Peter O'Toole on stage: a star's capacity to cast an unforgettable spell

He found stardom on screen in Lawrence of Arabia, but O'Toole was a legendary and often mesmerising presence in the theatre.

Today's papers all carry big pictures of Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia. Although that role made him an international star and launched a long film career, it shouldn't be forgotten that he was a formidable stage actor. What made him unusual was that he was something of a throwback to an earlier era: I'd describe him as a charismatic romantic with the glamour found in actor-managers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. And, if he returned to the stage only spasmodically after his film career took off, it may have been because he didn't fit easily into the new director-driven theatre.

I first heard of O'Toole when stories spread about his legendary performances at Bristol Old Vic in the late 1950s. In particular, there were reports of his Hamlet and Jimmy Porter, in which he combined harsh diction with headlong speed. I first set eyes on the man himself when he played Shylock, Petruchio and Thersites in Troilus and Cressida with breathtaking assurance as part of Peter Hall's opening season at Stratford in 1960. His Shylock was especially mesmerising: a tall, imposing, bearded figure who rent his gown of watered silk in anguish when he learned of Jessica's desertion, and who made his Christian enemies look even shabbier than usual.

My one and only encounter with O'Toole came a few years later in Pompeii, where he was filming a musical version of Goodbye Mr Chips. I've never forgotten his friendliness, his capacity to drink large brandies in the heat of an Italian afternoon and his love of words: I remember him telling me that he was drawn to Mr Chips because the character, in Terence Rattigan's movie-script, was "full of chalk dust and reflections". And O'Toole's passion for language animated his later performances in Shaw's Pygmalion, Man and Superman and The Apple Cart and in his perennial fascination with Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

The low point in O'Toole's stage career came in 1980 when he played Macbeth at the Old Vic. It was a flamboyant, under-directed performance in which, as I wrote at the time, O'Toole barked the lines as if playing to an audience of deaf Inuit. But he more than made up for that with his sublime performance in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, in 1989. As the Soho libertine reflecting on a life spent with publicans and sinners, O'Toole allowed the character's serpentine sentences to trail away into a smoke-wreathed world of his imagination, and caught the essence of a man whose unkempt appearance was belied by his verbal style. A part of me wishes O'Toole had made more of his theatrical talents. But I'll always be grateful to have seen an actor who had presence, intelligence and a star's capacity to cast an unforgettable spell.