Peter O'Toole

Open Letters mourns the death of enchanting rogue Peter O’Toole. Performances don’t come finer than his sly, histrionic Henry II, or his sun-touched T.E. Lawrence, or the winking self-parody Alan Swann. The definition of a movie star is an actor who never disappears completely into his roles, who remains in somewise himself and so wins our affection. Peter O’Toole was nothing if not a star. He spoke to a desire in all of us—for elegance, spontaneity, grandeur (not to say grandiloquence), grace, and, or so it seemed, indestructibility. Harold Bloom once said of such characters “heroic vitalists are not larger than life; they are life's largeness.” O’Toole filled each role to capacity but always retained a glimmer in his eye that let you in on the joke. And behind the glimmer there was madness and steel. And behind the steel and the madness, well, there was that glimmer...