Peter O'Toole

Peter James O'Toole, born on 2 August 1932 and raised in the south Leeds suburb of Hunslet, was an Irish actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television over more than five decades. His father, Patrick Joseph O'Toole, worked as a metal plater, football player, and bookmaker, while his mother, Constance Jane Eliot, was a Scottish nurse. Though O'Toole acknowledged uncertainty about his exact birthplace, a birth certificate filed at the Leeds General Register Office records his birth at St James's University Hospital in Leeds, Yorkshire. He grew up alongside an elder sister, Patricia, and was raised in the Catholic faith. After leaving school, he worked briefly as a trainee journalist and photographer at the Yorkshire Evening Post before completing national service as a signaller in the Royal Navy.

O'Toole trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London from 1952 to 1954 on a scholarship, having previously been turned away from the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin because he could not speak Irish. His RADA class included Albert Finney, Alan Bates, and Brian Bedford. Following his training, he built his early reputation as a Shakespearean actor at the Bristol Old Vic between 1956 and 1958, appearing in productions including King Lear, Othello, Major Barbara, and The Recruiting Officer. During that period he also played Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. He made his West End debut in January 1959 in The Long and the Short and the Tall at the Royal Court, directed by Lindsay Anderson and co-starring Robert Shaw and Edward Judd, a performance that earned him Best Actor of the Year honors. In 1960 he spent a nine-month season at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, taking on roles including Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

On Broadway, O'Toole appeared in 1987 in the play Pygmalion, in which he took the role of Henry Higgins, a character he had first played decades earlier at the Bristol Old Vic. His Broadway appearance placed him among the select group of major international stage actors to perform in New York. O'Toole was originally from Connemara, Ireland.

Among his most celebrated stage achievements was playing the title role in Hamlet in the National Theatre's inaugural production in 1963. He later received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Comedy Performance for his portrayal of Jeffrey Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell in 1990. His stage work also included a 1982 production of Shaw's Man and Superman that toured before playing at the Haymarket Theatre in London, a role he had first performed at the Bristol Old Vic in 1958.

O'Toole made his film debut in 1959 and received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for portraying T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia in 1962. He went on to receive seven additional Oscar nominations: for King Henry II in Becket and The Lion in Winter, a schoolteacher in Goodbye Mr. Chips, a paranoid schizophrenic in The Ruling Class, a film director in The Stunt Man, a film actor in My Favorite Year, and an elderly man in Venus. His eight nominations without a win tie him with Glenn Close for the most acting nominations in Academy Award history without a victory. In 2002 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented him with the Honorary Award for career achievement. He also appeared in films including What's New Pussycat, How to Steal a Million, Man of La Mancha, Caligula, Zulu Dawn, Supergirl, The Last Emperor, Troy, Stardust, and Dean Spanley, and voiced the restaurant critic Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille in 2007.

On television, O'Toole won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Movie for his portrayal of Bishop Pierre Cauchon in the CBS miniseries Joan of Arc in 1999. He received additional Emmy nominations for playing Lucius Flavius Silva in the ABC miniseries Masada in 1981 and Paul von Hindenburg in Hitler: The Rise of Evil in 2003. His accolades across his career also included a BAFTA Award and four Golden Globe Awards, as well as nominations for a Grammy Award. O'Toole died on 14 December 2013.