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Peter O'Toole

For a time in the 1960s Peter O’Toole was as famous for his hell-raising as his acting, a pity as he was a very fine actor indeed. Trained at RADA – he claimed he tried for a place there because of the gorgeous student actresses – he was always a theatre performer at heart and in style, though he went on to become a major film star and to receive eight Oscar nominations, never winning one (the Academy eventually awarded him an honorary version). Like his friends Richard Burton and Richard Harris he was an outsider in the rather nepotistic British theatre establishment, and like them too his success came from intelligence as well as personal magnetism. His film CV included The Lion in Winter and What’s New Pussycat, a pairing that shows his breadth. But O’Toole will be remembered most, of course, for Lawrence of Arabia, where his acting power and physical beauty contributed hugely to making it one of the greatest British pictures ever made. A blue-eyed, perfect cheek-boned, witty and whimsical hero.

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