Peter O’Toole’s recent Golden Globe nomination for best actor in Venus caps a brilliant acting career and strongly suggests an eighth Oscar nomination. But his re-emergence as a leading man — at 74 — also sends a defiant message: there’s plenty of life in the old boy yet.

O’Toole legendarily caroused in the 1960s and 1970s with Omar Sharif (his co-star in Lawrence of Arabia) and the two naughty Richards — Burton and Harris. That era of boozing when, as O’Toole once described it, “one went for a beer in Paris and woke up in Corsica”, exacted its payment in 1974. Was it hard drinking or stomach cancer, or both, that led to surgery to remove parts of O’Toole’s stomach and intestines? Accounts differ. But the ravages of alcohol were clear in that haggard, if still lively, face forever more.

I watched his “comeback” role in The Stunt Man (1980). O’Toole was terrific, and received the sixth of his seven Oscar nominations. I caught him on television the following year, when he played a Roman general in the mini-series Masada. And he was back again for 1982’s My Favorite Year garnering his seventh nomination.

His best small turn came as the British tutor in 1987’s The Last Emperor, in which he seemed to be a variation of Arthur Chipping, the schoolteacher he played in 1969’s Goodbye, Mr Chipps.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences contacted O’Toole about awarding him a lifetime Oscar, he asked if they would defer the prize until he was 80, since he was “still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright”. They apparently talked him out of it. He gamely accepted the trophy in 2003.

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