Lord Save Me My Drug Is My Baby
Peter O'Toole hated Christmas. "My father was the only person I'd spend Christmas with, because he despised Christmas like me," says his daughter Kate. "We happily ignored Christmas." A noted thespian herself, she has contributed to a documentary about the legendary actor — Peter O'Toole: Réalta & Rógaire — to be shown on TG4 on Christmas Day.
"Christmas was a lovely opportunity to unplug the phones," she says. "We saw it as a great time to escape from the world and stay in bed reading, uninterrupted. Neither of us had, or believed in, the Victorian ideal of a perfect family, which is where Christmas as it's celebrated today comes from. F**k that noise."
Nor does she believe in the mythology that has built up about her father's heavy drinking. "He never called himself a hellraiser. It was a lazy headline. And untrue."
What are the other great untruths about him? "That he f**ked Princess Margaret," she says. "Most definitely not my father's type. He found her slightly terrifying but often amusing."
Her abiding memory of her father is his loyalty to his friends.
"Throughout his life he remained true to his earliest friends from childhood in Leeds, helping them through good times and bad, attentive to them unto death.
Sadly, all his close friends died long before he did. It must have been dreadful to be the last person standing."
She can remember the last conversation they had. It was in December 2013 at Wellington Hospital in St John's Wood, London.
"He kind of died, then came back to life, technically, and for some reason, the hospital kept him going for about five weeks," she says. "Occasionally we would talk about something. Not much, though. He was concerned about me. He wanted to know if I was having a happy life."
And was she? "I was, actually."
Close
Peter O'Toole, Sian Phillips and baby Kate in 1960
Peter O'Toole died on December 14, 2013. A week later Kate spoke at his funeral at Golders Green Crematorium. She said she had lost a great friend and a great father.
"He was wonderful company," she tells me over lunch with Don Pablo, a miniature dachshund, asleep on her lap. "I was like my dad, temperamentally and in lots of ways. We like rooms at the same temperature — hot. We like cushions at the same firmness. We have the same sense of humour. We like the same food. Comfort food. Nothing fancy. Michelin stars? F**k off. My dad and I were kind of simpatico in lots of ways. There was a lifelong bond between us."
Sadly, that was not the case with Kate and her mother, the highly respected and award-winning actress Si â n Phillips.
"She was never nice to me," says Kate. "I never spent one moment in my mother's company that wasn't fraught with tension. We've never been close. I have no happy memories of being in her presence. They're all rather stressful."
Did she feel her mother was jealous of her relationship with her father?
"Those are questions for her to answer."
Kate O'Toole was in London last month to film her part in the crime series Silent Witness , which airs in January.
"I play the lead actor's mother. She's in a nursing home. We haven't seen each other for a long time."
Being in London always stirs emotions for her. She grew up in a four-storey
Georgian house in Hampstead.
"There was a game [my father] played with me as a child in the house — get around the living room without touching the floor. You would jump from armchair to armchair."
In the living room, the record player would be on with spoken-word albums like John Gielgud in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, while Seán O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock with Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack would be played nightly. All of this she absorbed from an early age.
Kate was born on February 26, 1960, when her father was in rehearsals at Stratford-upon-Avon for the role of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice . She first met him properly at the age of two in Spain. She was flown to Seville where he was filming the end of David Lean's Oscar-winning epic Lawrence of Arabia .
"He was dressed in full costume and make-up as Lawrence," she says of O'Toole's most famous role, that of Colonel TE Lawrence, for which he received his first Oscar nomination. "Can you imagine a young child seeing her father for the first time like that?"
Her parents were regularly away for long periods on acting jobs. This meant she and her younger sister Patricia were raised by their beloved Welsh maternal grandmother and a long succession of nannies, one of whom was a gay black man from Alabama, named Lonnie Trimble — an unusual nanny to have in those days.
"My dad — who was a friend of Martin Luther King's — got Lonnie out of the South. Lonnie was fabulous. He left us to go and be Brian Epstein's valet. That's how I got to meet all The Beatles."
The O'Toole house in London was a fabulous second home to theatre luvvies, film stars and royalty.
"Peter Sellers came when he was depressed. Dad thought he was a pain in the hole. But he still gave him a room."
Irish actor Donal McCann used to stay over too. "He was one of my father's best friends. Dad thought that there were two actors in the world who were as good or better than him: Donal and Jack Nicholson. Donal had a wonderful mind.
"My grandmother ran the house. Donal used to call her 'Desk Sergeant Phillips'. Lord Snowdon rang once and when he said who he was, she said, 'And I'm the Queen of Sheba', and hung up."
Close
Peter O'Toole and Kate in New York City in June 1987. Photo: Ron Galella
Prince Margaret's photographer husband Antony Armstrong-Jones took pictures of Kate and her mother which hang in the National Gallery in London to this day.
In February 1976, Si â n Phillips left O'Toole. She was seeing Robin Sachs, a man 17 years her junior. The couple's divorce came through in late 1979 and was hardly a surprise. The surprise, perhaps, was that the marriage had lasted 20 years.
"My father did have affairs and so did my mother. She wrote about it in her autobiography," says Kate, referring to the second volume of her mother's memoirs, Public Places , published in 2001.
Phillips married Sachs on Christmas Eve, 1979. "I was not invited to the wedding," her elder daughter says.
Phillips writes that you and your sister were away on holiday, I point out.
"That's bo****ks," she says. "It was Christmas, my sister and I were both in London but neither of us knew she was getting married again. Her best friend went to the wedding in London but no one from her family was told or invited. We only learned about it after the event."
Your mother also dedicates Public Places to you and your sister, I say. "Correct. [We] have no idea why. Particularly as a great deal of the book as it pertains to us is inaccurate. You'd think from reading it that we were reared by her. We weren't. After the first few months of infancy, two years of my life were spent living in Wales with her parents, my grandparents.
"The circumstances of that arrangement were never made clear to me. By the time my sister was born a year later there was an army of staff in place in a grand house, and nannies who did everything while mother was busy working in television, theatre and film.
"We children lived apart from the rest of the household, being on the top floor of the house in a self-contained nursery with its own kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms for staff. Neither of us can remember ever being bathed, dressed or fed by our mother up there. It just didn't happen. She was a cold and distant figure who frightened us whenever our paths crossed downstairs. That didn't happen too often."
At 88 years of age, Si â n Phillips is still going strong and recently completed a Beckett double-bill at the Theatre Royal in Bath, to rave reviews. "We are estranged all our lives," Kate says. "My mother will never speak to you."
Phillips, as predicted, did not respond to several requests for comment.
Kate has certainly inherited her father's joie de vivre. And, like her father, she has also seemed to live many lives .
In 1982, when she moved to America, to study at the Yale School of Drama in Connecticut, she married Tony, her American boyfriend from Astoria in Queens. "We met as graduate students at Yale. It seems like a lifetime ago."
Dropping out of Yale, she waitressed and acted in New York city. Her first job was with Jim Sheridan. In 1984, she made her debut as Colette in Brendan Behan's The Hostage , which was directed by Sheridan at the Irish Arts Center on West 51st Street. Sheridan had to take an acting part at the last minute when one of the actors was ill and O'Toole recalls being "onstage with him the night his daughter, Tess, was born".
Kate and Tony lived in a Soho in a loft that was so big she used to bicycle around the living room. "We turned it into a theatre for 96 people with a stage."
Their marriage ended after four years and O'Toole's acting career in the States seemed destined to be just as short-lived.
"That label of being Irish wasn't cool like it is now. It was pre Gabriel Byrne and Liam Neeson. It became frustrating in New York. I started to get more work in Ireland than in America."
In 1986 in Ireland, she acted opposite Stephen Rea in Double Cross , again directed by Sheridan. The Derry-based group which put on the play, Field Day Theatre Company, was run by Brian Friel and Rea, both founding members, and Seamus Heaney.
"I do remember getting my cheques signed by Friel and Heaney, and thinking, 'Damn it, I wish I could afford to keep one', which of course I couldn't. They were fantastic people. Heaney, in particular, was such fun. If you stood at the bar with him, you'd be in great company. His default setting was humorous.
"Friel was different. Men in the North are more inclined to prefer the company of men. Friel was lovely but he was a little bit like that.
"Rea, despite the lugubrious face, was very funny."
Close
Actress Kate O'Toole with Don Pablo. Photo: Mark Condren
Her acting career was taking off. In 1987 she played Miss Furlong in a film adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead . Three years later she played Julia in Druid's A Little Like Drowning , written by Anthony Minghella, and the following year, in another Druid production, she played Dunya in The Donahue Sisters , directed by Garry Hynes. "Garry really stretched me," she says.
In the mid-1990s she relocated to the West of Ireland to a cottage in Clifden that once belonged to her maternal grandmother, Mamgu. It's a place Kate knew well – ín the early 1970s her parents built a big house in the village, and she spent all her holidays there. Her father's ashes were scattered into the sea off nearby Eyrephort Beach.
"Clifden is the only part of my life that has never changed and has always been consistent." She still lives in the cottage, as well as having an apartment in Dublin.
In 1998, she acted in the film Dancing at Lughnasa . She became friends with art collector Garech Browne, staying with him at his estate in Luggala, Wicklow. She stayed in a guest room that had a Francis Bacon triptych on the wall.
"I always enjoyed waking up to Bacon in bed," she laughs.
There was never a dull moment with the Guinness heir. She once travelled with him to the Beckett Festival in Enniskillen. "I was to conduct a public interview with him about his friendship with Sam [Beckett], who often used to visit Luggala, having walked over there from Foxrock. Walking was a meditation for Beckett."
In Enniskillen, hilarity ensued when Garech decided he didn't really feel like answering any of Kate's questions about Beckett. He was more interested in taking a boat out to see the monastic settlement on Devenish, a holy island on Lough Derg. In the end, they managed do the interview and visit the island.
That night, to celebrate, they ate curry in the local Indian restaurant. "The food and the service were so indifferent we thought we'd stumbled into an episode of Fawlty Towers ," she recalls. "I cried with laughter as Garech reminisced about his marriage in India to Princess Purna while making unfavourable comparisons between the cuisine at the Enniskillen Indian and that served at his three-day long wedding feast."
She thinks this happened circa 2013. Around the same time, she was appointed to the Irish Film Board.
In 2019 she read poetry in a tribute to Leonard Cohen at the Bord Gáis Theatre with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. In July 2020, when Covid restrictions began to lift, she toured with Playboy of the Western World: The Musical. She has just wrapped a Christmas movie in Clare for Hallmark, which comes out next year.
She is the image of her father. Her blue eyes light up when she recalls their adventures together. One such tale is of going to a match with him at Lord's cricket ground in London in the mid-2000s. En route, Peter asked the driver to stop the car outside a former Beatles' house at St John's Wood, a short distance from Lord's.
"My father really enjoyed hating Paul McCartney," she says. McCartney had recently separated from his wife Heather Mills, who years before had her leg amputated when she had been hit by a motorcycle. "So, my father produced a fake leg, which he propped up against the door of McCartney's house."
Attached to the prosthetic leg was a tag. It read, in O'Toole's best handwriting: 'Only one previous owner.' "Then he ran back to the car, and we sped away.
"He was an anarchist. Children can sense people who are going to be naughty and break the rules — and he liked that."
She broke the drink-driving rules herself in Christmas of 2007 and was convicted of driving over the legal limit in Connemara, disqualified for three years and fined €500.
"Everybody in the middle of the country did that," she says of those days. "It wasn't like I was driving around Dublin city centre mowing down bus queues of people. There was only one car on that road — and it was mine. It was three in the morning. I didn't kill anyone. Why weren't the police on the Galway road where the accidents happen?"
At the risk of invoking Mr Freud, a great deal of Kate O'Toole's life seems to come back to her parents. In 2000, Si â n Phillips said in an interview she had no urge to have children: "[Peter] O'Toole was the one who wanted kids. If it had been left to me,
I wouldn't have had them."
"When I was 20 my mother told me to my face that having me was one of the worst experiences of her life," Kate says. "I've always known my mother would have preferred not to have children. I guess I have inherited that from her, because I never wanted any.
"I have never been in a huge, long relationship. The longest was for about seven years. If love means finding someone who you want to marry and have children with, then I have never been in love."
In Connemara, back in the 1970s, she had a relationship with a local man and when it ended she remained close with his family.
"Here's the thing," she says, as Don Pablo starts to wake up on his owner's lap.
"I have always been on the lookout for surrogate mothers. So, his mother was my mother de facto for a long time before she died.
"I have had lots of surrogate mums. There was one break-up I had that affected me far more than it should have done, and I realised that it wasn't losing him — it was losing his mother."
Even Don Pablo knows the reason why.
'Peter O'Toole: Réalta & Rógaire' runs on Christmas Day at 9.25pm on TG4
Lord Save Me My Drug Is My Baby
Source: https://www.independent.ie/life/actress-kate-otoole-i-had-a-great-relationship-with-my-father-peter-otoole-my-mother-she-was-never-nice-to-me-41138424.html
0 Response to "Lord Save Me My Drug Is My Baby"
Post a Comment