Old blue eyes is back on top

The body may be ageing, but the eyes still glow a luminescent blue and for the first time in more than two decades the talk once more is of an Oscar performance.

There have been a lot of near-misses in the 50-year screen career of Peter O’Toole. He has been nominated for an Academy Award seven times, including for Lawrence of Arabia, Becket and The Lion in Winter. But the only time he has gone home with the statuette was in 2003 when the Academy conferred on him an honorary award (he initially demurred, saying: “I’m still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright.” But eventually he turned up to accept).

Now the buzz is about Venus, a lowbudget film in which he plays a dying actor who falls in love with a 21-year-old siren played by Jodie Whittaker. The film, written by Hanif Kureishi and containing some pungent sexual moments, seems to divide those who have seen it into those who love it (men) and those who don’t (women). Just about everyone agrees that O’Toole is back to his best. “I’ve not been in anything quite like this before,” he told an interviewer. “No one better for a dirty old man who falls for a sluttish young woman.”

Peter Seamus O’Toole was born in 1932, possibly in Connemara, Co Galway, but he’s not sure. He grew up in Leeds and started as a copy boy at the Yorkshire Evening Post at the age of 14. He won a scholarship to RADA, where his peers included Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Richard Harris. He played Hamlet at the Bristol Old Vic at 24, frequently vomiting into a bucket from stagefright before making his entrance.

“And Introducing Peter O’Toole as T.E.Lawrence”, ran the credit on an international screen debut that turned him into a Sixties superstar. Noël Coward said that if he had been any prettier the film would have had to be called Florence of Arabia.

His impressive film work was matched, possibly even surpassed, by his capacity for alcohol. He stopped boozing on an epic scale after a major pancreatic operation in 1975 but “I still like a drink”. This lent authenticity to his acclaimed performance as the tippling journalist in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.

He was divorced from the actress Siân Phillips, with whom he had two daughters, including actress Kate O’Toole, and he has a son by ex-girlfriend, Karen Brown.

On a break from shooting Venus he fell and fractured a hip but soldiered on. “Peter’s very game,” says director Roger Michell. “But he needs to be treated with care.”

He is working on the third instalment of his autobiography. But while Venus has been called the “perfect bookend to his golden-haired desert warrior” it would be foolhardy to bet against him somehow rising to another meaty role. “You simply have to believe you have a future,” he said last year. “The moment actors start thinking otherwise, they’re dead.”