Peter O'Toole dead at 81 years

[Thanas]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-25393557

I love his work.

[Ahriman238]

Oh.

That's truly unfortunate, he was one of the acting greats, the people I point to when I ask why our generation has nobody like this.

[Simon_Jester]

Would you care to expand on that, Ahriman?

[Ahriman238]

I grew up seeing Lawrence and Man of La Mancha a million times. I can quote How to Steal a Million and The Day They Robbed The Bank of England, pretty much begining to end without laying up. To say nothing of all his stage work doing Shakespeare. I always think of him in company with Alec Guiness, Ian Mckellan, Lawrence Olivier and such.

[Elfdart]

My favorite Peter O'Toole movie:

[Thanas]

I grew up seeing Lawrence and Man of La Mancha a million times. I can quote How to Steal a Million and The Day They Robbed The Bank of England, pretty much begining to end without laying up. To say nothing of all his stage work doing Shakespeare. I always think of him in company with Alec Guiness, Ian Mckellan, Lawrence Olivier and such.

How to steal a million has the most fantastic dialogue ever. O'Toole and Hepburn deliver a masterclass in that one.

[Elfdart]

Peter O'Toole's best line:

[Simon_Jester]

I grew up seeing Lawrence and Man of La Mancha a million times. I can quote How to Steal a Million and The Day They Robbed The Bank of England, pretty much begining to end without laying up. To say nothing of all his stage work doing Shakespeare. I always think of him in company with Alec Guiness, Ian Mckellan, Lawrence Olivier and such.

This may suggest a few of the reasons we (appear to?) have no one like him now. Speculatively, a few connected points come to mind:

-Film and stage acting have become more dissociated, such that there are relatively fewer stage actors on film.
-The focus of film artists has come to concentrate more on cinematography and less on what we might call, well... acting.
-A successful film star has more need for physical presence and less need for social presence, because a film star will usually appear before audiences twenty feet tall, with all their physical faults and features magnified. Again, this tends to detract from what we normally call 'acting.'

[Ahriman238]

It's more than just that. Peter had a class and style to him that you never really see in contemporary actors, and all the presence and gravitas of the stage. Even when he was playing these quirky characters like Lawrence or Alan Swam the weirdness was understated like he could do these quirky things but still function as a person and not "oh lord, what a weirdo." like, say, Jim Carrey. There's a charm and sincerity and you can tell he takes every role so damn seriously, you can't help but take it seriously too. Olivier and Guinness were the same way, John Hurt and Morgan Freeman do it too. Whatever they're saying or doing seems perfectly plausible because they can sell it to you perfectly.

I don't know, it's really hard to describe and I'm sure I'm making a terrible mess of it. But that is the quality of a truly great actor.

And as long as everyone is sharing their favorite memories-

[Scrib]

Peter O'Toole's best line:

This may not be the forum, but I wonder how writers feel when they see things like "O'Toole's best line". Now, I'm assuming that this wasn't some sort of improvisation and his delivery was good (I don't know if it was good enough to be more important than the line as written -if it was written), but still I expect one to be a bit bitter if your role in facilitating people's enjoyment of a performance is just completely ignored.

[Simon_Jester]

It's more than just that. Peter had a class and style to him that you never really see in contemporary actors, and all the presence and gravitas of the stage. Even when he was playing these quirky characters like Lawrence or Alan Swam the weirdness was understated like he could do these quirky things but still function as a person and not "oh lord, what a weirdo..."

That is what I was getting at with my first two comments, or part of it. On stage, an actor's "presence and gravitas" dominate a performance. There's such a thing as choreography but it's tied up in the actor's ability to convey emotion through posture and body language, which is part of 'presence.'

On film, the actor's presence still matters, but many directors seem to concentrate on other means to move the audience, most of which don't exist in a stage performance: things like creative use of cuts and camera angles, and heavy use of the soundtrack.

Film is older now than it was in the 1950s and '60s, and less dependent on stage for guidance as to how to make good art. That would tend to explain why it seems to have partly abandoned stage presence.

Then again, there's also been a cultural shift: O'Toole's career comes out of the 1950s and '60s. My impression is that back then, there was a fairly sharp divide between serious works (in which a man's dignity was almost always preserved, even if something funny was happening) and... call them 'silly' ones (where it wasn't). This encouraged the actor to cultivate the gravitas you mention, and it would tend to show through even in nominally comical works, as part of the 'norm' that any comedy necessarily violates to make humor.

like, say, Jim Carrey. There's a charm and sincerity and you can tell he takes every role so damn seriously, you can't help but take it seriously too. Olivier and Guinness were the same way, John Hurt and Morgan Freeman do it too. Whatever they're saying or doing seems perfectly plausible because they can sell it to you perfectly.

I don't know, it's really hard to describe and I'm sure I'm making a terrible mess of it. But that is the quality of a truly great actor.

Contrasting this to Jim Carrey is interesting, because Jim Carrey's career is tied up in comedy- he is a comedian, and his stage presence focuses on silliness and extracting laughs from the audience. To make that work, he tends to act in unexpected, outlandish, and exaggerated ways, because he is trying to make you laugh all the time, not just occasionally.

Most "serious" screen actors don't do that. However, a lot of the ones who don't mostly stay out of comedy in the first place. Maybe the explanation is that 'comic actor' has become a typecast role for a relative minority of all actors. These actors become clowns, and their availability tends to push the industry to produce movies full of people clowning, shrinking the niche for 'serious comedy' of the sort O'Toole got into.

[Darth Yan]

A little late but god damn it. I really loved him in Lawrence of Arabia.

[LadyTevar]

A bit late seeing this

Peter O'toole as Henry in "The Lion in Winter" is often called "required viewing" for the SCA. He and Katherine Hepburn are simply fantastic as the old married couple that can't live together.