O’Toole is considered one of the greatest actors of our time, with his star status well and truly cemented after his brilliant performance as Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. The eight-time Oscar nominee starred in films such as The Lion in Winter, Goodbye, Mr Chips, My Favourite Year and more recently Troy, Venus, Ratatouille and The Tudors. In 2003 he was awarded an honorary Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for “remarkable talents [that] have provided cinema history with some of its most memorable characters.”
Apparently O’Toole very nearly turned the award down, in case another Oscar-worthy role came by, he wrote: “I am still in the game and might win the bugger outright.” In 1987 he was offered knighthood but turned it down ‘for personal and political reasons.’
There’s a story of O’Toole, he was shooting a scene on a lake and his finger was trapped between two boats, he said “Bloody agony it was. Took the top right off.” He carried the tip back to shore, dipped it in a glass of brandy and put it right back on. After three weeks he unwrapped the bandage he put on it and found that he’d not quite put it on right. “I’d put it back the wrong way, probably because of the brandy, which I drank,” explained O’Toole.
File under: dude’s to afterlife party with.
He once said of his years of living la vida loca: “I loved the drinking, and waking up in the morning to find I was in Mexico,” he said. “It was part and parcel of being an idiot.”
As a young man he wrote in his notebook: “I will not be a common man. I will stir the smooth sands of monotony” and today his family, friend and colleagues remember a man who, by all accounts, was a legend, hell raiser and all round great man.
via Daily Mail
