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Tracking OToole

The Cinema and the stage lost one its most brilliant practitioners when PeterOToole passed on December 14, 2013. OToole was one of the lions of the cinemawho also doubled as a titanic stage/television performer. In his later years he wasequally delightful in character roles, cameos and even animation.

OToole began in the fifties onstage at the Bristol Old Vic playing Shakespeare,Beckett, and Shaw . By 1960 he was a star at the Royal Shakespeare Company whenDavid Lean selected him to play the legendary T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). In a brilliant, raging, and undaunted performance he owned many of thefilms best lines. When he puts out a match with his finger, he tells a young soldier,the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts. When he saves a man whohas fallen off his camel he tells his friend, Ali, nothing is written. When he stridesinto an English bar and demands the racist bartender serve a young Arab soldier, hecalmly states, weve taken Akaba, a port city in modern Jordan that wassupposedly invulnerable from attack.

Despite the brilliance of that performance, for many it is OTooles manyminor roles that are intriguing. Theres the blood curdling scream as JC, a crazedEnglish Lord who thinks he is Christ, or something much worse in Peter Medaks1972 black comedy, The Ruling Class. He is a daffy philanderer in Woody AllensWhats New Pussycat? (supposedly a successful Warren Beatty pickup line) (1965)saying , women have always been a big problem for me.

In Wolfgang Petersens grim Troy (2004), OToo le cooly schools Brad Pitt asKing Priam when Brad Pitt says, you are still my enemy in the morning, OTooledeftly fires back, you are still my enemy tonight.

In science fiction and horror OToole was eerie in 1998s Phantoms with lineslike, Its here, its there, its all around us. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator ofSherlock Holmes, he adjudicates a case on fairies in A Fairy Tale (1997). He pondersto Harry Houdini, when Columbus knelt in prayer, on the edge of America, whatprophetic eye saw all that the new continent might do to effect the destiny of theworld?

In 1980s television film Masada , he plays a Roman legionnaire securing aJewish rebellion at Masada. A Roman soldier reports he has burned a farm village.He replies, a nd having miserably failed to collect a prime source of the empires taxrevenue, your remedy was to dispossess and ruin the farmers who might one dayreplace t hat source?

OToole was atop his game as gruff food critic Anton Ego in Disney/PixarsRatatouille (2007), pronouncing sentence on the little rats meal. He says, but thereare times when a critic truly risks something and that is in the discovery anddefense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent and new creations. Thenew needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new. An extraordinary meal

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from a singularly unexpected source. OToole , himself, was always such anunexpected source of delight.