When Peter O’Toole blew his entire ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ salary in one night: “We lost all the money we had earned in nine months”
Like many actors of his generation, especially the British set, who all emerged at around the same time, Peter O’Toole often let his vices get the better of him. It might have been his hard-drinking ways that earned him a spot among the pantheon of legendary hell-raisers, but he couldn’t say no to a spot of gambling, either.
The common thread that united O’Toole and his peers wasn’t only their love of a bevvy but the fact they were all among the finest actors in the business. By day, they’d command the stage and screen with incredible performances, but by night, they’d end up three sheets to the wind and continue knocking them back until the sun came up.
O’Toole, Richard Harris, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton, Terence Stamp, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, and Laurence Olivier all rank among the finest acting exports the United Kingdom has ever produced, and every single one of them developed a taste for the hard stuff that did them absolutely no favours in the short-term, and that’s only because Caine scaled back his intake and Hopkins gave it up entirely.
One excess can regularly lead to another, and in O’Toole’s case, that saw him blow all of the money he’d made from Lawrence of Arabia in a single night at the card tables. Most people would learn their lesson and ensure they never did the same thing again, but for reasons known only to him, he went ahead and did the exact same thing again.
David Lean’s sumptuous epic is undoubtedly one of the greatest movies in cinema history and the defining role of O’Toole’s career, which is saying something when he notched eight Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’ and starred in some incredible pictures.
The arduous shoot began in May 1961 and didn’t end until September of the following year, with the cast and crew touching down in Jordan, Morocco, Spain, and Lebanon at various points. To keep himself occupied, O’Toole decided that he and co-star Omar Sharif should frequent their nearest gambling haunts, which didn’t end well.
“We were in Beirut, and we were playing cards, and we lost all the money we had earned in nine months, we lost in one night in Beirut,” he admitted to NPR. That didn’t put him off the idea of seeing if he could turn his fortunes around, but history ultimately repeated itself when enough time had passed for his bank balance to be restored to a decent enough level to fritter it all away.
“Then a year later, we were in Casablanca and all the money we had earned in that year we had lost in two nights,” O’Toole continued. “We weren’t sober, but neither were we unconscious. We were fully aware of the pain and agony of watching all of our pennies go down the swanny.”
That was O’Toole’s approach to life in a nutshell: live it as hard and fast as possible, or there’s no point in living it at all. Unfortunately, it had the potential to be massively detrimental to his finances.
