunt Man
My Favorite Year
Supergirl
Creator
Club Paradise

it's as if he gave up after they wouldn't give him an oscar for stunt man/my favorite year.

(tho secretly I loved creator and saw it twice in the theatres)

(maybe even 3x)

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I remember in the Ruling Class documentary, the director talks about choosing Peter O'Toole for the main role, and says something to the effect of "he has this look like you don't know whether he's going to hug you or shoot you!"

Had I noticed the fifth place winner, I'd have voted for it.

I got "Ruling Class" from Netflix because of this thread. :-(

Very strange, but sloooooow, and not as funny as I'd hoped. (Except for a few nice moments of deadpan absurdity.)

i am so sad that i missed this poll, esp. since i just watched "lawrence of arabia" and "beckett"

;_;

And so he retires. And it was all worth it for the first two minutes of this clip from 1995:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K561m7Nq7kk

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_K4ncs0BvIRA/SZI30FmZ3uI/AAAAAAAADFA/l-cqVzeECoU/s400/rhys.jpg

He was nominated what, eight times for an Oscar without winning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGCGZk2_jJo

oh I watched that Letterman appearance at the time (I was a Letterman watcher in the mid nineties). Good times.

Wikipedia page is a treat:

Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole was born in 1932. Some sources give his birthplace as Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, and others as Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, where he grew up. O'Toole himself is not certain of his birthplace or date, noting in his autobiography that, while he accepts 2 August as his birthdate, he has a birth certificate from each country, with the Irish one giving a June 1932 birthdate. O'Toole is the son of Constance Jane Eliot (née Ferguson), a Scottish nurse, and Patrick Joseph O'Toole, an Irish metal plater, football player, and racecourse bookmaker. When O'Toole was one year old, his family began a five-year tour of major racecourse towns in Northern England. He was brought up Roman Catholic. O'Toole was evacuated from Leeds early in World War II and went to a Catholic school for seven or eight years, where he was "implored" to become right-handed. “I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood – the black dresses and the shaving of the hair – was so horrible, so terrifying,” he later commented. “Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day.”

Upon leaving school O'Toole obtained employment as a trainee journalist and photographer on the Yorkshire Evening Post, until he was called up for national service as a signaller in the Royal Navy. As reported in a radio interview in 2006 on NPR, he was asked by an officer whether he had something he had always wanted to do. His reply was that he had always wanted to try being either a poet or an actor. O'Toole attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) from 1952 to 1954 on a scholarship after being rejected by the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin by the director Ernest Blythe, because he couldn't speak Irish. At RADA, he was in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford. O'Toole described this as "the most remarkable class the academy ever had, though we weren't reckoned for much at the time. We were all considered dotty."

And I had no idea he was married to Sian Phillips for two decades! The things you learn.

Watching "How to Steal a Million" now; he reminds me of Jimmy Stewart crossed with David Bowie

He seems way too ethereal/mystic to be from Leeds. I couldn't imagine him wandering around Rothwell.

anyone ever see Lord Jim? showing 70mm print in NY today.

A looong time ago. I remember thinking it was dece! But I may have been 12.

Mostly midbrow-dull but the print was new... it follows the Lawrence template to a degree -- Eli Wallach replaces Jose Ferrer as torturer, tho they give PO'T a native mate instead of forcible sodomy. James Mason shows up as a gentleman pirate in the last 45 minutes and livens things up greatly.

and the music was closer to authentic than usual. There was gamelan!

He is hilariously shouty in Becket, which livens up the otherwise boring pageantry and Church vs court intrigue. The gay text is very blatant, see here for a summary:

https://cinemaocd.tumblr.com/post/5509209616/becket-1964-wrap-up

I'm a fan – it's a gay medieval The Women

very generous of you

i still prefer SCTV's The Man Who Would Be King of the Popes

I know – it's better than The Women.

funnier maybe, not better

you can sense Burton's boredom once Becket becomes a pious goodygoody (he wanted to play the king, apparently)

Dave Kehr:

One hundred forty-nine minutes of pure, unadulterated culture, produced by Hal Wallis in 1964 as if in apology for all of the Elvis movies he was making at the same time. Richard Burton is Becket, Peter O'Toole is Henry II, and they both have very nice voices. There's an Anouilh play buried in it somewhere, but Edward Anhalt's adaptation keeps it a secret.

Thank you Morbs!

who on earth would care about an Anouilh play? Two hard-drinking hams bitching about their barely suppressed mutual lust? Come on!

you vulgarian

Teenage me LOVED this film and wangled extra credit in European History by doing a 90-minute cut so it could be watched by the class over two days (but I loved the Lion in Winter as much because it was about as bitchy as my divorced parents over Christmas, too).

O'Toole did a commentary for the DVD in which he starts by saying that teachers habitually stopped the film while showing it in class to annotate the inaccuracies. (Becket was a Norman like Henry, not a Saxon.)

suzy, i hope you cut out all the Masses.

Obvs.

Becket was a Norman like Henry, not a Saxon.

This was taken from Anouilh's play tbf.