Peter O

[Guest fountainhall]

Hard to realise that Lawrence of Arabia was released all of 50 years ago. Surely David Lean’s greatest movie (far superior to Dr. Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter and the flawed adaptation of E. M Forster’s A Passage to India – and marginally so to Bridge on the River Kwai), it thrust the young Peter O’Toole in the world spotlight. Some reckon he became so identified with the role that he could never really break away from it in the public’s mind. Yet, he still garnered 8 Academy Award acting nominations and holds the record for most nominations without ever having won.

 

Now 80, O’Toole came from a new breed of extraordinary actors. Gone were the upper class accents of the Laurence Oliviers, John Gielguds and Ralph Richardsons. In came the working class and regional accents of the likes of Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney and Peter O’Toole. Strangely, neither Finney or O’Toole have been knighted like the others, although it is almost certain both turned offers down for political reasons.

 

With its near overt references to the possibility of his being gay, Lawrence of Arabia was a step in the acceptance of gay figures in movies, although it has never been proved that Lawrence himself was exclusively so. Also, the movie never really developed his friendship with Dahoum, the young Arab who was almost certainly his lover for a few short years until his death from typhus at the start of World War I. The two lived together. Lawrence even made a rather ‘well-endowed’ nude carving of him and put it up in their house.

 

Lawrence once said, "I liked a particular Arab, and thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present.” Some consider Dahoum is the man to whom he refers in the poem (in reality a love poem) “To S.A.” from his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” (Dahoum's real name was Selim Ahmed).

 

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands

and wrote my will across the sky in stars


To gain you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,


that your eyes might be shining for me


When I came

 

Death was my servant on the road, till we came near


and saw you waiting:


When you smiled, and in sorrowful envy he outran me and
 took you apart:


Into his quietness

 

So our love's earnings was your cast off body to be
held one moment


Before earth's soft hands would explore your face and


the blind worms transmute


Your failing substance.

 

Men prayed me to set my work, the inviolate house


in memory of you.


But for fit monument I shattered it, unfinished: and now


The little things creep out to patch themselves hovels


in the marred shadow


Of your gift.