“Venus” (2006)
Initially, when offered an honorary Oscar in 2003, Peter O’Toole wrote the Academy a letter turning it down, telling them he was “still in the game, and might win the bugger outright.” He was eventually persuaded to accept it (watch his terrific speech below), but true to his intentions, found himself back in the Kodak Theater only three years later for Roger Michell‘s “Venus,” and while he was thwarted for the eighth time (Forest Whitaker won for “The Last King Of Scotland“), he couldn’t have found a better Academy swansong than with this role, that sums up so much of what made him special. Reuniting Michell with Hanif Kureshi, the writer of the similarly-themed “The Mother,” the film sees O’Toole play Maurice, an actor reduced to playing a grandfather in a TV soap who strikes up a curious, complicated relationship with the great-niece (Jodie Whittaker) of his best friend (Leslie Phillips). There’s a hamminess to the part that wouldn’t work if he was playing anything other than an elderly luvvie, but it feels firmly authentic here (his scenes with Phillips, and with Vanessa Redgrave as his ex-wife are particularly touching), while Whittaker, in her screen debut, provides a spark of youthful energy that O’Toole responds to; his depiction of a life-long lover given one last brush with a lust that he ultimately knows will never be reciprocated, is rather heartbreaking. And yet O’Toole also plays it with a light touch, once more displaying his gift for physical comedy in a way that belies his age—the scene where he accidentally interrupts Whittaker’s nude modelling class is low-brow, but pitch-perfectly played.
“Ratatouille” (2007)
We can see that this might be a controversial choice—how could we deny a place for “The Lion In Winter” or “Becket” in favor of a film in which O’Toole’s indelible face never appeared? But it’s a mark of O’Toole’s performance that his brief supporting role in Pixar and Brad Bird‘s “Ratatouille” got calls for a ninth Oscar nomination from many critics, and it’s as great a voiceover turn as has ever been given by an actor. When he first saunters into the restaurant, O’Toole’s character, food writer Anton Ego, is a sinister, lanky villain, threatening Linguini with imminent critical evisceration, and O’Toole’s lugubrious tones couldn’t be a more perfect match. And yet, as it turns, the character is the emotional heart of the film, his mind changed by a Proustian flashback caused by rat Remy’s cooking, and O’Toole gets a killer monologue by the end, both skewering and justifying the art of criticism; a bold thing for a kids’ flick about talking rodents. And what’s more, O’Toole delivers it like it was a Shakespearean soliloquy, bestowing decades of experience and gravitas, and making that payoff truly sing. If you’re not sure about our pick on this one, just try and imagine how the film would have worked with anyone other than O’Toole voicing Ego.
