selenak

Last night, just before I went to bed, I read that Peter O'Toole had died. It wasn't completely unexpected - I had a feeling he might not be well after his retirement from acting earlier this year - and he did get to be 81, but it was still one of those instances where someone whom you never knew personally but who through his profession has given you much in in your life is taken away, and you can't help but mourn.

The obituaries are pouring in, of course. This one is okay. But how do you sum up an actor anyway? Let alone a person? Richard Burton, who was close friends with O'Toole and preceded him in death by several decades, once said about him:

'He looked like a beautiful, emaciated secretary bird ... his voice had a crack like a whip ... most important of all you couldn't take your eyes off him( ...) Acting is usually regarded as a craft and I claim it to be nothing more except in the hands of the odd few men and women who, once or twice in a lifetime, elevate it into something odd and mystical and deeply disturbing. I believe Peter O'Toole to have this strange quality.'

Often both film and audience aren't kind to actors when they lose their youth, and actors, in turn, hide from the consequences of their inevitable aging. O'Toole was fearless about that, and

rozk sums up the result in her review of his last great movie, Venus, beautifully here.

And there is an interview with the man himself in which he comes across as witty, self aware and blazingly alive.