LOL, funny how different people view the same thing — I’ve always found LoA to be a boring, insipid excuse of a movie, and a tremendous waste of talent and time. My Favorite Year is, by my lights, inarguably O’Toole’s best film, perhaps because in many ways he’s playing himself.

I’m unusual, though… I also consider My Fair Lady to utterly suck… and can offer a lot of objective criteria for why that is so. The 1930s Pygmalion, with Leslie Howard, is far and away the best version of Shaw’s story on film to date.

To each their own, though. T’would be a boring place if we all liked the same things, wouldn’t it?

O’Toole burst onto the film world with a thunderclap.Just how can anyone be expected to top that role? Obits bemoaned his erratic career, but has his Lawrence performance been topped by anyone since?

Oh. And loved someone’s mention of David Lean as well. Another of my personal favorites. If not my favorite.

Perfectly said, Beverly, and I think that was also pretty much how I felt just watching him in a movie. He seemed to put it all out there, almost too much so.

For a taste of what he was like on stage, there’s a video of a full play he was in posted on YouTube here. It was in 1999, so he wasn’t in his prime, but he still packed a wallop.

I’m glad I got to see him that once. He was one of the great ones.

He may have Said he was going to sober up in 1975, but he didn’t. . . .

Impressions: curtain rises on the market with Eliza Doolittle and her flowers. And, just behind the column there, is one burning blue eye — watching her. I said to my actress friend, “Amazing: all you can see is one eye, and he still draws you to look at him.”

Peter doing the “teacup roll”: a vaudeville trick where you almost drop your teacup, but roll over and rise to your feet still holding it and without spilling a drop. (This scared the crap out of the audience, because we knew he was “half-seas over” by his elongated timing and exorbitant pauses. Peter was triumphant: as if to say, “You thought I would fall, but I DIDN’T!”)

At the intermission: the ladies’ room attendant admitted to my friend and me that Mr. O’Toole’s understudy had stepped in for him eight times, in a six-month run. One of the other audience members asked her, “Is Mr. O’Toole feeling well?” and the attendant, embarrassed, said he’d “had the flu.” She said to Kit and me, “When the understudy is on, we get out of the theater a half-hour sooner.”

Afterwards, at the stage door (my bold actress friend talked me into going to get his autograph): he came out and signed autographs for us. He was even taller than I thought, and quite thin. He looked older than his years, and his color wasn’t good — his alcoholism had taken a heavy toll, which you never see from across the footlights. There was a slight spot on his lapel. His amazing blue eyes swept over our heads with the remoteness of a lighthouse beam, never making contact.

John Simon wrote a review of the show, and alluded sideways to the state of the star.

Kit, when she bought the tickets (weeks in advance), had asked the box office guy bluntly, “Is Mr. O’Toole sober? I don’t want to see his understudy!” The guy replied, “Well, he signed a contract with the Shuberts saying he had an ironclad guarantee that he has to be there for every performance.” She told me later, “For any actor to miss eight performances over the course of a short run is terrible, and for sure his drinking is taking him out.”

So, yeah. Fantastic performer, stunningly handsome, and he had the disease of alcoholism. Seeing him onstage, I was struck by how fantastic his timing was — the effect of the drink was to stretch everything aaaaaalmost to the breaking point, and Just when you couldn’t stand it, he’d continue. I came away with the impression of a magnificent talent struggling under a heavy burden, and just managing to keep its feet.

We were worn out after the show: you were so in sympathy with him, you found yourself Willing him to get through it. But what a tragedy that he had to struggle so with the booze, make light of it though he may.

He was a fine writer, too: check out his autobiography.

Who could ask for more?

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