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      The fuel would come in handy on one of his visits home to Ireland. There was the time O’Toole stayed with his old friend, the movie director John Huston, at his estate in the Wicklow Mountains. The two boys had had a long night of it when we join the story as recounted by O’Toole:

      Came the morning, there was John in a green kimono with a bottle of tequila and two shot glasses. He said: ‘Pete, this is a day for gettin’ drunk!’ We finished up on horses, he in his green kimono, me in my nightie in the pissing rain, carrying rifles, rough-shooting it – but with a shih-tzu dog and an Irish wolfhound, who are of course incapable of doing anything. And John eventually came off the horse and broke his leg! And I was accused by his wife of corrupting him!

      As with Harris, the booze was blamed for damaging his health. There was a serious illness in 1976, when he required major surgery to remove his pancreas and part of his stomach; then he nearly died in 1978 after succumbing to a severe blood disorder. The booze certainly helped to destroy his marriage to Welsh actress Siân Phillips, from whom he was divorced in 1979. He later said he had studied women for a very long time, had given it his best try, but still he knew ‘nothing’.

      O’Toole returned to work after his brushes with death but his 1980 Macbeth at the Old Vic made headlines for all the wrong reasons: ‘He delivers every line with a monotonous tenor bark as if addressing an audience of deaf Eskimos,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian. The morning after the disastrous premiere O’Toole opened the door to journalists seeking his reaction and gamely laughed it off – ‘It’s just a bloody play, darlings!’ – but it must have rankled. Later he won his fair share of theatre awards, including a lifetime achievement Olivier Award, but dismissed them as ‘trinkets’.

      By his seventy-first year, his film work had earned him seven Oscar nominations – two of them for the same character (he played Henry II in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)) but none of those shiny statuettes. The Academy attempted to bestow an honorary award but O’Toole initially turned it down, telling the bewildered committee that he was ‘still in the game and might win the lovely bugger outright’ before urging them to ‘please defer the honour until I am eighty’. The Academy (and his daughters) convinced the contrary actor to change his mind and, despite his upset at the lack of booze at the event (apart from the vodka he managed to have smuggled in), Peter O’Toole took to the stage to accept the ‘lovely bugger’ in 2003.

      As if to prove a point, he powered his way to the acting frontline once more when he was nominated for yet another Oscar following a classy performance as an ageing Casanova in the 2006 film Venus. It was as if he wanted to score a goal in extra time and, despite not winning the award, O’Toole proved he was still very much in the running. When he retired in 2012, saying, ‘The heart of it has gone out of me’, he was bowing out more or less at the top of his game.

      Despite playing all those English establishment figures, he always remained an Irishman to the core, with a house in Galway as well as one in London. He played cricket for County Galway and often went to Five Nations rugby matches with the two Richards, Harris and Burton. There is a special place in any Irishman’s heart for watching England being defeated at rugby. We’re at one with the Scots and the Welsh on this. There’s a Celtic brotherhood of freedom-fighting, feisty people who have been oppressed by the English. So for the Irish, it’s sweet to win at Murrayfield and the Millennium Stadium but the sweetest victory of all is to decapitate the English rose at Twickenham – as I’m sure Harris and O’Toole would have agreed.

      Harris has gone now, Burton went long ago, and O’Toole is the last man standing, bemoaning the fact that his drinking partners have left him alone at the bar, an act he considers ‘wretchedly inconsiderate’. But behind the beer goggles, who is the man that theatre critic Kenneth Tynan described as an ‘insomniac Celtic dynamo’? We’ll probably never know; even his own sister, Patricia, can’t figure him out. When she met an actress who was about to star with him, she asked, ‘At the end of the picture, will you tell me who my brother is? What goes on in there, in the f**king thing he calls a mind?’

      It’s a question that may never be adequately answered but whatever it is that goes on in there, it helped produce a flamboyant bon viveur who became a legend in his own lifetime – both for his acting and for his hellraising. They simply don’t make ’em like that any more.

       JONATHAN RHYS MEYERS: born to be king

      Born 27 July 1977

      My favourite actors, Peter O’Toole, Richard Harris, Richard Burton, they never fulfilled their potential. You’d see absolute brilliance, but they burned the candle at both ends … If you want to be in for the long haul, you have to be up to it. You can’t go out all night chasing girls and partying.

      Hellraisers often fall into one of two categories. One kind tends to pursue the path of boldness, enjoying the notoriety and basking in the anti-glory that ensues. The other type is inclined to fall into the hell that gets raised. This species of hellraiser is more an accidental tourist to a land they didn’t particularly want to visit. It is into this latter category that Jonathan Rhys Meyers finds himself, more out of accident than design. A fine actor with a stormy relationship when it comes to booze, Jonathan is well aware of the moniker that has followed him around since he first hit the headlines for less than appetizing reasons. But rather than relishing the hellraiser label, like his predecessors Harris and O’Toole, he has battled it. If you want a career in the film industry today you have to clean up your act so they can get insurance cover for you. It’s all about the money. I’m in two minds whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing because our hellraisers tend to add to the gaiety of the nation. They’re more fun. I personally prefer a bit of roughness round the edges.

      Colin Farrell looked set to inherit the hellraiser mantle for a while, with a sex tape, a taste for hard liquor and a long line of model/actress girlfriends, but he managed to go through the mill and come out the other side. I’ve met him several times and can confirm that he’s clean as a whistle, as well as being an extremely affable, articulate and witty guy. We talked about his relationship with the late Elizabeth Taylor in the years before her death – she got him to read a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem at her funeral, where he was one of the only people there who was not a family member. He’s sober now but he’s still got that naughty glint in his eye and I think that must have been what attracted the woman whose great love was Richard Burton, one of the most infamous hellraisers of all time.

      As to why men like Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Colin Farrell and those who blazed a trail of destruction and staggering acting ability before them end up as tabloid headlines, the best place to look is at the beginning of their stories. For Meyers, it was in Dublin city that a premature baby named Jonathan Michael Francis O’Keefe was born and kept in hospital for seven months before being allowed to go home to his mother, Geraldine, on Valentine’s Day 1978. Within three years, the family had moved to Cork and Jonathan’s parents had separated. Abandoned by his father, he stayed with his mother in a council flat. Unhappy at school, Jonathan Rhys Meyers abandoned education – or, rather, education abandoned him when he was expelled at fifteen years old for truancy. His story around this time is one of poverty and neglect. Geraldine O’Keefe had a serious drink problem and whatever money came in from the state swiftly found a home in the local pub: ‘She drank her dole money all the time. The reason she had no money was that she was going out with a lot of other women who had no money, and you start buying drinks all round and it’s gone. So you have a lot of friends on Thursday when you have money, and it’s all happy. And Friday morning you wake up and have nothing.’

      With little else to do, Jonathan headed for the local pool hall and it was there his life changed dramatically in every sense of the word as casting agents happened upon the sultry-looking young man with movie star looks and an attitude to match. An audition followed, he met a director, and within months he was starring in a commercial for Knorr, got paid £500 and thought: ‘What boy is not going to say, “I’ll do this”? I wanted to act because it was soft money.’ Soon afterwards, and by now a fully fledged aspiring actor, Jonathan arrived on the set of Neil Jordan’s biopic Michael

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