"He hates the cold. He's terrified of the cold. He found the cold the most intimidating enemy. I don't think he found any of the rest of it particularly difficult," adds Michell.
On this afternoon, O'Toole is almost congenitally charming, dropping names and anecdotes from a famed life like Hansel tripping along the forest path. Although this role in "Venus" is more naked than almost any before this, he insists he prepared as he always does: "Lock myself in a room and send everybody away and see you in a month or a week or however long it takes until I complete the study and memorize everything that I am going to do. And then I am open for suggestions."
"Vanessa," he says, referring to Vanessa Redgrave, who plays his ex-wife. It at first seems like a non sequitur, but it turns out to be a longer explanation. "I have worked with Vanessa's father. I have worked with Vanessa's children. I have worked with Vanessa's sister, brother and niece. Vanessa and I have never worked together before. We have known each other since the '50s; Vanessa is rooted in the old tradition of study, private, uninhibited, unobserved private studies. So I said in theater parlance, 'Do you know the jokes [the lines]?' And she said, 'Of course.' She said, 'Now I am free.' It liberates you. Then you can take advice or direction, whatever."
*
WARTIME YOUTH
DURING the afternoon, O'Toole offers glimpses of his life, almost like pristine images in a slide show, from which the psychological threads must be deduced. Born in 1932, the son of an Irish bookie, he grew up during World War II, a real "Hope and Glory" childhood. "The war began for us children of the war when we were 7 and then six years later we were 13. And those six years were an eternity. There were no schools from 1942 on." They spent their days playing -- "we were hiding in shelters that were bombed. I was only in three high explosive raids, only three. It is not the scariest thing in my life, but it was scary. And then there were the fire bombs, and we didn't count those because they didn't often go off and they didn't make much scream or much bang, and yet the nearest I have been to blown up was by an incendiary bomb maybe about 30 yards from me."
He initially tried his hand at journalism at the Yorkshire Evening News, which he didn't like much, although "I loved the company. Men really did have tickets for the match in their hats, and they did get drunk after filing some decent copy."
