The Irish Are Coming

Now he was of a certain vintage, the parts offered and taken were appropriate and commanding. And so when Ridley Scott needed an imperial Marcus Aurelius, he went to Harris (Gladiator, 2000). When the time came to find Harry Potter’s genial headmaster at Hogwarts, it was Harris they called (of which more anon). Producers and film insurance executives notwithstanding, he still enjoyed the occasional night on the lash. He once dragged Alan Rickman and Kenneth Branagh out until four in the morning and, according to Rickman, they had a ball: ‘Richard was regaling us with stories about his life, we just sat there with our mouths wide open.’

Harris was without doubt one of the finest actors of the second half of the twentieth century, a fully fledged, high-octane, booze-soaked (for the most part) Irishman who brought a swagger to the silver screen that until then had been lacking. Would he have won more acclaim if he’d curbed what he termed his ‘excessive-compulsive’ nature? Did he care? Prosaic in his analysis of the acting world, Harris commented shortly before he died: ‘Actors take themselves so seriously. Samuel Beckett is important, James Joyce is – they left something behind them. But even Laurence Olivier is totally unimportant. Acting is actually very simple, but actors try to elevate it to an art.’ All the same, I contest that British theatre and film would have been far poorer without him. He was what they call a dangerous actor, one who brought colour, unpredictability and emotional integrity to his every role and raised the bar high for all the compatriots who would follow (as well as setting a vertiginous standard for hellraisers).

Harris may have made his home in London and bought a house in the Bahamas, but he remained a proud Irishman, Munster man and Limerick man to the end. When Munster was playing rugby, you’d often find him cheering from the stand, and he was a regular visitor to his family back in the old country. After his death in 2002, a funeral mass was held in his London home but the coffin was draped in the Irish flag. In a final flourish, his ashes were scattered in the exotic surroundings of his Bahamas home and it is there that he swirls mischievously in the Caribbean air today.

PETER O’TOOLE: the Celtic dynamo

Born 2 August 1932

God, you can love it! But you can’t live in it. Oh, the Irish know despair, by God they do. They are Dostoyevskian about it. ‘Forgive me Father, I have f**ked Mrs Rafferty.’ ‘Ten Hail Marys, son.’ ‘But Father, I didn’t enjoy f**king Mrs Rafferty.’ ‘Good son, good.’

Peter O’Toole is less Irish than Richard Harris in many respects because Harris lived in Ireland till adulthood whereas O’Toole was only a boy when the family emigrated to the UK. But although he had an English accent and took British roles, he always played the Irish card – and when it came to hellraising he was destined to be the last man standing.

O’Toole’s father moved the family from a ruggedly desolate part of Connemara to a Leeds working-class housing estate – what O’Toole later called ‘a Mick community’ – in search of a better and brighter future. Full of Irish ex-pats and hard-nosed working men, as streets go these were meaner than average. Three of his childhood friends would later be hanged for murder. This was no gilded cage and yet a cursory look at the O’Toole parents gives us some insight into what was to come. Dad, Patrick Joseph O’Toole, was an illegal gambler with a fondness for alcohol and Mum, Connie, loved literature and read stories to young Peter when he was a boy. And so, hailing from Ireland’s wild west, reared in a tough part of town in a home that mixed literature and booze with a whiff of rebellion, the foundation stone of the house that Peter would build was laid very early on.

Not unlike Richard Harris, the man who would ride shotgun with him later in life, O’Toole was a poorly child, afflicted as he was with TB, a stammer and poor eyesight. And during his school days he felt the wrath of religious rigour, with nuns who tried to beat him out of left-handedness. O’Toole dedicated a corner of his autobiography to the women in black who tormented him as a youngster, describing the day they went for him after he drew a picture of a horse urinating: ‘Flapping, frantic as startled crows, rattling beads and crucifixes, black hooded heads, black winged sleeves, white celluloid breasts, hard, white bony hands banging, the brides of Christ got very cross indeed.’ Sounding more and more like Alex or one of his droogs in A Clockwork Orange, he continues: ‘They tore up my drawing and began to hit me. This made me more cross than those sexless bits of umbrella could ever be so I joined the dance and hit and tore. ’Tis only a gee-gee having a wee-wee you cruel, mad old ruins.’

Later in life, when he criticized the Catholic Church in general and his Catholic upbringing in particular in an interview in Playboy magazine, O’Toole was surprised to receive a sackful of post from angry priests and nuns: ‘They were shocked. I wrote back saying I was shocked – what were they doing reading Playboy?’

But back to his younger, less sinful days: O’Toole left school early and earned a crust by packing cartons at a local warehouse before landing a job at the Yorkshire Evening News, his local paper, where he went from tea-boy to journalist to bored wannabe: ‘I soon found out that, rather than chronicling an event, I wanted to be the event.’

Abandoning journalism, he looked to drama as a potential path before being grabbed from his nascent career by a stint of National Service that saw him joining the Royal Navy as a signals operator. This unlikely nautical adventure was followed by a further bid for theatrical glory. Aiming for the top, O’Toole tried his hand at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) but was refused entry on the basis of his academic shortcomings. The flighty would-be actor blew his top and the tirade was fortuitously overheard by RADA principal Sir Kenneth Barnes, who set up an audition that O’Toole passed, resulting in a place at one of the world’s foremost theatre schools. It wasn’t long before the lithe Irishman was treading the boards and propping up bar counters around London.

O’Toole’s acting career was firmly launched in 1959 when he starred in the play The Long and the Short and the Tall by Willis Hall, directed by Lindsay Anderson (the same director who had launched Harris, soon to be O’Toole’s drinking buddy). His understudy was one Michael Caine, who quickly came to realize that the worst part of being Peter O’Toole’s understudy was wondering whether the star would return from the pub before the curtain rose. Night after night, O’Toole kept Caine waiting until the last minute before cantering past and straight on to the stage. Young Caine was charged with sourcing parties, alcohol and women, tasks that drove the beleaguered understudy to comment: ‘I’d have made a wonderful pimp.’

There’s always a delicious irony to the idea of an Irishman taking on the role of a British national treasure and so it is entirely appropriate for me to dwell on one of British cinema’s twentieth-century masterpieces, Lawrence of Arabia. The lead role in this gargantuan 1962 production was originally to be played by Marlon Brando, then Albert Finney, but ultimately it came to Peter O’Toole. And by the end of filming, O’Toole was giving Lawrence a run for his money when it came to exploits in the Middle East.

Egyptian film star Omar Sharif became a close friend, a man with whom he had way too much fun in Beirut’s hot spots. Asked by a journalist if that entailed getting up to no good, O’Toole replied with a grin: ‘Oh darling, do you consider it to be no good? We considered it to be very good indeed.’ Among the less salubrious exploits was the night he threw a glass of champagne in a local official’s face, leading co-star Alec Guinness to comment ‘O’Toole could have been killed, shot or strangled and I’m beginning to think it’s a pity he wasn’t.’

The film involved a gruelling and physically brutal schedule but the results were worth it. Seriously. I watched it recently and thought it was pretty trippy. Back in 1962, they knew a star was born and O’Toole lapped it up. ‘I woke up one morning to find I was famous,’ he remarked. ‘I bought a Rolls-Royce and drove down Sunset Boulevard, wearing dark specs and a white suit, waving like the queen mum. Nobody took any f**king notice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.’

And yet, the world did notice Peter O’Toole. It was hard not to. Always wearing his trademark green socks, O’Toole played up his Irishness and floated around town, drinking lavishly and followed by wisps of Gauloise cigarettes that he smoked in an ostentatious cigarette holder. Described by a friend as smelling ‘like a French train’, Peter was a committed smoker. When John Goodman, his co-star on King Ralph (1991), offered to get him an ashtray after he flicked his ash on the ground, he cried, ‘Make the world your ashtray, my boy.’

This was the stuff of O’Toole legend: a half-sozzled, licentious thespian with swagger and a talent to back up all the talk. As part of a set of working-class boys who made good, O’Toole, Harris and Richard Burton became their own West End rat pack, lascivious lounge lizards who took the art of candle burning to new levels. Looking back on those days, O’Toole is unapologetic: ‘I do not regret one drop. We weren’t solitary, boring drinkers, sipping vodka alone in a room. No, no, no: we went out on the town, baby, and we did our drinking in public! … It was a fuel for various adventures.’ Such fuel allegedly saw him go for a drink in Paris one evening only to wake up in Corsica.

The fuel would come in handy on one of his visits home to Ireland. There was the time O’Toole stayed with his old friend, the movie director John Huston, at his estate in the Wicklow Mountains. The two boys had had a long night of it when we join the story as recounted by O’Toole:

Came the morning, there was John in a green kimono with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. He said: ‘Pete, this is a day for gettin’ drunk!’ We finished up on horses, he in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it – but with a shih-tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound, who are of course incapable of doing anything. And John eventually came off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!

As with Harris, the booze was blamed for damaging his health. There was a serious illness in 1976, when he required major surgery to remove his pancreas and part of his stomach; then he nearly died in 1978 after succumbing to a severe blood disorder. The booze certainly helped to destroy his marriage to Welsh actress Siân Phillips, from whom he was divorced in 1979. He later said he had studied women for a very long time, had given it his best try, but still he knew ‘nothing’.

O’Toole returned to work after his brushes with death but his 1980 Macbeth at the Old Vic made headlines for all the wrong reasons: ‘He delivers every line with a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of deaf Eskimos,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian. The morning after the disastrous premiere O’Toole opened the door to journalists seeking his reaction and gamely laughed it off – ‘It’s just a bloody play, darlings!’ – but it must have rankled. Later he won his fair share of theatre awards, including a lifetime achievement Olivier Award, but dismissed them as ‘trinkets’.

By his seventy-first year, his film work had earned him seven Oscar nominations – two of them for the same character (he played Henry II in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)) but none of those shiny statuettes. The Academy attempted to bestow an honorary award but O’Toole initially turned it down, telling the bewildered committee that he was ‘still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright’ before urging them to ‘please defer the honour until I am eighty’. The Academy (and his daughters) convinced the contrary actor to change his mind and, despite his upset at the lack of booze at the event (apart from the vodka he managed to have smuggled in), Peter O’Toole took to the stage to accept the ‘lovely bugger’ in 2003.

As if to prove a point, he powered his way to the acting frontline once more when he was nominated for yet another Oscar following a classy performance as an ageing Casanova in the 2006 film Venus. It was as if he wanted to score a goal in extra time and, despite not winning the award, O’Toole proved he was still very much in the running. When he retired in 2012, saying, ‘The heart of it has gone out of me’, he was bowing out more or less at the top of his game.

Despite playing all those English establishment figures, he always remained an Irishman to the core, with a house in Galway as well as one in London. He played cricket for County Galway and often went to Five Nations rugby matches with the two Richards, Harris and Burton. There is a special place in any Irishman’s heart for watching England being defeated at rugby. We’re at one with the Scots and the Welsh on this. There’s a Celtic brotherhood of freedom-fighting, feisty people who have been oppressed by the English. So for the Irish, it’s sweet to win at Murrayfield and the Millennium Stadium but the sweetest victory of all is to decapitate the English rose at Twickenham – as I’m sure Harris and O’Toole would have agreed.

Harris has gone now, Burton went long ago, and O’Toole is the last man standing, bemoaning the fact that his drinking partners have left him alone at the bar, an act he considers ‘wretchedly inconsiderate’. But behind the beer goggles, who is the man that theatre critic Kenneth Tynan described as an ‘insomniac Celtic dynamo’? We’ll probably never know; even his own sister, Patricia, can’t figure him out. When she met an actress who was about to star with him, she asked, ‘At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is? What goes on in there, in the f**king thing he calls a mind?’

It’s a question that may never be adequately answered but whatever it is that goes on in there, it helped produce a flamboyant bon viveur who became a legend in his own lifetime – both for his acting and for his hellraising. They simply don’t make ’em like that any more.

JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS: born to be king

Born 27 July 1977

My favourite actors, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, they never fulfilled their potential. You’d see absolute brilliance, but they burned the candle at both ends … If you want to be in for the long haul, you have to be up to it. You can’t go out all night chasing girls and partying.

Hellraisers often fall into one of two categories. One kind tends to pursue the path of boldness, enjoying the notoriety and basking in the anti-glory that ensues. The other type is inclined to fall into the hell that gets raised. This species of hellraiser is more an accidental tourist to a land they didn’t particularly want to visit. It is into this latter category that Jonathan Rhys Meyers finds himself, more out of accident than design. A fine actor with a stormy relationship when it comes to booze, Jonathan is well aware of the moniker that has followed him around since he first hit the headlines for less than appetizing reasons. But rather than relishing the hellraiser label, like his predecessors Harris and O’Toole, he has battled it. If you want a career in the film industry today you have to clean up your act so they can get insurance cover for you. It’s all about the money. I’m in two minds whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing because our hellraisers tend to add to the gaiety of the nation. They’re more fun. I personally prefer a bit of roughness round the edges.

Colin Farrell looked set to inherit the hellraiser mantle for a while, with a sex tape, a taste for hard liquor and a long line of model/actress girlfriends, but he managed to go through the mill and come out the other side. I’ve met him several times and can confirm that he’s clean as a whistle, as well as being an extremely affable, articulate and witty guy. We talked about his relationship with the late Elizabeth Taylor in the years before her death – she got him to read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem at her funeral, where he was one of the only people there who was not a family member. He’s sober now but he’s still got that naughty glint in his eye and I think that must have been what attracted the woman whose great love was Richard Burton, one of the most infamous hellraisers of all time.

As to why men like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell and those who blazed a trail of destruction and staggering acting ability before them end up as tabloid headlines, the best place to look is at the beginning of their stories. For Meyers, it was in Dublin city that a premature baby named Jonathan Michael Francis O’Keefe was born and kept in hospital for seven months before being allowed to go home to his mother, Geraldine, on Valentine’s Day 1978. Within three years, the family had moved to Cork and Jonathan’s parents had separated. Abandoned by his father, he stayed with his mother in a council flat. Unhappy at school, Jonathan Rhys Meyers abandoned education – or, rather, education abandoned him when he was expelled at fifteen years old for truancy. His story around this time is one of poverty and neglect. Geraldine O’Keefe had a serious drink problem and whatever money came in from the state swiftly found a home in the local pub: ‘She drank her dole money all the time. The reason she had no money was that she was going out with a lot of other women who had no money, and you start buying drinks all round and it’s gone. So you have a lot of friends on Thursday when you have money, and it’s all happy. And Friday morning you wake up and have nothing.’

With little else to do, Jonathan headed for the local pool hall and it was there his life changed dramatically in every sense of the word as casting agents happened upon the sultry-looking young man with movie star looks and an attitude to match. An audition followed, he met a director, and within months he was starring in a commercial for Knorr, got paid £500 and thought: ‘What boy is not going to say, “I’ll do this”? I wanted to act because it was soft money.’ Soon afterwards, and by now a fully fledged aspiring actor, Jonathan arrived on the set of Neil Jordan’s biopic Michael Collins (1996), in which he played the assassin of the Irish revolutionary, and felt very much at home: ‘It was just the whole atmosphere, the whole buzz about it, the big cameras and, suddenly, it was kind of like, this is a pretty f**king cool job.’

Success didn’t come easily or quickly and Jonathan had to graft to get good parts. Countless auditions were coupled with ‘talk’ of major parts in films like Minority Report and Spider Man (and at one point, the next James Bond!), none of which came to pass – but there was good news as the roles started to trickle in. His presence was required and lauded in television projects like Gormenghast (2000) and movies that include Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Vanity Fair (2004), Matchpoint (2005) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). Jonathan’s star was on the rise, but as he has said himself, ‘Overnight success takes about ten years.’

A major break came when Jonathan was cast as Elvis in a CBS mini-series (2005). Not only could he transcend the Irish accent and take on a plausible American one but he got the pelvic moves and facial twitches dead on. A Golden Globe quickly followed and the future looked bright. However, within a year, his mother Geraldine died aged just fifty. It was a traumatic time for the young actor and there were stories of dramatic bust-ups with his girlfriend and drinking bouts that ended badly. In a move that distances him from the old-school hellraisers, at the age of just twenty-nine, Jonathan checked into rehab. At the time, he told reporters, ‘I am not a hellraiser. I drank for a year and then realised it didn’t work for me any more.’

For a while, he replaced the pub with the gym but admitted it was hard to give up drinking, especially when filming in Dublin. He was a man in mourning, in the public eye and in trouble and in some ways there’s a deeper tragedy underlying Jonathan’s hellraising, one that lacks the sheen of the boozed-up glamour of O’Toole or Harris. Since then there have been a few messy and troublesome scraps in airports and more stints in rehab, but I can tell you that when he came on my show he was slurping nothing more intoxicating than the coffee. He was very calm and a proper gentleman in the Peter O’Toole mould, rather than the tabloid creature that has been created around him. He’s got money now but rather than investing in the fancy cars and bling, he’s bought himself homes in London, Dublin, Morocco and LA – which all sounds eminently sensible for a poor Irish lad made good.

It should be noted that throughout the whole torrid time, Jonathan was keeping the acting show on the road with arguably his most acclaimed performance to date as Henry VIII in the phenomenally successful mini-series The Tudors, a role that won him an Irish Film and Television Academy Award in the Best Actor in a Television Series category, 2008. It’s a role that he appeared to relish and one he was more than proud of: ‘People have said Henry VIII didn’t look like me. Fair enough. But no critic can tell me that how I play Henry isn’t right, because I play him a hell of a lot closer to history than people admit. He was an egotistical, spoilt brat, born with the arrogance that everything he had was his by right.’

Meyers was following in the footsteps of Charles Laughton, Richard Burton, Robert Shaw and Keith Michell but he took the role by the scruff of the neck and did it his way – including all the sex scenes, which he said were ‘like having sex in a Walmart on a Saturday afternoon’.

Jonathan’s own life story couldn’t be further removed from that of the most married monarch of them all but you can tell there’s plenty more to come from him. Although he’s already shown his versatility in going from the King of Rock’n’roll to the King of England, I personally think this actor’s best years lie ahead of him if he can keep the demons at bay.

He rejects the hellraiser label, saying: ‘I kind of like people having this idea that I’m this wild rebellious guy. But the reality is that I’m not, and I’m not quite sure I want to reveal how boring my life is. Of course, as a young Irish actor you’re tarred before you start. It’s the enduring cliché.’

What I think he’s got in common with the other Irish hellraisers is the ability to play edgy, troubled and explosive characters – perhaps because he’s got all that Celtic rage bottled up inside him. Let’s park this one for now as ‘work in progress’.

* * *

It’s curious that all three of the hellraisers I’ve featured here came from difficult backgrounds and fought to achieve their success. They’ve got an irrepressible, restless spirits and boundless raw talent. Perhaps that self-destruct gene can be channelled into creativity, supplying the high-voltage electrical power that each of them possesses as an actor. Of course, you don’t have to have an intense love affair with liquor to be a great actor – there are loads who don’t, some of whom I’ve featured in Chapter 7. But the drinker’s unpredictability gives them an edge and makes you feel you don’t quite know what they’re going to do next – even when they’re sober.

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THE COMEDIANS

IF YOU WANT TO SEE how much Anglo-Irish attitudes have changed over the last decades, just take a look at the humour. The Bernard Manning era when every paddy was an idiot and ‘How many Irishmen does it take to change a lightbulb?’ jokes were ten-a-penny have long gone. It would be like doing a joke about a Pakistani or a black woman or a gay man: it’s not only politically incorrect but can be illegal and every right-thinking person considers them bad taste. Of course, in Ireland we’re allowed our own self-deprecating humour but it’s got to be on our own terms. We’ll crack a joke about ourselves and call ourselves paddies – but the British are not allowed the paddywhackery now, and some Irish people even got a bit hot under the collar in the 1970s when Dave Allen dipped into it.