Born to a vagabond bookie working the U.K.’s racetracks, O’Toole as a very young man “became the most notorious sailor in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy,” before working as a hawker of balloons, a paparazzo, a newsman, and a steeplejack. He drifted into the London Theatre and studied ballet.
Reed thin, toweringly tall, and larger than life, with blue eyes as pale as an autumn morning, O’Toole brought his tormented personality to stage and screen, exhibiting a galvanizing mania with a booming speech pattern evocative of the most chauvinistic days of the British Empire. With drinking buddies like Richard Burton, O’Toole was the last of the dying breed of orgiastic hell-raisers in the tradition of Errol Flynn. Off screen, O’Toole starred in week-long binges and sex orgies of near biblical proportions. He equalled Don Juan’s legendary 1,003 seductions, bedding everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Princess Margaret, who relentlessly pursued him.
This illusion-shattering overview of Peter O’Toole’s hell-raising (or at least very naughty) life is unique in publishing—there’s never before been a biography that’s anything like it.
