A Lion In Winter

There are very few actors whose legacy is as broad and deep as that of Peter O'Toole. He burst on to the screen in "Lawrence of Arabia" almost 40 years ago and followed that with epic performances in films such as A Lion in Winter where he starred opposite Katharine Hepburn.

He has made history and headlines both in and out of the movies, living a life that has been itself an epic tale — one of great success and great failure. It is a life he has rarely spoken about publicly until now, at 68, when he sat down last fall with CBS News 60 Minutes II Correspondent Charlie Rose in London.

"So I picked up my books of reference and everything written on old age, age and youth, and I found myself at complete variance with every, practically every sentiment uttered. So I had to start from scratch," O'Toole says.

He confides he thinks aging is "a gas," and that he loves it.

He has been impressive for all of his 68 years. He has portrayed King Henry II, Lord Jim, Shylock, Macbeth, Alan Swann, and the 14th Earl of Gurney who believes he is Jesus Christ.

Born in Connemara, Ireland, O'Toole is the son of Constance Jane Eliot Ferguson, a Scot, and Patrick O'Toole, a gambler and bookmaker who moved to England shortly before World War II.

It was there that young Peter made what he called his first stage appearance as an altar boy: "I served Mass every morning at 6:30, first Mass, usually for a young priest who was serving his first Mass in a tiny place called the Lady Chapel. And if he was particularly nervous, we'd put an extra slug of the Algerian altar wine in to calm him down," O'Toole says laughing.

"I've seen a few priests who really thought they had the odor of sanctity on them. In fact, they had had a little bit too much of Our Savior," he adds.

He recalls that he loathed the nuns. "They were brutal. Specifically, a few nuns were brutal to me."

Once when asked to draw a horse, he drew one relieving itself. A nun ripped it up. She beat him "savagely" on the hands with a ruler, he says.

His father was a professional gambler, who loved the cards, and would bet on anything including "two pieces of sugar. You moisten them a little bit, and bet which sugar the fly will settle on first," he explains.

O'Toole had a hankering for gambling as well. "And I love a little punt now and then — a punt, a bet," he says.

"Omar Sharif and I in a Beirut casino with my sister in attendance and her husband in one night, playing Chemmy. We did nine months wages from Lawrence of Arabia, in one night," he says, laughing.

Early on, O'Toole traded his photographer's camera at a local newspaper and his bell-bottoms in the Royal Navy for an actor's life in the great British tradition. Before he was 30, he had played more thn 70 major stage roles, including Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. And it was while playing Shylock that he received a phone call that would change his life — from legendary film director David Lean.

O'Toole says he had no idea what the call was about.

Lean told O'Toole "Lawrence of Arabia" would take five months to shoot. It took two years and three months, almost all of it in the 125-degree heat of the desert.

Lawrence of Arabia won seven Academy Awards, although none for O'Toole. Yet it made him the biggest international film star on the planet.

"David came to me on the first day of filming and said, 'Pete, this is the beginning of an adventure.' And I looked at it in those terms," he recalls.

"I was tense and nervous every single day of shooting," O'Toole says. "For me, of all people, to play a rather sensitive, possibly homosexual, strange, little quiet-voiced bloke, me? I will try it, perhaps. But, you know, I was Shylock, and Petruchio."

And then he played King Henry II, opposite his friend and hero Richard Burton, in Beckett.

And later he portrayed an older King Henry II in A Lion in Winter with one of his earliest fans and supporters, Katharine Hepburn, as Eleanor of Aquataine.

"Well, after Spencer's death, I got to know Kate quite well," O'Toole says.

Not even another Oscar-nominated turn as a demented earl in The Ruling Class could prevent O'Toole's slump in the 1970s. The great film roles stopped coming and his personal life became a nightmare, including major surgery to repair a lifetime of excess.

What had happened?

"It's plumbing," he says.

"I'm not going to talk about plumbing," he adds, not impolitely. "I was quite ill for a while."

Then his divorce came. His dog died, too, he says.

O'Toole came roaring back in the '80s with more Oscar-nominated roles, including the over-the-hill swashbuckler Alan Swann in My Favorite Year. It was his seventh nomination as best actor without a win, a dubious record indeed.

Does he care about the Oscars?

"Oh, yes, of course," he says.

O'Toole found success on the stage late last year when he won raves at the London Old Vic as Jeffrey Bernard, a real-life tabloid columnist who reflects on his wanton life one night when he is locked inside his favorite pub.

Now, his life is about cricket at the Marlybourne Club — and about finishing the third volume of his memoirs, titled Loitering With Intent. But most of all, it's about Lorcan Patrick O'Toole, his son, now 17 years old, the product of an affair with an American woman and the subject of an ugly custody battle that O'Toole largely won.

Is his son going to be an actor?

"He wants to be, at the moment, but he could change his mind tomorrow and become a cricketeer," O'Toole says. "He could change himind after that and become a musician."

Says O'Toole, "I was asked about my epitaph. And it was on a leather jacket. And pinned to it was what I decided in a comical moment would be my epitaph. It was from the Sycamore Dry Cleaners: 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' And it will do."