O'Toole, Peter (1932– ), Irish-born actor, who began his career with the
Bristol Old Vic, 1955–8, and made his first appearance in London in 1956 with the company in Shaw's
Major Barbara. He built up a formidable reputation in Bristol, particularly with his Jimmy Porter in
Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1957. He made his first outstanding success in London as the earthy, cynical trouble-maker Private Bamforth in Willis
Hall's The Long and the Short and the Tall (1959). In 1960 he was with the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre company, playing Petruchio in
The Taming of the Shrew and giving an electrifying performance as Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice. He then moved into films and made only intermittent returns to the stage in the title-role in
Brecht's Baal, as Hamlet in the
National Theatre company's inaugural production (both in 1963), and as the Yorkshire novelist-hero of David
Mercer's Ride a Cock Horse (1965). A year later he was in Dublin to play Jack Boyle in
O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock, and in 1969 at the
Abbey Theatre there as Vladimir in
Beckett's Waiting for Godot. He returned to the Bristol Old Vic in 1973 in the title-role of
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, and in 1980 he returned to the London stage to give a controversial performance as Macbeth for the Old Vic Company (see
PROSPECT THEATRE COMPANY). He later appeared in the West End in several plays by Shaw:
Man and Superman in 1982,
Pygmalion (as Professor Higgins) in 1984 (NY, 1987), and
The Apple Cart in 1986. In 1989 he gave a virtuoso display as a well-known contemporary columnist in Keith Waterhouse's
Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell.
