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Part I. Anger, Suez and Archie Rice

“There they are,” George Devine told John Osborne, surveying The Entertainer‘s opening night audience. “All waiting for you…Same old pack of c***s, fashionable assholes. Just more of them than usual.” The Royal Court had arrived: no longer outcasts, they were London’s main attraction.

Look Back in Anger vindicated Devine’s model of a writer’s-based theater. Osborne’s success attracted a host of dramatists to Sloane Square. There’s Shelagh Delaney, whose A Taste of Honey featured a working-class girl pregnant from an interracial dalliance; Harold Pinter’s The Room, a bizarre “comedy of menace”; and John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, which aimed a Gatling gun at its audience. Devine encouraged them, however bold or experimental. “You always knew he was on the writer’s side,” Osborne said.

Peter O’Toole called the Royal Court actors “an...

I met Peter O'Toole in a night-school class at the Leeds College of Commerce in the early 1950s, where we were both doing an English literature O-level as part of the young journalists' training scheme.

One of the set books that year was a volume of Tennyson and Browning, and Peter asked if he could borrow my edition until he could buy one of his own. But that was the last I saw of either him or the book, until, that is, I was commissioned in 1959 to write a profile of Willis Hall, whose The Long and the Short and the Tall was running in the West End with O'Toole in one of the starring roles.

I mentioned the lost volume to Willis and there followed an invitation to join them both at a London theatre pub where, in spite of the alcoholic haze, I seem to remember the book being gracefully returned.

The actor was one of a generation of hard-drinking stars who gloried in their wild exploits and lost weekends

• Peter O'Toole: a life in pictures

• News: Peter O'Toole dies aged 81

Peter O'Toole was the last of the hell-raising actors who ushered in the swinging 60s and was almost as famous for his drinking as for his dazzling eyes.

As with his peers and sometime drinking buddies Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Oliver Reed, much of his best work seems to have been done under the influence.

"We heralded the 60s," he once said. "Me, Burton, Richard Harris – we did in public what everyone else did in private then, and does for show now. We drank in public, we knew about pot."

Both Burton and O'Toole won Oscar nominations for Becket but said they were drunk throughout most of the shooting.

While shooting The Lion in Winter, O'Toole cut off...

Peter O’Toole, arguably the most strikingly charismatic, most eerily handsome, most preternaturally gifted actor of his acting generation, died Saturday at a London hospital at age 81.

O’Toole was part of the 1954 graduating class of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art along with Richard Burton, Albert Finney, and Alan Bates. After a supernova first decade — a 10-year run from 1958 to 1968 that included two stage Hamlets, two filmed Henry IIs, and an incandescent, career-defining title role in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia — O’Toole let the momentum slip. The 1970s were a blur of bombs and bad health...

Todd in his most acclaimed role, as star of The Dam Busters.

The distinguished British actor Richard Todd has passed away at age 90. Todd was a real-life war hero, being among the first paratroopers to enter France on the eve of the Normandy invasion. Todd later starred in two major films recreating the historic event: D-Day, The Sixth of June and The Longest Day. He also starred in the acclaimed WWII adventure The Dam Busters. His eclectic post war career included an eight year stint performing on Britain's West End in the play The Business of Murder and launching a successful dairy business. Among his other films were starring opposite Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart (for which he was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar), The Long and the Short and the Tall (aka Jungle Fighters), Never Let Go in which he starred opposite Peter Sellers, The Hellions, Operation Crossbow...