Playboy Interview: Peter O'Toole

Our interviewer is the noted English drama critic Kenneth Tynan, whom readers will remember as the author of our September 1963 interview with Richard Burton, as well as of two Playboy articles: "Papa and the Playwright" (May 1964) and "Beat'e in the Bull Ring" (January 1965). Tynan writes of this month's charismatic subject:

"Peter Seamus O'Too!e, born in County Galway 32 years ago, became an emigrant at the age of one, when his family left Ireland to settle in the Yorkshire city of Leeds. Bad health and wartime evacuation kept him out of school until he was 11, and two years later he gave up formal education for good. After spells in journalism and the navy, he won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. A spectacularly promising graduate, he went on to serve a tough professional apprenticeship at the Bristol Old Vic, Britain's leading provincial stronghold of good theater, where he spent three seasons playing everything from Shakespeare to John Osborne. Already drums were beating throughout the profession, signaling the arrival of an exceptional talent. O'Toole got the full fanfare in 1959, playing a garrulous Cockney cynic in Willis Hall's London hit, 'The Long and the Short and the Tall.' Since then he has built himself three international reputations: as a Shakespearean actor (Shylock and Petruchio at Stratford-on-Avon, Hamlet in the inaugural production of Britain's National Theater), as a star of epic movies ('Lawrence of Arabia,' 'Becket,' 'Lord Jim'), and as a manic, round-the-clock hell-raiser. Once, picked up on a drunk-and-disorderly charge, he told the court: 'I felt like singing and began to woo an insurance building.'

"I went to see him at his home near Hampstead Heath, the lofty stretch of parkland that overlooks central London from the north. Here he lives, tall and lean and Irish, with his tall, lean, Welsh wife, actress Sian Phillips, and their two little girls--five-year-old Kate and two-year-old Pat. Traffic roars by a few yards from the front door; O'Toole's den is at the back of the house and bears outside it a brass plate that reads:The Marcus Luccicos Room. This is a private Shakespearean joke: Marcus Luccicos is an offstage character in 'Othello' who, despite an urgent summons from the Venetian senate, fails to arrive and is never mentioned again. The room is plastered with theatrical posters, pictures and prints of actors, and dozens of trophies, including the gloves worn by Sir Henry Irving in Tennyson's chronicle play 'Becket.' There is also a tape recorder, on which O'Toole has been known to record his early-morning cough. He claims that it is comparable, in its special racking intensity, only to that of Jason Robards, Jr.

"He met me looking as he sometimes does in movies, wan with sleeplessness, his complexion etiolated as if dusted with powdered ash. But the old insomniac Celtic dynamo was still whirring within him, and he said he was ready to talk. Would I mind if he rambled, he asked. I said not in the least; and--as Jelly Roll Morton used to sing--'Didn't He Ramble,' speaking in a spasmodic flow of Yorkshire-inflected Irish, punctuated by snorting hoots of laughter. To paraphrase the tag line of the same song, 'I hope the butchers never cut him down.'"

[Q] Playboy: During the two years you spent in school, what were you good at?

[A] O'Toole: I was very good at English composition. I wrote a marvelous thing once, called "A Sound of Revelry." It was all about a village idiot I once met, an old twat named Obadiah, who heard a sound of revelry. He got into this pub where everyone was playing darts and enjoying themselves, and he joined in the darts match, and they all poured mixed drinks down him--crème de menthe and after-shave lotion. Then they kicked him out; he got thrown through the door. But when I met him in the street outside, he felt perfectly happy; he'd been accepted at last. Apart from composition, I couldn't do anything much except play Rugby football.

[Q] Playboy: Was it a Catholic school?

[A] O'Toole: Christ, it was so bloody Catholic it'd frighten you. It was about as Catholic as you can get--the full expatriate Irish nunnery. Probably the first word I ever heard was "sin."

[Q] Playboy: What does sin mean to you?

[A] O'Toole: Well, I feel it going into a New York bar late at night. You see, they used to have no licensing laws in Ireland and the place was rather dull, but now the bars have to close at 11 at night, and you can commit sin by having a drink. It's a great gas. But I used to see sin as black horseshit--steaming horse droppings, but black. It used to paralyze me, still does. I still have a reek of sin.

[Q] Playboy: What's the most sinful thing you ever did at school?

[A] O'Toole: The first time I was really aware of committing a grievous sin, the full mea maxima culpa, was when I was a very small thing, at infant school. I drew a picture of a horse peeing, and I got the crap beaten out of me by lots of great horrible hawks--flapping nuns with white, withered hands. They'd never held a man, those hands.

[Q] Playboy: What's the most sinful thing you've ever known a friend of yours to do?

[A] O'Toole: I can't tell you the most--there's a different one every week--but I can tell you the most recent. I know a lovely girl who's full of life and spirit. She married a fe'low I never liked the look of, and he made her sign á paper, which he put in his safe, swearing that she'd always wear black and would never sing folk songs. I don't know why, but that made me ill. He was butchering something that was so pretty, that would make any hour sweeter. But I get resentful at the funniest things. That was just last week's.

[Q] Playboy: During your school days you served as an altar boy. What was it like?

[A] O'Toole: It means being a sort of master of ceremonies. It means knowing the protocol, and occasionally reminding the gentleman in charge that we're doing Low Mass, not High Mass, and giving him little nudges. But I loved every second of it. After all, drama as we know it in England was started by the Church; look at the morality plays. The Mass was my first performance; it's as simple as that. Also, believe it or not, I really believed. During the War, when sweets were rationed, I used to go in the church and put a bloody toffee on the altar rail. That's a kid's action, but I was really hooked on the ceremony; I loved it. I had very little horizon then, and for me it was something splendid beyond words. How does one believe? What's the mechanism of belief? I haven't the faintest idea.

[Q] Playboy: When you married Sian, she was a divorced woman. Did that involve you in any conscience struggle?

[A] O'Toole: I haven't had a conscience struggle with the Church since I was about 16, when I strolled out through the door and never went back. But I still have spasms and twitches, because, look, there's nothing more potent and highly charged to a kid than the whole idea of transubstantiation and the robes and the incense and the candles and the bleeding lamb and the crown of thorns.

[Q] Playboy: You felt all this in Protestant Britain?

[A] O'Toole: Ah, but in a Mick community. And there's nothing more Mick than an expatriate Mick--take a look at the Irish bars on Third Avenue. Have you ever been to Leeds? I just spent three sleepless nights there celebrating my father's birthday; he was born at midnight on St. Patrick's Day, he admits to 75 and looks 50. Wisdom of my father, uttered in a pub last Thursday night: "You can lead a horse to water, but rhubarb must be forced."

[Q] Playboy: When did you lose your virginity?

[A] O'Toole: On the steps of a church, strangely. I was 15, and what I felt was gross humiliation. I went out with a friend and we found two very experienced ladies--semiprofessional, I think. The only advice I'd had was to take the initiative, so I steered the lady's hand in a certain direction. The first thing she said on making contact was, "Put that on the mantelpiece; I'll smoke it in the morning." I saw her again about six years ago in a pub; we had a quiet word and giggled a bit. But at the time I felt enormous guilt--sins of the flesh, sins against our Blessed Lady. I had to confess it; in fact, it was almost the last time I confessed. "Was it with a woman, my son?" "Yes, Father." "Was she married, my son?" "I think not, Father." That cost me a coup'e of rosaries and all the stations of the cross--the full Waiting for Godot routine.

[Q] Playboy: After school you went into journalism. How did that happen?

[A] O'Toole: I had a very good friend who was a priest, and he wanted to save me from being a grease monkey, because at that time my whole ambition was to sell Jaguars. Anyway, the general manager of one of the local papers was a Catholic, so he found me a job as teaboy and copyboy. It lasted from the age of 14 to the age of 18. I wrote captions, and went to football and cricket matches, and even got tickets for the theater. I was a critic. I used to review striptease artists, and Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy, and plays at the Theater Royal. Also I learned about photography, working in a horrible darkroom, and became a sort of assistant art editor. I remember I used to get horse meat for the chief photographer. Never knew why he wanted it; probably he was kinky for horses. A betting man, perhaps. But all this was my real education, and it moves me to think about it, because it was marvelous for me, a slum Mick, to be pushed into something that seemed so enormously sophisticated. I entered the company of literate men; they liked me and took me around, hid me under their overcoats in bars. And every week I had two afternoons off to take classes in English literature. I began to feel instructed and liberated.

[Q] Playboy: Do you go back to Ireland often?

[A] O'Toole: Whenever I'm not working. I go to Galway and Connemara, provided I can get past Dublin. With Dublin, the only thing you can do is turn up the collar of your coat, pull your hat down over your eyes and walk straight through it; otherwise you're there forever. But no one's ever flourished in Ireland; her greatest export is men. Look at the theater, for instance: Run through Farquhar, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde, Shaw, Synge, O'Casey, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett--all wild geese who flew the coop.

[Q] Playboy: What was your first stage appearance?

[A] O'Toole: Aged six, as a character called Professor Toto in a children's concert. I had to feed a donkey sugar.

[Q] Playboy: And how did you get the part that led to everything else--as Private Bamforth in The Long and the Short and the Tall?

[A] O'Toole: They sent me the script and I wrote back saying it's marvelous; whoever plays it will become a star, and please let it be me. Next thing I know, Albert Finney's playing it, and the next thing I know after that is that Albie's got appendicitis, and they're asking for me again. At first I turned them down, because Albie and I had joined the Royal Academy together, and we were both tottering about trying to get our feet in the door--in fact, we still have a certain sort of dark professional rivalry--but in the end I took the part, and I'm very pleased I did. Apart from anything else, I got to meet Katharine Hepburn. She came round one night after the show and said she liked it very much, but I was too overwhelmed to speak, so we just said bye-bye. Then suddenly my phone never stopped ringing--producers and directors all wanting me, which surprised me, because I was bad news at the time; they'd written me off as a Cockney savage. But she'd gone around and done a Barnum and Bailey for me. I met people--and I keep on meeting people--who'd say: "Kate Hepburn told me all about you." What a sweet thing, I thought; I hope to Christ I can do the same for someone someday. Then suddenly my wife was big with child. When it was a girl, I thought: Why not name her after that beautiful thing? So I called her Kate. I never told Miss Hepburn, through.

[Q] Playboy: It was around this time that you had your nose fixed, wasn't it?

[A] O'Toole: What happened was very simple. I'd already had my hooter kicked a bit on several occasions, and during The Long and the Short and the Tall I got it kicked to death again--onstage. It was flattened all over my face. Then a part came up in a film called The Day They Robbed the Bank of England and, as I say, the poison had already gone out about me being a horrible savage, so I thought, well, f------ it, at least I'll get the thing gathered into a tidy heap. So I had it changed for the purpose of being able to play in pictures. Simple as that.

[Q] Playboy: Have you had any other physical problems?

[A] O'Toole: My eyes, mainly. I've had eight operations on the left one alone. It's in the family; my old man has got funny eyes, too. I don't need glasses, but I go cross-eyed very quickly, and strong light affects me; I respond to it with lumps behind the eyeball that have to be taken off regularly. I think it's psychosomatic, really. Or perhaps it's a kind of stigmata. There I go--on the cross again. Did I tell you, by the way, that my daughter Kate is getting religious? She went to a Christmas show at a Catholic school near here and came home raving about what she called "an activity play in which Jesus Kite was killed at the crossings." But another thing about me. I used to have a ferocious stammer and a lisp. I got them cured playing Rugby in the navy against the Swedish police. I turned up late and the captain punished me by making me play in the pack--with the forwards, you know, a lot of huge great pork butchers sweltering about all over the place. My whole Rugby life had been beamed on the fact that I kept well away from the pack, but there I was, sweating and heaving among the best. Having had every bone crushed, I was moved to fullback, which is suicide alley--I mean, it's ridiculous--and people were yelling "Die, Navy, die with it!" and "Tigerish now, Navy!" Anyway, I did die with it on one occasion and someone kicked me straight in the mouth and cut my tongue in half. I didn't know what I was doing--probably trying to lick the salt off his knees like my dog does when it's hot--but anyhow, my tongue was hanging out like a moose's uvula, and crunch went this great Swedish bogey, and I woke up in hospital. They made me do exercises for weeks--counting my teeth with my tongue and things like that--and I never stammered again.

[Q] Playboy: So much for physical afflictions. Has anyone ever written anything about you that hurt your feelings?

[A] O'Toole: Often. I gave up reading reviews years ago, because (a) I found it unprofitable and (b) I was always being accused of wearing too much make-up. Everyone else could come on drenched in crepe hair, but Paddy O'Toole would be attacked for wearing make-up. But the thing that hurt me most was when someone said that I only acted to demonstrate how pretty I was. Which was very unfair, because I've always considered myself to be the author's advocate. Mind you, I'm at the stage now where I don't give a damn what anybody says. All I care about is whether I think the work's going well.

[Q] Playboy: In 1959, the drama critic of The New Yorker said that you had "a technical authority that may, given discipline and purpose, presage greatness." Any comments?

[A] O'Toole: Discipline? I've always had that; despite the rumors, I'm one of the most frightening old disciplinarians who ever drew breath. And purpose? If that means dedication and a serious point of view, let me remind you that it was me as Hamlet who opened the National Theater.

[Q] Playboy: You were once quoted in print as having said: "I want to do the film of My Fair Lady. It'll be good for me to act with Audrey Hepburn." Did you say that?

[A] O'Toole: Never in my life. It's also in print that I'm living with Rudolf Nureyev, and that isn't true either. The simple fact is that someone from Warner Bros, approached me about My Fair Lady, and I said that I thought they were potty and that the only man who could and should play Higgins was Rex Harrison. I did say I wouldn't mind playing Doolittle, but they didn't like that at all.

[Q] Playboy: You've made your name in films playing tormented heroes who end up more or less martyred. Do you enjoy being "on the cross"?

[A] O'Toole: No, but I know what you mean. I read a piece about me the other day with a headline that went: "I'm Tired Of Playing Suffering Gents In The Far East." But let's go through the list. Lawrence of Arabia? Yes, I suppose he was a martyr of sorts. Henry II in Becket? Well, he ended up being whipped for his sins, but he didn't enjoy it. He accepted it because it was politically expedient, and he loathed every second of it. As for Lord Jim, he certainly chose to die, but I played him not for that reason but because it was the only chance I'd ever had of doing a Western--or an Eastern, if you like. He was a simple, silent, guilt-ridden fellow who rides into town like Shane; I just fancied the idea.

[Q] Playboy: You've also appeared as God in John Huston's movie of The Bible.

[A] O'Toole: Yes, I played the Author. As a matter of fact, there are three of me in the film. Huston had this marvelous idea about the three strangers who appear to Abraham in Chapter 18 of Genesis. He thinks they're a pre-echo of the Trinity, so I play all three of them, and one of them is God. I use three different voices, ranging from senile Scunthorpe to juvenile Scunthorpe. [The Scunthorpe district in northern England is to Yorkshire what Brooklyn is to New York or Pomona to Los Angeles: a stock target for local comics.]

[Q] Playboy: You're among the very few screen actors who have ever played God. What's He like in your version?

[A] O'Toole: He's the full anthropomorphic God. He's the troubled old fellow who comes down and has to decide whether or not to blow up Sodom and Gomorrah. And He has the first recorded Levantine argument with Abraham about how many righteous people make a town worth saving--50, 30, 10; they really bargain with each other. When I arrived in Rome to start work, they gave me the usual first-Communion nightie and a pair of wings, because they obviously hadn't read the Old Testament. So John Huston asked me how I thought Abraham would visualize God, and I said it would be more like a Hittite statue, and so that's how we did it. It's anthropomorphic with a vengeance, because we played it for a lot of fun. What else can you do? "Sarah was reproved," it says rather sternly in the Bible, after she's spent a perfectly innocent night with Abimelech. How can Sarah be reproved? She's 127 years old.

[Q] Playboy: After The Bible, you made a comedy called What's New, Pussycat? with Peter Sellers. Everybody agrees that it's fairly far out. Are they correct?

[A] O'Toole: It depends what you mean by far out. Everyday life is far out. I first realized that many years ago, when I turned on the radio and someone was asking a man to describe his most embarrassing experience. I've never forgotten what he said. "I was sitting at home one night, washing my trombone, when I looked through the window, and there in the moonlight on the crazy paving I saw a hedgehog. Thinking it might be thirsty, I took it out a saucer of gin. The following morning I observed that the gin was untouched. Imagine my embarrassment when I found that it wasn't a hedgehog at all; it was a lavatory brush." I'm sorry, but if that isn't far out, I don't know what is. What was he doing washing a trombone? But to get back to Pussycat: We began with a brilliant, sketchy, Perelmanesque script by Woody Allen, who is a genius. Then things got a little neurotic, with lots of politics and infighting and general treachery, and finally--with the ghost of W. C. Fields hovering over our heads--we improvised the whole thing from start to finish. There were areas in the script that were undeveloped, which is the norm with most films: You cast first and write afterward. I actually wrote with my own fair hand about three fifths of the script. When I say "wrote," I mean that we'd meet at ten in the morning--Sellers and I and Clive Donner, the director--and sit around talking and hoping. Sellers had the ideas, I did the words and Clive was the arbitrator. We jotted things down on the backs of contraceptives and off we went. I play a fashion journalist and Sellers is my analyst. We took it on the wing every day, grabbed an idea and built it from there. I've seen 30 minutes of the rough cut and I fell on the floor.

[Q] Playboy: What will your next film be?

[A] O'Toole:Will Adams. I'm making it with my own company. John Huston is going to direct, Dalton Trumbo has written the finest script that ever breathed, and I've got Toshiro Mifune--the greatest actor in Japan--to play in it with me. Will Adams was the first Englishman to go to Japan. He's the unknown Elizabethan. He made a much greater contribution than Raleigh or Drake, but he committed two grievous crimes: He was born in the lower classes, and he didn't come home to share the goodies. He was a shipbuilder's apprentice who fought against the Armada and went off with a Dutch trading fleet to open up the East Indian market. He was wrecked on the shores of Japan, where the Jesuits grabbed him--the Portuguese Jesuits, whose main contributions to Japanese civilization were Christianity and the gun. He was sentenced to be crucified--as you've already spotted, the cross occurs and recurs in my speech--when the emperor met him and liked him. He taught the emperor mathematics, built his first ship for him and became his most powerful advisor, the first and last white samurai. I don't want to raise any monuments, but Adams was about the only one of Elizabeth's great globe-trotters who didn't go to plunder.

[Q] Playboy: How did you find out about him?

[A] O'Toole: I met an actor in Kyoto who told me the story. Have you seen the Zen garden in Kyoto? Just five rocks and a load of pebbles--but the use of space! I sat there and I contemplated peace. Japanese poets have been describing it for centuries, but for me it was like a huge ocean, with little bits of life appearing and being very beautiful--and being allowed to be beautiful. Anyway, that was where I met this actor, who told me that Adams was still revered as a Buddhist saint, with a shrine of his own and all that. I listened with my mouth wide open, came home and looked up the records, and got thoroughly hooked.

[Q] Playboy: You're producing Will Adams yourself. Would you also like to be a director?

[A] O'Toole: Only if I wasn't acting as well. Direction is something very odd and recent. It's an innovation of the 20th Century, invented to protect the author from the vagaries of the actor-manager; I think it's time there was an innovation to protect the author and the actor and the public from the vagaries of the director. Given a good play and a good team and a decent set, you could chain a blue-arsed baboon in the stalls and get what is known as a production. But my trouble is, I love acting. I think it's the nicest thing that ever happened to anyone.

[Q] Playboy: What play would you most like to film?

[A] O'Toole:King Lear. And I'm going to make it. One of the marvelous things about having a few shillings is that I'm in a position to call the shots. And I hope the director will be Kurosawa, the man who made Rashomon. I think he knows Lear in his bones--that monolithic, feudal thing.

[Q] Playboy: Will you be influenced by the famous Paul Scofield performance of Lear, which Peter Brook directed for the Royal Shakespeare Company? He played Lear not as the usual titanic hero, but as a cranky old man whose daughters probably had very good reasons for resenting him.

[A] O'Toole: I didn't like the Scotfield Lear. It was a tremendous performance, but it wasn't the play the fellow wrote. I realize that nowadays you can't accept things like royal authority and feudal command, and I also realize that the text ought to reflect what Hamlet calls "the very age and body of the time"; but I wanted to call for "Author!" at the end, and I expected Peter Brook to come running on. Shakespeare's Lear was an appalling, dotty old man with two daughters who were the original ugly sisters. That's the simple plot premise, and the whole play is about undressing--taking off clothing and crowns and titles. Remove these things and you get the "poor, bare, forked animal"; that's the theme, and Shakespeare has rivers of irony flowing to express it, without any help from Mr. Brook. Of course, Shakespeare makes a comment on our times--I played Shylock with one foot in Auschwitz--but you mustn't forget the people he wrote for, who knew all about robes and ceremonies. His theater wasn't only a temple of the arts, it was a corn exchange. As an actor, Paul Scofield is a gent who could show us all the way home. His performance was extraordinary. I came home haunted by the bloody thing, and I keep on waking up saying the lines as he said them. But in the whole conception, I felt there was too much bending. It bent the text. To me, Lear is the greatest artifact ever and, vain as I am, I don't intend to try it until I'm about five years older. I haven't got the equipment.

[Q] Playboy: You once said that you hated the "head-back-and-sonority-of-utterance" school of acting. Doesn't it secretly rather attract you?

[A] O'Toole: I'm attracted, yes, but I don't want to join it. I truly do not like arias. I can play John Gielgud's records for hours, and I can watch Callas spellbound. They're phenomena, and I'm quite prepared to adore phenomena. But I'd hate to copy them. I loathe Victorian floridity; I even dislike florid opera: Lucia di Lammermoor drives me up the wall. No, I just like actors to talk sense.

[Q] Playboy: Since you've been in a position to choose your parts, have you ever played a character the audience was meant to hate?

[A] O'Toole: I've played several full-sized monsters--Lawrence, for instance. Didn't everyone hate Lawrence? I'm not like John Gielgud, who says he can't possibly persuade audiences to dislike him. I know more about villains than I know about heroes, and I'm prepared to state a case for them. People say I romanticized Lord Jim. I don't know whether that's true, because I haven't seen it. I've never seen any of my pictures all the way through.

[Q] Playboy: Isn't that rather unprofessional?

[A] O'Toole: The reasons are totally professional. The first time I saw myself was in the rushes of The Day They Robbed the Bank of England and I was shattered. For the next two weeks I felt like death: I couldn't work, I couldn't talk; I just posed and farted about like an idiot. It made me self-conscious and awkward. Self-aware is one thing; self-conscious is another. The truth is that I dislike the film world. I think I am temperamentally unsuited to it. I simply can't bear being microscopically examined by a camera from morning till night.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about artists you admire. What comedians, for example, make you laugh?

[A] O'Toole: English comics like Sid Field, who's dead, and Jimmy James, who's just retired--he was the comics' comic. You felt secure the moment he set foot on the stage; it was like watching a great violinist take up his bow or a great surgeon pick up the scalpel. And Frankie Howerd--like to die! For me, the greatest American comic was W. C. Fields. He had this trick that all great comics have: They're blinkered; they refuse to see anything except one blinkered point of view, from which they trample on unremittingly. It may lead them to illogical conclusions, but they'll stand by those conclusions; they'll die for them. And it's funny, because for them it's real. I mean, when Fields hated children, he really did. And when Frankie Howerd gets indignant, he's really and passionately furious. And I just wet myself laughing. Oh, and I forgot Zero Mostel, who's obviously a comic genius. He came into this pretty house when Sian and I had just bought it, and it looked like a great empty soup kitchen with workmen tapping away all over the place. He strolled in with that huge great frame and that glare and that enormous authority, wearing a beret and limping. I believe he'd just knocked down a bus in New York and the bus company was suing him for damages. Anyway, we had a few jars of booze and he suddenly glared at the workmen and bellowed: "Take all the ceilings out! I want a long, tall room!" And, by God, they were nearly starting to do it.

[Q] Playboy: What do you think of Lenny Bruce?

[A] O'Toole: He's something else. He was my salvation when I went to Hollywood for the first time. It's a very unpleasant place and I hated it. I mean, it looks like a parking lot mixed with Coney Island, which is enough to put any decent man off. But people kept saying: "Wait till you get to Beverly Hills." Well, I got to Beverly Hills, and it was Christmas, and I saw nothing but Santa Claus in neon lights and reindeers climbing out of chimneys. The awful thing is that everyone who lives there loves it. But Lenny was playing at the Unicorn and he restored my sanity--I went night after night and died on the floor. What I love about Lenny, apart from the fact that we click as chums, is that he's the only man in show business who can casual'y describe a town hall as a shit house and a hotel as a toilet and get away with it. It's unbelievable, the way he switches the audience on to his wave length. Again, it's that blinkered point of view, and that total sincerity.

[Q] Playboy: Laurence Olivier directed you in Hamlet at the National Theater in 1963. We're told he can be pretty intimidating when he wants to be, even at the best of times. What was it like to play Hamlet for a man who had made history in the part himself?

[A] O'Toole: I found him perhaps the least terrifying man I've ever met in the theater--because at first glance I could see throught him and he could see through me, and he knew that I knew that he knew. Look, love, I've been bullied all my life by bigger experts than Larry Olivier, I can assure you, and he's just got to get in line. He turned me to stone a couple of times with that gray-eyed, myopic gaze of his, but a couple of times he made me very happy. After one rehearsal he said to the company: "Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in living memory we have seen the real Hamlet." When the greatest actor on two stalks says a thing like that, what can you do? Of course, I felt I was being watched every minute.

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel that he may have regarded you as a potential threat--as the young prince who might usurp his throne?

[A] O'Toole: If he was sending out waves like that, I wasn't aware of them, and in any case, it wouldn't have affected me; after all, he asked me to play the bloody thing. He came to the house and asked me a lot of oblique questions about the part, and finally I said to him: "Look, it doesn't matter what theories I've got about Hamlet. All that matters is what comes through in the performance." I could have quoted exactly the fifth emendation made by H. Curtis Scrotum in 1855 and that sort of thing, but I see no point in that kind of discussion. Besides, I've worshiped at Larry's shrine for years. Nothing has ever been done, or will ever be done, like his Richard III at the Old Vic in 1944. The relish of it--that was what impressed me, although I was only a child--the way he seemed to savor everything Richard said, with a nagging, almost pedantic delight. Then there was Titus Andronicus, and Corio-lanus, where he came on like a boy, with that wonky, juvenile gait. I'm hooked on Larry O'ivier. I mean, he's done it; he's sat on the top of Everest and waved down at the Sherpas. He speaks from Olympian authority, and I think he bridles that authority admirably. I know lesser farts in bigger organizations who brandish their puny accomplishments like a club. But I'm not sure he ought to be running the National Theater. Larry's business is acting; he belongs in the stable, as head stallion. I don't think he's got a great deal to contribute as a director. In Hamlet I wandered amazed among scenic flyovers and trumpets; I didn't know where I was, I only did it because I was flattered out of my trousers to be invited.

[Q] Playboy: Let's talk about books. What modern novel have you most admired?

[A] O'Toole:Catch-22 comes popping into my head. It's a nightmare, but it's the truest thing I've ever read about war. It described everything I felt in the navy.

[Q] Playboy: Among living people, whom would you like to meet that you haven't already met?

[A] O'Toole: Marlon Brando, for one; I'm a great stage-door Johnny. Until recently, I'd have said John Steinbeck, but I've just met him. The same applies to Gene Krupa. You see, I'm a bit of an amateur musician--my instruments are drums and bagpipes--and I used to play with a jazz band in Leeds. Everyone wrote us off as arty, nail-biting wife beaters because we used to sing old Lead-belly songs that have since made the top of the pops. That's when I first heard about Gene Krupa, who's the finest orchestral drummer there ever was. I met him the night Lord Jim opened in New York. Having shaken every hand in sight, I slipped off to the Metropole bar, and he drank Coca-Cola with me and then went up and beat the living Jesus out of those drums. It was a big thrill. And, of course, I'd love to meet Khrushchev, because he's the man who brought Marxism away from the altar, if you see what I mean. And that wife of his, with those legs like milk bottles. I think Khrushchev and I could have a really good fuss together. I'd like to talk to him about communism's biggest mistake, which was the use of history as a spine of infallible theory to support a body of doubtful practice. In fact, they alter each vertebra according to any prevailing notion. They've done the Jesuitical bit on Marxism, and that's a crime. It isn't as bad as the crimes of the Catholic Church, but it's in the same neighborhood.

[Q] Playboy: What people in the past--real or fictitious--are you most fascinated by?

[A] O'Toole: Don Quixote, Edmund Kean the tragedian and Judas Iscariot.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] O'Toole: Don Quixote because I admire anything quixotic. Kean because he's the actor I'd like most to have seen. And Judas because bogeymen have always fascinated me, and he's the supreme bogeyman in Christianity. You see, I think he was in on the Crucifixion. Christ needed someone to put the finger on him; he needed to be martyred, and he talked Judas into it.

[Q] Playboy: You say you admire everything quixotic. Do you have any personal eccentricities yourself?

[A] O'Toole: I never carry a watch or a wallet or a lighter. Or a key: I just hope some bastard's in. Otherwise I go through the window, and then the police come and it's horrible. I have a photographic memory; I learned Hamlet in three days. I have no sense of direction, and I have a most peculiar sense of time; I've no idea of the day or the date, but at certain hours I get a desperate twitch. For instance, I'll tell you the time now. It's about 6:30.

[Q] Playboy: It's 6:34.

[A] O'Toole: Not bad for a fellow who hasn't slept. Do you know how I knew that? Because I'm an actor, and all over England, the curtain is due to go up in 60 minutes' time. As for physical oddities, I'm hairless around the titties, and I was treated as a girl until I was about 12. I was very pretty and rather tubby, with a mop of golden curly hair that I've tried to keep straight every since. I used to be called "Bubbles."

[Q] Playboy: Were you ever homosexual?

[A] O'Toole: Never. When I was about 12, of course, I joined the fraternity of M.M., under the auspices of the reverend brothers. M.M. stands for Mutual Masturbation, which was regarded as a healthy alternative to ordinary sex.

[Q] Playboy:But you got over it?

[A] O'Toole: Yes--you might say I pulled myself together.

[Q] Playboy: We hear you have trouble sleeping, and a couple of years ago you collapsed from exhaustion in New York. What makes it so hard for you to sleep?

[A] O'Toole: One of the things that keeps me awake is that I don't know why I can't sleep. New York itself is a stimulant. The first time I went there I stayed at the Algonquin, besotted with visions of the Round Table. I walked into the bar, and there was James Thurber; I walked into the lift, and there was Brendan Behan, sitting on the floor with a bottle of milk. It's always like that. But the time I fell over in New York was something special. I'd just finished Lord Jim in Cambodia. The natives were burning down embassies, and Sian and I had hid in lavatories; it was very unpleasant. We went to Japan for a holiday and then flew to New York. That's a frightening flight; I hate airplanes anyway; I can't believe all that tonnage can float in the air. Anyway, we stopped at Anchorage, Alaska, where I bought a pair of cuff links and a bowl of chili con carne; and as soon as we left, the place fell apart in an earthquake, which shook me up. By the time we got to New York I hadn't slept for 36 hours. There was the usual bloody circus of journalism and television, which I subscribed to, but my reserves were getting low. Then I went on Channel 13 for an hour, and the interviewer dug very deep, and I was moved both to laughter and to tears. By now I hadn't slept for 60 hours, but I thought I could do the Tonight show, and I went on it and suddenly I fell over, crunch, broke my dark glasses and came home in a box. But about sleep in general: I don't mind missing it when I'm working in the theater, because I've got the whole day in front of me before the performance. But in the cinema it's different: After you've tossed about in a bed and eventually left it because you don't want to wake up your wife, and you've tried to read a book on the sofa until your eyes are about f/11, you have to turn up at the studio and pretend to be some super high-stepping gent. Sometimes I go into the garden and sit on the swing for hours. It's not nice. Rebecca West once told me that she was a happy insomniac. But she's all right, you see; she's in the lonely business of putting words on paper, whereas I've got to turn up and look lovely. I've tried every pill there is, from tranquilizers to knockout drops. In Japan I spent a fortune on a pillow that's supposed to masturbate you and nod you gently to sleep. No good. I believe you can buy a bed called "Fairy Fingers"; they trickle up and down your spine, settle around your scrotum, and you totter gently into an irredeemable kip. I haven't tried that yet. In the navy I used to drop off quietly when I was on watch, looking for submarines; I'd tuck my cigarette up my sleeve and get nicotine stains on the inside of my elbow. Nowadays I'm lucky if I get an hour's sleep a night.

[Q] Playboy: Have you ever taken pep pills?

[A] O'Toole: Once, and never again. I had spent a night talking, as I often do, and I had to play the Moody One next day--Hamlet, his melancholy nibs. I felt a bit dreary, so a lady in the company gave me a little green pill out of a silver Victorian pillbox. I was on the ceiling for 48 hours. I was cuckooing and crowing from chimneys, hurtling about and gamboling and skipping--and I never stopped talking. I wept at weather forecasts.

[Q] Playboy: Let's get back to eccentricities. Are you superstitious?

[A] O'Toole: In one respect, yes. I won't go out of the house without wearing green socks. In the late 19th Century, Britain made it a capital offense for the Irish to wear green, their national color. So they made a point of wearing it, and this was handed down to my father from his father. But I disbelieve in all other superstitions--especially the Catholic Church. I'm a retired Christian.

[Q] Playboy: Do you believe in God?

[A] O'Toole: I believe, as John Le Carré says in one of his books, that the number 11 bus goes to Hammersmith and that Santa Claus isn't driving it. And I believe in Gandhi's marvelous, ironic remark that God has no right to appear to mankind except in the shape of bread. What a lovely flip of the Catholic coin! But it took me a long time to disbelieve in transubstantiation. If you're a Catholic, you aren't a sinner as long as you can drop in at what they call "the short 12"--12-o'clock Mass. It's there for actors, writers, painters and other drunks, and it's short because the priest needs a drink like everybody else. All they do is elevate the Host, and if you witness the transubstantiation--the changing of the bread into Christ's body and the wine into his blood--you're home and dry, you're as pure as the driven C. P. Snow.

[Q] Playboy:Have you ever killed anyone?

[A] O'Toole: Not to my knowledge. Unless you count birth control: From time to time I've seen a thousand Shakespeares and Ibsens in my handkerchief. When I was called up for military service, they told me that I could only be a conscientious objector if I swore that my Christianity was offended, and since I'd abandoned that lovely primrose path of dalliance, I couldn't with any honesty take that stand. Faced with the alternatives of going down into the mines or going to jail, I preferred the sea, and I vomited over every square yard of it. But if there was another war, I'd be a conscientious objector like a shot.

[Q] Playboy: You mentioned birth control. As "a retired Christian," what are your feelings about it?

[A] O'Toole: When I was a Catholic--and I really went all the way, I had a bad case of handmaiden's knee--I remember a frightening debate going on about the sin of being cremated. Intelligent people were shrieking against it from pulpits. Nowadays cremation has been given the blessing, but I can remember real terror: people hiding their heads if they'd had a relative cremated. I thought at the time that unless they allow cremation and birth control shortly, there's going to be a mountain of dead bodies with a pyramid of newborn babies on top, and that's all there'll be on sea or land or in space.

[Q] Playboy: Then you think that birth control is a good thing?

[A] O'Toole: Good? It's lovely! I adore making love, I really do, but I don't want babies at the end of every sweet hour. I can't see how anyone could make it controversial. The whole argument is based on a wonky interpretation of a wonky bit of Genesis about Onan being slain by the Lord because he spilled his seed on the ground. Seeing that everyone in that part of the Bible is rushing around seducing their sisters at the age of about 850, it seems a mad point to dwell on. Unless birth control is sanctioned, the world is going to be in terrible trouble. I haven't the faintest idea why the Church should promote the strangulation of early seed by the rhythm method rather than by bouncing it against a piece of rubber. Somebody once asked me to suggest another name for the rhythm method, and I said it ought to be called "parenthood."

[Q] Playboy: What are your politics?

[A] O'Toole: I'm a retired left-winger. I don't vote. I think there's a place for an actor in any political system--Czarist Russia, Imperial Japan or Tory Britain.

[Q] Playboy: Even for a working-class actor like yourself?

[A] O'Toole: I'm not working-class; I come from the criminal classes. My father was an off-the-course bookie, and that was a crime until a few years ago. But if you want to define me, I'd better confess. I'm a total, wedded, bedded, bedrock, ocean-going, copper-bottomed, triple-distilled Socialist. At the last election, I insisted that everyone in my house vote Labor, even though I knew it would mean I'd be taxed to the bollocks. The only objection came from my driver. "Sack me if you like," he said, "but I'm a Conservative." And he went off in the Rolls and voted Tory. But somehow I didn't feel as adamant as that. Sometimes democracy frightens me; it doesn't always let the minority think freely. The only thing I'm sure of is that I would never lift a finger to help the Conservatives.

[Q] Playboy: Are there any laws you'd like to see repealed?

[A] O'Toole: The laws against homosexuality. And censorship and capital punishment would have to go. I'd also change the laws relating to divorce. The Arabian system makes sense to me. You simply say "Piss off" to your wife three times and you're divorced, as long as it's done in front of her uncle. Of course, you have to go on paying her upkeep and providing for the children.

[Q] Playboy: Of all the parts you've played, what speech means the most to you?

[A] O'Toole: Something Vladimir says in Sam Beckett's Waiting for Godot: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener."

[Q] Playboy: Are you afraid of dying?

[A] O'Toole: Petrified.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] O'Toole: Because there's no future in it.

[Q] Playboy: When did you last think you were about to die?

[A] O'Toole: About four o'clock this morning. A few weeks ago I watched a commercial on television. It was selling insurance, and I hadn't realized how graphic and Grand Guignol they'd got. There's a fellow on the beach with his wife and ten children romping around in the sand, and suddenly they all dissolve. And he thinks: "Must insure with the Prudential" or whatever. But if I was going to die, I'm afraid I wouldn't give a damn about anyone. A man in New York once asked me what I'd like engraved on my tombstone, and I said: "'Oh Christ, what a pity.'"

[Q] Playboy: What would you like people to say about you as an actor, when you're dead?

[A] O'Toole: "God rest his soul." That's all. While I'm alive, I've got only one interest, one concern and one love, and that's work. Afterward, nothing matters. I wouldn't mind borrowing W. G. Fields' epitaph: "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." Or possibly something that a friend of mine wrote on the program of a bad Pirandello play I appeared in: "Poor Pete--out of his depth in the shallows."

[Q] Playboy: If you had to sum up your attitude toward life with a story, what would it be?

[A] O'Toole: I once knew a fellow who committed robbery with violence, and he was sentenced to a long prison stretch and 12 strokes of the cat. He'd been injured during the robbery, so they put him in hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. During the administration of the cat, he fainted after six strokes, and the doctor put him in hospital again. And he got very friendly with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they got him well enough to go back and take the next six strokes. I saw him afterward and I said: "Oh, Jesus--that bloody law, that bloody judge!" But he said: "I don't want the fellow who made the law, and I don't want the fellow who passed the sentence. All I want is the fellow who held the bloody whip."