The movie Peter O’Toole called “an example of true, true bottomless stupidity”
When parents tell their children not to smoke or drink, they usually try to couch it in terms of altruism that a life of hard drinking and carousing will only lead to pain and misery, so do your future self a favour and stay out of it, but what they probably will not talk about is Peter O’Toole, because he renders all cautionary tales moot.
By all accounts, O’Toole was one of the hardest drinkers in Hollywood, which is really (really) saying something. Alongside Richard Burton, he drank his way through most of the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s while maintaining a starry acting career, but unlike the former, he seemed to have an absolutely fantastic time doing it. He nearly died several times, of course, but when he finally kicked the bucket in 2013, he’d made it all the way to 81.
Whether through financial necessity or love of the game, he worked all the way to the end of his life and beyond, thanks to a handful of posthumous releases, but in that time, there were plenty of movies that he probably wished he hadn’t made. The Nutcracker Prince was hardly necessary, and that bonkers supernatural thriller Phantoms was pretty uncalled for, too, but for O’Toole, the dumbest of all of his films was a harmless comedy in which he played a plummy royal secretary.
“King Ralph is an example of true, true bottomless stupidity,” he told the BBC in 2007, “This was a script that was on very, very thin ice indeed”.
Directed by David S Ward, the film takes place shortly after the entire royal family is accidentally electrocuted to death by a photographer (hilarious!), and the nearest heir to the throne is a slacker of a lounge singer in Las Vegas, played by John Goodman. O’Toole co-stars as the surviving servant of the crown who tries to tame the Yank’s revolting Americanness.
It’s a profoundly idiotic premise, and the execution isn’t much better, but O’Toole thought that it had some potential. Despite the thinness of the ice of the script, he explained, they had skaters who could handle it, such as Goodman, Leslie Phillips, of Carry On fame, Richard Griffiths, and character actor James Villiers, who were all part of the cast, as was English acting royalty John Hurt, but none of it mattered because, according to O’Toole, the director thought he was dealing with Shakespeare, not a bit of fluff.
The actor might have thought the whole thing was a lost opportunity, but Goodman had other recollections, and in a 2019 interview, The Big Lebowski star revealed that he struck up a friendship with his late co-star during the production of the film.
O’Toole would regale him with stories, and he would hang breathlessly on every word, and since the English actor had given up drinking by then, he satisfied himself by watching Goodman drink.
The former might not have mentioned this when discussing the production of King Ralph, but it’s a wholesome image of the lanky, greying Briton and gregarious American shooting the breeze over a single pint at a dingy pub in the early ‘90s, enough to make you believe in the magic of cinema, even if there was no magic whatsoever on screen.
