The lost weekend of Michael Caine and Peter O’Toole
Almost as much as he was famed for his string of award-nominated performances on stage and screen spanning decades, Peter O’Toole was every bit as infamous for his escapades away from the bright lights. One of the most notorious hellraisers in an era that was positively overloaded with them, one wild weekend saw him permanently lose a young Michael Caine as a drinking buddy.
In the late 1950s, when he was still juggling a nascent film career with treading the boards, the man born Maurice Micklewhite was O’Toole’s understudy for a 1959 run of The Long and the Short and the Tall at London’s Royal Court Theatre in 1959. The two quickly struck up a fast friendship, but it didn’t take long for the future two-time Academy Award winner in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category to realise that he was out of his depth trying to keep up with his mentor’s legendary penchant for alcohol.
Speaking to Conan O’Brien, Caine admitted that while the cast of the production – which featured Robert Shaw, Terence Stamp, and Richard Harris – may “sound like a lot of people who became famous,” his perception of his hard-drinking castmates was that they were “a lot of drunks.” Of course, he includes himself as part of that generalisation but nonetheless intimates that it was O’Toole who led him ever so slightly astray.
The pair ventured out for dinner one Friday night, only for Caine to regale the story of how he’d woken up in a flat he was adamant he’d never seen before. Naturally, his first bleary-eyed question was to ask his cohort, “What time is it?” Never one to do things by half, O’Toole responded in kind: “Never mind what time it is, what fucking day is it?”
As it turned out, the clock had somehow spun out of control and lapsed into Monday evening, and the duo were inevitably required to be onstage for their latest performance of The Long and the Short and the Tall that very evening. In fact, they were due on stage imminently and had to overcome the mother of all hangovers. Yet, they still managed to perform as required.
With Caine seeking more clarification on the weekend he’d lost entirely from memory, he soon discovered the owner of the restaurant where they’d been dining had banned them both for life without acquiescing to his request to find out exactly what it was that they’d done. Ever helpful, Caine turned to his more experienced troublemaker for advice, where O’Toole warned him that you should “never ask what you did, it’s better not to know.”
Perhaps wisely, Caine took his more established counterpart’s wisdom at face value, but not before swearing he’d never hit the pub with O’Toole again. Sadly, the mystery of their alcohol-fuelled odyssey remains forever unsolved.
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