Lawrence of Leeds

An unknown movie actor checked into an English hospital last week, taking a couple of dozen scripts to bed with him. He is unknown because he has so far appeared in only three minor pictures. He had the scripts with him because producers all over the world are nonetheless begging him to work for them. He needed hospitalization because he is physically shot. During the past 20 months, he has suffered sand burns on his feet, sprained both ankles, cracked an anklebone, torn ligaments in his thigh and hip, dislocated his spine, broken his thumb, partially lost the use of two fingers, sprained his neck, and suffered two concussions. The survivor's name is Peter O'Toole, and he is Sam Spiegel's Lawrence of Arabia.

Two months before its release, Lawrence of Arabia has already been described as the finest motion picture ever made, although no one has seen it but Producer Spiegel and his bodyguard. O'Toole has been hailed as "a new Olivier," becoming roughly the 29th young actor to be so described. Next spring, he and Richard Burton will begin making the film version of Becket (he is Henry II; Burton is Becket). After that, O'Toole will appear in his own movie production of Waiting for Godot. Columbia Pictures and Alan Jay Lerner want him for the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady (making him the new Rex Harrison).

Unshaven Scholarship. A tall, green-eyed, 29-year-old Irishman with an overflow of dark blond hair, O'Toole is at least prepared for his prepackaged stardom. Unlike, say, Warren Beatty--who had never been seen in anything more exacting than a high school football game before being hailed as a superstar--Peter O'Toole was trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and is a veteran of both the Bristol Old Vic and the Shakespeare company at Stratford on Avon. Critics have variously cited his "huge resources" and "sinewy vitality," his capacity to deliver lines so that they "sing like bullets."

His father was a bookie in Connemara who moved to Leeds when Peter was one. Young Peter hated school. "I was far more brilliant than anyone else," he explains. He quit when he was 14 and did amateur theatricals and odd jobs until he was called into the navy. After he was demobbed, he spent his service pay wandering around England, and 23 of his last 30 shillings went for a ticket to see Sir Michael Redgrave impersonate King Lear at Stratford. He hitchhiked to London the next day, walked into the Royal Academy unshaven, and demanded an audition. He won a scholarship.

Haunted Tanks. His reputation as an actor grew almost as fast as his reputation as a loudmouthed roisterer. He drank hard. "I like to make things hum," he says. "I like to shout at the sun and spit at the moon." He had his nose sharpened by a plastic surgeon. His opinions did not need sharpening. He has often refused TV work, not wanting to swim in "the haunted fish tanks." He describes theater folk as "messy, sloppy, opinionated people, and if you can't stand them, you should go off and write slim volumes of poetry."

Now married to Welsh Actress Sian Phillips, he is quieter. "I was a wild man," he says, "but that's not all. I'm an actor. That's my bloody business. I'm the hardest working actor I know." And he knows quite a few. Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Claude Rains and Arthur Kennedy play supporting roles to his T.E. Lawrence in a script written by Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons) and directed by David Lean (The Bridge on the River Kwai). All agree that Peter O'Toole is as good as he seems to think he is. "If I wasn't sure I could deliver the bloody goods, I would get off the bloody stage," says Peter. "Any actor who doesn't feel he's potentially a king should get off the stage and hide up a bamboo tree."

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