Peter O'Toole pictured recently in Galway

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Someone once said that death's door is one of Peter O'Toole 's regular residences. The eight-time Academy Award -nominated Irish actor looks frail but dapper in cravat and pinkjumper today in his residence: the penthouse suite at the Radisson Hotel in Galway . The Galway Film Fleadh, in association with the Irish Film & Television Academy (IFTA), is playing tribute to him tonight. Peter is very much thelast of the gang that included, to name but two, Richards Burton and Harris. The last of his kind, he is still bursting with lifeat 74 years of age. He says his longevity despite the odds has"nothing to do with my habits, nothing to do with the way I chooseto live my life. It is all to do with genetics. My dad went at 86.A car killed him. He was crossing the road. He left the bookie at5.30pm going for the pub."
He slams his fist down on the palm of his hand to indicate a carimpacting with his dear old dad. "He lived for about three months,but it took a car to take the old bugger away."
What will it take to take you away? "Probably the same," he says .
Peter O'Toole is a witty and epically engaging raconteur. It is anunparalleled joy to have a conversation with him. He reads, hesays, some of Shakespeare 's 154 sonnets most days. When asked if this is a form ofTranscendental Meditation, he smiles and says, "If anything, it isthe opposite of Transatlantic Meditation. I find it stirs my mind.It is not meditative at all."
What great truths did Shakespeare's sonnets teach you aboutromantic love?
"Not a sausage," he laughs. "I know nothing."
Who was the love of your life? "Ah!" he says not answering thequestion. He picks up the book I am reading, God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens . "Ah, Hitchens," O'Toole says. "What was that other book? Dawkins?The God Delusion! Yes, I'd read bits of it. I felt he was shoutingat me and telling things that I half knew. I thought, 'Hang on,mate, give us a little bit of slack.' He was so dogmatic."
You were used to dogma, presumably, being brought up Catholic in West Yorkshire of the Forties. "I am born and raised a Holy Roman," he smiles,serenely. "I was an altar boy. I wasn't touched." Noel Coward , it transpired, would have liked to have touched him. Havingwatched Peter star in Lawrence of Arabia , Coward famously said, "If Lawrence had looked like him therewould have been many more than 12 Turks queuing up for thebuggering session". Reminded of this, he laughs: "He used to callit Florence Of Arabia! Noel and I were good friends. He was adelightful man."
So, it transpires, is Peter O'Toole. He is full to the brim withstories. I love, in particular, the story of a terroristorganisation member who wrote a letter saying he had left a bombfor the actor.
"I don't know what you've heard," he begins, eyeing me up and down,"but we were filming in an apartment at the side of a famousrestaurant -- I can't remember it's bloody name -- on the banks ofthe Seine . I went to the apartment in the morning to find some very gloomyfaces and a piece of paper. Someone said to me, 'You speak Arabic,don't you, guv?' It looked like Arabic. I looked at it, and Ithought this is mirror writing. I held it to the mirror: 'IRA bomb.You have two hours to evacuate the building. O'Toole is a traitorfor playing a CIA man.' The building was completely evacuated. Iwas around the corner, waiting for it to blow up."
O'Toole says he doesn't think about his own death much these days.Not that he doesn't think about the past -- and what a gloriouspast it is. He can recall sharing a dressing room with George Formby in Manchester in the Fifties. "He kept two ukuleles, tuned to different keys,and I asked him if one was a spare. 'No,' said Formby, 'I find itvery difficult to change key, so I don't bother. I just pick upanother ukulele.' The phrase became a favourite -- wheneveranything would go wrong, I'd say: 'Pick up another ukulele!'."
He recalls a night on the tiles with Samuel Beckett in the Fifties that began with Sam telling him that he thought nodecent film could be made with dialogue -- it had all been downhillsince the silent era. "I was at a party in Harley Street. I can'ttell you the exact date but it has got to be about 57-ish. Krapp'sLast Tape, which was then called Monologue For McGhee, was justout. At the party, I didn't know that many people and I was givingout about something, I forget what." Suddenly, he remembers: " Buster Keaton and silent films. And suddenly this man ... did you ever meet Sam?He had the most staring eyes. And he had a fierce temper. And hetook his specs off. He just went: 'Bahh!', and he gave me a speechabout silent films and this, that and the other. We calmed downeventually and we took a bottle from the party and ended up sittingin a doorway drinking a bottle of whiskey, surrounded by London fog. The only person near us was a policeman and we gave him adrop."
I ask him when was the last time he had a drop. "This morning. Itwasn't whiskey. It was wine."
I thought you gave up years ago for health reasons.
"Oh, for God's sake," he harrumphs. "Who have you been reading? Putit like this: less than I used to, but I still enjoy a drop, yes."
In 1976, courtesy of his heavy drinking, O'Toole underwent surgeryto have his pancreas and a large portion of his stomach removed."Listen," he says with a smile beginning again on his lips, "Idon't really want to discuss my internal economy."
His late-friend Richard Burton (who Peter once found draped drunkenly over a bass player in aLondon club, "beautifully chanting Shakespeare's sonnets to apicked-out iambic accompaniment") said that: "Acting is usuallyregarded as a craft and I claim it to be nothing more except in thehands of the odd few men and women who, once or twice in alifetime, elevate it into something odd and mystical and deeplydisturbing. I believe Peter O'Toole to have this strange quality."
He still possesses this quality. Even allowing for hyperbole, he isa legend. And as with all legends there are many stories that havegrown legs about him over the years.
Did you really go for a drink in Paris and wake up in Corsica? "Unfortunately, its true," he laughs."Yes. Those days are gone. I'm afraid all my friends have gone," hesays almost wistfully.
By rights, Peter O'Toole should have been gone too. In his hellionheyday, he did crazy things such as drunkenly climb up the walls of Lloyds Bank in London. "It was simple then. You have heard of Buildering?" hesays referring to the act of climbing illegally and without ropeson the outside of buildings and other artificial structures.
"Well, my friend Patrick Oliver -- O Liver, I call him -- and me had read about buildering. So wedecided to builder everywhere. Churches. Town halls. Always atnight. And on Lloyds Bank!" he laughs. "Where did you find thatstory?" he asks, laughing more and more.
I wondered whether he and his pals -- Burton and Harris et al --saw themselves as carrying on the traditions of Rimbaud andBaudelaire and Byron, or were you just pissheads who liked lunacy."We were just ordinary, law-abiding souls who liked a drop. "
I suspect there was more to it than that. I tell him my theory.Peter once said that he and The Two Richards were young peoplewho'd been children throughout the war. He added that you can onlyimagine what it was like in 1946 not to be bombed, not to berationed, not to be restricted. I asked him was that the key to himliving a life in the realm of the senses.
"Firstly, when the war ended, my daddy and I, we jumped on a boatand we came to Dublin , and I bought eight-hour killed meat, butter, nylon stockings. Iwent to a place called The Green Cuckatoo in O'Connell Street. Thiswas 1945-46. That's the first thing we did. The sense of liberty,the sense of freedom of no war, no more bombs. I mean, Dublin wasbombed. Belfast was bombed."
But did that post-war freedom -- with the knowledge during the warthat life could have ended at any time -- form your sense of beinga libertine? "A libertine?" he smiles. "Libertine. That's a goodword. You make me sound like Rochester ." Did you think you were indestructible? You're still here. Othersaren't.
"Quite. How can you tell?" he laughs. "But ... they're all gone.Harris is gone, not too long gone. [Donal] McCann, gone. Burton,gone. But Burton went a long while ago. Harris was the most recent,and McCann," he says. "I even found myself associated with one ofthe other hell raisers, Oliver Reed , all the time. I never meet the boy."
What was it like being a hell raiser? "It's like asking a fire whatit's like to be a fire."
What's it like to be a fire, Peter? "Hot," he says, roaring withlaughter.
Looking back, did you regret the effect it must have had on yourmarriages?
"I didn't have 'marriages'. I had one perfectly sound marriagewhich tottered on for quite a while," he says of his 20-year unionto Welsh actress Sian Phillips (they married in 1960 and had two daughters : Kate and Patricia O'Toole . He has a son, Lorcan, from a later relationship.
Be that as it may, but you got married. "I did. In Dudley," helaughs. "She was a lovely woman." Asked how she would describe him,he says with a rueful smile: "I have no idea." She said you werevolatile (She also called O'Toole, a "dangerous, disruptive humanbeing".) "Volatile? That's hardly a novel thought," Peter grins."She is a lovely woman. Bright and intelligent."
He isn't the eternal luvvie you might have suspected. He thinksSamuel Beckett was, for instance, a one-trick pony. "Oh God. Imean, Sam Beckett . I think when the dust settles after a few generations Sam Beckettwill be known as a brilliant French novelist, one of the greatest,who, by chance, wrote an extraordinary play called Waiting ForGodot. En Attendant Godot. And it works. I don't think much of theothers. That's heretical, I'm told."
By the same logic, do you think that Peter O'Toole had essentiallyone movie in him?
"What?" he gasps. I repeat the question as the blood drains fromhis face. "Me? What does that mean? How can I possibly? Thequestion is meaningless."
O'Toole, who also starred in classics such as Goodbye Mr Chips andThe Lion in Winter, professes himself delighted with the one pieceof work that -- like Waiting For Godot with Beckett -- will beeternally associated with Peter O'Toole: Lawrence Of Arabia.
"I am delighted. If it had been a bore, but it was two years of ayoung man's life, from 28 to 30, spent in amazing conditions. It isa greatly loved movie all over the world. Oddly enough, I wasrecently reading one of the first press notices it ever had in England , and it wasn't all that favourable. It lacked 'a light touch' orsomething." Peter O'Toole has a marvellous turn of phrase, equalparts Byron, Will Self and Bernard Manning . A car breaking down isn't a car breaking down. It is shaking like"a Sheffield dog shitting penknives". "Well," he laughs, "that's an old saying,I first heard it in Sheffield." Lest we forget, he devoted anentire section in one of his memoirs to the laundering of "shittyknickers". He laughs at the memory, but not as much when I askedhim where he was born.
"It depends what paper you read." He once said, "I'm notworking-class. I come from the criminal classes. You see,technically, daddy was," he says, his eyes brightening at themention of his daddy, "a criminal, because he was a bookie. Andbookies were illegal until 1962 in England. Daddy was a race trackbookie who didn't always go to the tracks. And so he would run alittle book. That was illegal. And so, if he had been caught, hewould have gone to prison. Happily, he wasn't caught. But can youimagine those days? 1962, the pair of us stood in a casino. Therewas a framed 100-pound chip and the mayor and the parson werethere. Two years earlier he would have gone to prison for it. Thatwas his life: avoiding being caught." Was that your life too:avoiding being caught? "You've caught me. Avoiding being caught?"he laughs. "It's not a bad thing. Don't be caught. What's the 11thcommandment? 'Thou shalt not be found out'." And when that unlikelyevent happens, Peter O'Toole can just pick up another ukulele.