`I am human. All too bloody human.'

The film tells of an aging journeyman actor who spends his days cavorting with his best chum, another aging journeyman actor (Leslie Phillips) and playing stiffs in hospital dramas, until he unexpectedly falls for his friend's niece, a tarty, angry, lost young woman, Jessie, played by newcomer Jodie Whittaker. "It's about a man continuing a hopeless passion for a woman he's too old to fulfill. He's almost enjoying a memory of what he was once capable of," explains screenwriter Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"). "It's a sad film because he has so much sexual desire, but it's rather cheering because he's still going."

Directed by Roger Michell ("Persuasion"), the film catapults O'Toole from the ether of old-world Hollywood into the gritty domain of modern-day London, from the grand tradition of \o7acting\f7 to the current vogue for naturalism at all costs.

These lives are not epic but small and real, and O'Toole strips down for the occasion. Shot without makeup, in natural light, he is unvarnished and almost unrecognizable as a jaunty wreck of a human being grasping for one last flicker of life.

Michell recalls sitting in the Garrick Club, a famed actor's club in London, waiting to meet O'Toole for the first time. "There was a commotion," and suddenly O'Toole was there, climbing up the marble staircase, arm in arm with compatriot Richard Briers. "They were hanging on to each other. I'm not sure who was holding on to whom. There was Peter, mischievous, funny, clever, and very, very alive. I knew before even shaking his hand he was the right man for the part because he has all those combinations of charm and grace, yet he's a person who's quite elderly now, and that brings a wonderful sense of truth and vulnerability to what he does. He's still a swashbuckler, but a swashbuckler who's marching through time."

Indeed, O'Toole appears older than his years but carries himself with perennial panache. The filming took place on the streets of London in midwinter, and O'Toole suggested that the production purchase him a little heater, and a small tent in which he could sit when not acting, so he wouldn't get too cold. "We all thought it was absurd when we heard about it, but it was this rather wonderful invention," says Michell. "Quite a few people would congregate in his tent, having coffee or hot drinks. Then we got into a habit of photographing the tent wherever it was erected, and what resulted is a Christo-like record of the tent all over London.