Tracking OToole The Cinema and the stage lost one its most brilliant practitioners when Peter

OToole passed on December 14, 2013. OToole was one of the lions of the cinema who also doubled as a titanic stage/television performer. In his later years he was equally 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 when David 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 the films 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 who has fallen off his camel he tells his friend, Ali, nothing is written. When he strides into an English bar and demands the racist bartender serve a young Arab soldier, he calmly states, weve taken Akaba, a port city in modern Jordan that was supposedly invulnerable from attack. Despite the brilliance of that performance, for many it is OTooles many minor roles that are intriguing. Theres the blood curdling scream as JC, a crazed English Lord who thinks he is Christ, or something much worse in Peter Medaks 1972 black comedy, The Ruling Class. He is a daffy philanderer in Woody Allens Whats 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), OToole cooly schools Brad Pitt as King Priam when Brad Pitt says, you are still my enemy in the morning, OToole deftly fires back, you are still my enemy tonight. In science fiction and horror OToole was eerie in 1998s Phantoms with lines like, Its here, its there, its all around us. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, he adjudicates a case on fairies in A Fairy Tale(1997). He ponders to Harry Houdini, when Columbus knelt in prayer, on the edge of America, what prophetic eye saw all that the new continent might do to effect the destiny of the world? In 1980s television film Masada, he plays a Roman legionnaire securing a Jewish rebellion at Masada. A Roman soldier reports he has burned a farm village. He replies, and having miserably failed to collect a prime source of the empires tax revenue, your remedy was to dispossess and ruin the farmers who might one day replace that source? OToole was atop his game as gruff food critic Anton Ego in Disney/Pixars Ratatouille (2007), pronouncing sentence on the little rats meal. He says, but there are times when a critic truly risks something and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent and new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new. An extraordinary meal

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