Conversation with Peter O’Toole’s Daughter
In a rare interview about the Laurence of Arabia star, actress Kate discussed her legendary father’s hellraising days with me shortly before his death at the age of 81.
Legendary hell-raiser Peter O’Toole once famously finished a play on a Saturday night and took his young understudy, a then relatively unknown Michael Caine, on a night on the town—only for them both to black out.
The last thing the young Cockney actor Michael Caine remembered was tucking into a plate of eggs and chips at a nearby restaurant. When they woke from their drunken slumber in a strange flat it was broad daylight and Caine enquired about the time, only for O’Toole to snap, “Never mind what time it is. What fucking day is it?!”
It was 5 p.m. on Monday—three hours until curtain. Caine was shocked to discover that they had spent two nights painting the town red—yet neither one of them could remember anything about it. Back at the theatre, the stage manager informed them that the restaurant’s proprietor had banned them for life from his establishment. Caine was about to ask what they’d done when O’Toole whispered, “Never ask what you did. It’s better not to know.”
The stories of Peter O’Toole’s hell-raising days are legion but few are crazier than what he did to celebrate the birth of his eldest daughter, Kate. His delight was unbounded and, of course, a few drinks were needed to wet the baby’s head . . . but he ended up, as Katy told me, becoming so inebriated that he put a tattoo of a shamrock onto his newborn baby’s bottom!
One can’t even begin to imagine what the celebrated thespian— who announced his retirement from acting in 2012, before passing away at the age of 81 in December 2013—told his wife when she discovered the next morning that their newborn baby not only had a tattoo but also the slogan ‘Made in Ireland’ etched onto her bottom. “If Social Services were around then!” quipped Kate in this rare in-depth interview about her famous father. As she later told me in 2018, Kate doesn’t like to do interviews “about either of my parents” because “talking about other people really isn’t my thing”.
Recalling the tattoo incident, Kate told me: “My father was drunk out of his mind and delighted and thrilled. And with his doctor who was also drunk. They decided to have me branded on my ass with a thing that is supposed to be a shamrock and ‘Made in Ireland’. That’s the joke—‘Made in Ireland’ stamped on my ass.”
Even though the tattoo inevitably became disfigured as she grew, Kate still sees the funny side of it. “When I was a baby, it was a shamrock. I think it was probably three cigarette butts, probably! As I say, Social Service!” she chuckled.
“When you hit puberty it was this dreadful thing on my ass. It is no longer nice. I thought, ‘I’ll go to the tattoo parlour and ask them to make it [back] into a shamrock because it’s meant to be a shamrock and Made In Ireland is fine. I get the joke. So, I plucked up the courage—it took me months—and I finally go and they said, ‘No, we can’t do that. It doesn’t work. Scare tissues’.”
The disfigured tattoo is still there today—a clear reminder that Kate’s upbringing was far from conventional, to put it mildly. Her father and Welsh mother Siân Phillips—who starred alongside her first husband in three films, including Goodbye, Mr Chips (1939)—first crossed paths and fallen in love when they appeared together in a stage play. “They were cast as brother and sister because they looked so similar,” recalled Kate.
Kate looks remarkably like her father too. Looking at her blue eyes, it’s hard not to think about the iconic image of Peter’s piercing azure eyes gazing out from under the head cloth of his Kufiyya desert garb in Lawrence of Arabia (1962). “I don’t think anyone on the planet has eyes quite like my father’s, though!” she insisted. “I’m six of one, half a dozen of the other. It depends [on] which way the wind is blowing.” But she felt temperamentally closer to her father. “We are peas in a pod. I was completely a daddy’s girl,” she told me.
Initially, her parents were steadfast against getting married after discovering the unplanned pregnancy with Kate. “They loved each other, but they didn’t believe in marriage or see the point of a bit of paper,” she said.
It was Marie Keane—a highly regarded Abbey Theatre actress, who worked at the RSC in England and was “Beckett’s favourite actress”—who cajoled them into their wedding vows.
Kate recalled, “Marie said, ‘You have to get married because one day that child might grow up and want to join the army or become a politician or something like that and he’s going to need a birth certificate’. They didn’t know if I was a boy or a girl.
“My father said, ‘If he grows up to be that sort of an idiot then he doesn’t deserve a birth certificate!’ Marie said, ‘Will you ever just get married—for feck’s sake’.”
So, reluctantly, they tied the knot in 1959—only a few months before Kate’s arrival the following year. Sadly, the marriage would later end in a bitter divorce.
Kate was never baptised because of her parents’ disdain for religion, but Katherine Hepburn was her unofficial godmother. Urban myth has it that she was named Kate because of her father’s close friendship with the Hollywood legend, with whom he later starred alongside in The Lion in Winter (1968).
“I don’t know if it’s true,” Kate said. “I think the real reason I was called Kate is because my father was playing at the Royal Shakespeare Company when I was born in The Taming of the Shrew, which was one of his first big hits on the stage.”
According to some exaggerated profiles—including one in an Irish national newspaper—Peter was so determined for Kate to be born in Ireland that he insisted to his wife that they move over here prior to the delivery. Kate giggled at such inaccuracies. “Oh, really! I was born in England. I have an Irish birth certificate. I was registered with the department of foreign births,” she told me.
There has always been a shroud of mystery surrounding Peter O’Toole’s own birthplace. Was he Irish-born or a so-called Plastic Paddy? That’s been a question nobody has ever really been able to get to the bottom of. In his own memoir, O’Toole stated that he wasn’t sure himself because—strangely—he has two birth certs: one giving Connemara as the origin of birth and the other as Leeds.
Nobody knows where he was born, Kate explained because her grandfather was an illegal bookie who was always on the run. “I’m not from the working class, I’m from the criminal class,” Peter O’Toole once declared about his upbringing.
But didn’t he once boast that he was born in Galway?
“No, he doesn’t think Galway—he’s never said that. Everybody else says that. Nobody knows,” Kate said. “Look, his father—my grandfather—was on the wrong side of the law his whole life. We know nothing about him because he didn’t want anybody to know anything about him. We don’t know.”
Did she ever ask her father about it?
“Yes. He doesn’t know.”
But one thing, as far as she is concerned, is crystal clear—Peter O’Toole’s lineage was 100 per cent Irish.
“The only thing for sure is that his grandfather’s mother was an islander. She came from Omey Island,” she explained. “Her family had land in Connemara near where we are—that’s the connection. That I know is real.”
Shortly after Kate’s birth, Peter dashed off to film Lawrence of Arabia, the epic movie that would turn him into a bona fide Hollywood star. But it wasn’t without its sacrifices—he didn’t get to see Kate for the next two years while he was off in the Sahara and the Middle East. It wasn’t until Kate’s second birthday that he got to hold his daughter again when filming was wrapping up in Seville.
Despite being so young, the reunion had such an impact that Kate can still vividly recall the occasion. “It was the first time he’d seen me since I was a baby. I’d been living in Wales with Mamgu, which is Welsh for Grandma. She came with me to Seville,” she recalled. “It was all very exciting, as you can imagine. He took me to a bullfight.
“After that, I travelled quite a lot, almost every year of my life. I always had a nanny or governess with me; the first one was a Bedouin called Shufti, who came back from the desert with dad.
“As school progressed and exams became more serious, I had proper tutors to make up for missing weeks of classes when I went to Orinoco in Venezuela for months on end—that was for the film Murphy’s War in 1970—instead of sitting behind my school desk.”
When they were at their London abode, Kate and her younger sister Patricia both lived in a self-contained two-bedroom flat at the top of the six-storey Georgian house in the affluent Hampstead, with their nanny; while their maternal grandmother had her own flat on the first floor.
“It was very beautiful. Very posh,” Kate recollected. “The main thing I remember as a child was it was like Mary Poppins. Chim chimney. We were definitely isolated on the top floor. It was like a Parisian flat with a little balcony and it looked over the skyline of London. The rest of the house was normal. But we weren’t allowed into any of those rooms.”
Is it true that she would have to make an appointment when wanting to visit her parents in her own home?
“Yes. That’s right. That’s the way I grew up. That was just it—the centre of the house was out of bounds. You couldn’t go into any of the rooms without knocking first. We had an intercom system in the ‘60s. We called it the buzzer because it kept making a buzzing sound.”
Any truth to the rumour that her parents had separated bedrooms?
“My parents had their own bedroom—they didn’t sleep separately. They shared a bedroom.”
Kate has vivid images from her childhood of witnessing the crime scene of the morning after of her father’s wild soirées. Sneaking downstairs in the mornings, she’d regularly swing open the door of the gargantuan living room to set eyes on an assemblage of unconscious bodies—a who’s who of London’s high society—scattered on the floor in a drunken slumber and snoring in unison to the sound of a skipping record on a turntable.
She’d often have to tiptoe over a passed-out Richard Burton to retrieve her school satchel. “I’d creep out before anybody woke up and started harassing me! As I say, social services!” Kate quipped.
“If you’d open the door there’d be just sort of dead adults—dead! The thing I remember most was it was like being in an aeroplane flying above the clouds because the whole room would be full of wonderful, blue stratus cloud cigarette smoke hanging in the room from the night before. This amazing, wispy, magical blue smoke wafting around.”
As she got older, Kate would find her father’s friends hitting on her, but she refused to divulge any names. “I’ll tell you off the record,” she sheepishly answered.
She does, however, admit that her first big crush was as a 14-year-old with their neighbour, the eccentric Peter Cook, who was then 36 years old and flush with success from his comedic collaboration with Dudley Moore.
“He was absolutely bloody hilarious. I fancied him like mad. He was the first person I had a crush on. On the record—drool,” she confessed.
What was it about him that attracted her?
“Physically, wit—everything. I flirted with him. I did. I was mad for him.”
Unsurprisingly, he told her to, “Fuck off!” when her flirting be- came obvious.
The crush began when he would pop over to watch TV with her father. “It was so hilarious—he and my Dad used to sit and watch the football together and they’d turn the volume down and do the commentary. Eye-watering, hilarious,” she said. “They used to watch Come Dancing together with the volume down and my dad would be saying things like, ‘Cynthia tonight is wearing 5,000 yards of very sharp barbed wire’.”
At the height of his fame, Peter had to beef up security because of fears that his two children could be kidnapped. They had to be escorted to school, which was only a stone’s throw from the house. Was it a terrifying experience?
“Not for me because we were never told about it. We had an army of staff. But we had a few weird phone calls. I would pick up the phone sometimes and there would be a heavy breather on the other end saying, ‘I want to kill your mother’.”
She felt suffocated by the tight safety measures and would relish when her parents would visit their second home in Galway, where security was much more lax.
“That’s why, to me, I’m completely opposite of most Irish people who grew up in place like Clifton in the ’60s. To me, Clifton in the ’60s represented complete freedom because it was the only place I could be without the security guard,” said Kate, who moved back into the area full-time after she had established herself in her own right as a talented actress.
“I know most people want to leave [Ireland] because they are choked by the Church and by all the limitations and all that, but for me it was the complete opposite of my rather stultifying, protected, body-guarded life in London.”
But the good times clearly outweigh such bad experiences for Kate, who travelled the world at her father’s side. She was in Paris when her father made What’s New Pussy Cat (1965) and How to Steal A Million (1966). “Romy Schneider on one side, Molotov Cocktails on the other—quite a combination,” she joked.
She recalled playing cards with Sophia Loren “in her trailer between takes” on location in Rome for Man of La Mancha (1972). Another time in the Italian capital for the making of the critically mauled Caligula, she remembered John Gielgud, Helen Mirren, and her father “all in stitches at the lunacy of the entire production” of the film, which on release shocked audiences with graphic pornographic scenes that were controversially inserted in during the editing process.
The film was a disastrous experience for all involved, but it was an idyllic time in Rome for Kate, who remembered staying in a beautiful villa with “frescoes and catacombs and a magnificent pool lined with stones”.
But cracks were by then beginning to appear in her parents’ marriage. “My parents were on the brink of divorce then so perhaps not the happiest of times for them,” she confessed. “I was too busy clam- bering around Roman ruins and falling in love with ancient history to pay much attention to domestic affairs.”
Her mother eventually left O’Toole in 1975 for the actor Robert Sachs, who was 15 years her junior. Did it come as a shock when her parents separated when she was 15 years old and then divorced four years later in 1979?
“No. I had a feeling it was happening. I smelled it coming down the wire.”
Was the split upsetting for her?
“No. People have their own lives to live,” she replied, philosophically.
Kate’s mother wrote in her memoir that she had endured “mental cruelty” during her tempestuous marriage to O’Toole. In Kate’s own opinion, was it accurate?
“Who knows! You’d have to ask her. I’m sure she did feel that way if she said it. That’s her opinion and perception. And perception is reality though, isn’t it? We all have good days and bad days. Not everybody is a ray of sunshine all the time.”
Did the book upset her?
“No, it didn’t upset me—not in the sense that you mean. She was a really good writer and the reason I didn’t like her book was be- cause it wasn’t her best writing. I felt that she didn’t want to write the book—her heart wasn’t in it and I think that shows.”
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, after her parents separated, Kate’s maternal grandmother—who used to live with them at their London abode before the divorce—stayed on with Peter to raise her two granddaughters.
“She never left, she stayed—my mother left. She wanted to look after me and my sister. She was the most wonderful woman in the world. Her attachment was to me and my sister,” Kate told me.
Back in Connemara—in the “dream home” her parents designed themselves—Kate remembered her father having a string of girlfriends, many much younger than him.
“He doesn’t have a partner [now],” she told me back in 2012, a year before his death. “He’s had a succession of nice girlfriends. He dated Trudie Styler for a while. She lived with us in Connemara,” she said of the woman who went on to marry English musician Sting.
Was it strange to see her father with younger women who were sometimes near her own age?
“If they’re nice it’s fantastic. It’s got nothing to do with age, it’s got everything to do with personality.”
The legendary director John Huston, who gave up his American citizenship and became an Irish citizen in 1964, was a nearby neighbour in Galway. When his wife Enrica Soma tragically died in a car crash, their youngest daughter Allegra stayed with the O’Toole family. It was subsequently revealed that Allegra was the offspring of an extramarital affair Enrica had with John Julius Cooper, the second Viscount of Norwich.
“Allegra is my best friend in the world since her mother died,” Kate explained. “She was five and she came to live with us in the big fancy house in London while the Huston estate tried to figure out what to do with her. She also lived with us in Clifton. She also came on holidays with us because we used to go to France for two weeks every year, to Cannes before it became a nightmare.”
Kate laughed at the absurdity of how busloads of tourists would descend on Clifton to take photographs of “the house where Peter O’Toole lived”—even though it was still only being built and was covered with scaffolding and there were mudslides everywhere surrounding the property.
“All the local businesses in Clifton used to say to the American tourists who had come off the coach tours in those days in the late 60s, ‘Peter O’Toole has just built a house. You’ve got to go look at it’,” she recalled. “So, we used to get actual coach loads of nuns, Americans, travellers, all kinds of people, just taking pictures of us at the house. It was mad, you know?”
Kate added, “It wasn’t really a problem. It was hilarious because it was barely more than a construction site at that point. It was like, ‘What are you looking at?’ We just thought it was mad. Silly.”
She remembered one funny episode when she mistakenly took Katherine Hepburn for a tramp when she called to the house unannounced. “I was at the kitchen sink window looking down and there was this awful old hag wearing clothes suitable for the windy weather—a headscarf and a hat and an old jacket and a pair of sensible trousers but also with a skirt over the sensible trousers tucked into the boots,” Kate said. “And I just said to my mother, ‘Oh, it’s one of those travellers again to take a photograph’. And then she said, ‘Oh, no, darling—it’s Kate Hepburn!’
And it was, just dressed for Connemara.” Amazingly, Kate said, she has only ever been upset once about something she read about her father. As a young child, she recoiled in horror when coming across a story claiming her father was on death’s doors. “I was in Connemara with my grandmother—both my parents were both away working—and I remember reading just a little paragraph saying that Peter O’Toole was dying of stomach cancer,” she told me.
“I was completely devastated by it, because I believed at that age, as you do, that anything you see in print is true. I believed that that was the case and it wasn’t—it was some stupid ass story that got completely fucked up in the mix and had nothing to do with anything. “And it was years before he did get sick. But that was my first experience of being really frightened because of his health. And that is the first time I’ve ever been hurt by a newspaper article. And because of that experience, fortunately, happily, it was the very last time because nothing has ever been like that since.
“So, frankly, if somebody writes that I look like a dog and I just climbed out of the back of the bus and I’m terrible in the play and I’m not worth tuppence-wop, I couldn’t care less. I couldn’t care less about anything that I read in the newspapers since that very day.”
A few years later in 1975, Peter was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “He nearly died. It was 50/50. I wasn’t aware of it at the time. I knew he was ill but I wasn’t told how ill. I didn’t realise he might die,” Kate said.
“But I did know that his life was completely changed when he came out of the hospital. My mother left. His agent had robbed him. Everything fell apart then. When he came out of hospital there was nobody there.”
But Kate was there for him at the time. She was also by his side in 1978 when he almost died from a blood disorder.
O’Toole dramatically cut back on his drinking binges after being on death’s door back in the late 70s. But he still likes an occasional tipple. “Especially when I’m around,” she laughed.
She was also by his side last year when he was struck down with pneumonia and they feared the worst. She puts it down to a foolish decision to make a film in poor living conditions in Asia. “He was in Kazakhstan doing a dodgy film in very dodgy circumstances. He’s much better now,” she said, clearly relieved.
Was he worried?
“Yeah. Well, he’s not getting any younger—79 going on 80. But he does look after himself.”
During his twilight years, Kate visited her father regularly in London; while Peter liked to come back to Galway occasionally for visits, but they didn’t talk regularly on the phone. “He doesn’t do the phone. He doesn’t know how to use a phone!” she laughed.
Despite the close bond that has always existed between the legendary Peter O’Toole and his daughter, there was a time when they drifted apart, Kate revealed as we continued discussing vignettes about her extraordinary upbringing.
After we’d talked for a few hours, Kate—who good-humouredly refers to me as “Jason No-Relayshun” throughout our conversation because of our surname—opened up next to me about her parents’ bitter divorce.
After her mother, Siân Phillips had left her father for her younger lover, the family unit sadly disintegrated. Kate dropped out of school and went off to live in a squat with a boyfriend. What did her parents make of their 17-year-old daughter running off to live in squalor?
“I don’t know—I never asked them! I was free to do my own thing. I mean, my mother was gone, so that was irrelevant [to] what she thought anyway. My father was busy working. They weren’t really paying attention to me then.”
While living in the squat, she hung out with emerging bands like the Sex Pistols and waited tables in a trendy jazz club where Miles Davis was the resident musician.
In fact, her proclivity for having a good time seemed at times to almost rival her father’s reputation as a hell-raiser. She was sent home from a school skiing trip to Switzerland after being caught in a compromising position.
“I didn’t behave myself,” she sheepishly admitted. “I ended up in the toilets of the hotel underneath a big gang of Swiss army guys, all of whom I’d invited back and the geography teacher came in and she said, ‘Oh, my God! What is going on here?’ I said, ‘It’s called sex and drugs and rock and roll!’ She said, ‘Get out now’.”
Kate paused to laugh. Quickly realising how she just made this anecdote sound as if she was the only female amongst the male companions, Kate immediately clarified the story by telling me: “Me and a few friends—I wasn’t being gang raped by the Swiss army! No, it wasn’t like that. But they had come in through the skylight. It was just girls on a school trip. I got expelled for that and neither of my parents passed any remarks. Why would they? For fuck’s sake!”
Surely her parents were shocked by such behaviour?
“I don’t think it shocked them. I think they were unshockable.” Kate had first shown signs of her rebellious streak when she ran away from home when still only a toddler. Recounting the story, she told me: “I was two, seriously. My mother remembers it. She was looking out the window and she saw me striding towards the Tube station with my bag stuffed with my dolls and teddy bears. And she sent the nanny out to get me. The nanny said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m leaving. I hate being told what to do’.”
She certainly had a wild streak in her formative teenage years, but Kate was also sensible enough to stay away from hard drugs, which she put down to her “grounded Welsh part” on her mother’s side.
“I don’t like needles. But Grass is a good thing,” she said.
It wasn’t until she moved to America that she started taking co- caine. “You couldn’t live in New York in the ‘80s and not do it [coke], darling,” she laughed.
Did she become addicted to cocaine?
“Oh, no, I’ve never been dependent on anything or anyone. But it was more at the weekends,” she said nonchalantly.
Her move to the US—and first foray into acting—was more by accident than design. Kate had dreamt of being a playwright but this plan changed after a traumatic break-up with her boyfriend with whom she shared the squat. To get over her broken heart, Kate jetted out to the US to visit her father, who was making a movie called Svengali with the Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster back in 1983.
“I went to stay in a hotel with him for a couple of weeks. I was recovering. I was having a trauma. I was very fragile,” she confessed.
It was Jodie Foster, who at the time was attending Yale University while making films during school term breaks, who encouraged Kate to attend the prestigious university. “She said, ‘There’s a really good drama school, you should apply to get in’.”
There was one inconvenient problem—Kate had never completed her secondary school education. She brazenly lied about having a BA from Trinity College on her application for an MA course in writing at Yale.
“That year there was a postal strike in Ireland,” Kate recalled. “So, physically the admin woman at Yale couldn’t ring Trinity or write to them. I’d passed through all the hoops and then it just came down to the technicality, ‘Where’s your BA?’ I just said, ‘I’m grand—I have my BA, of course I do. Yeah, yeah. You’re just going to have to try to get hold of Trinity’. And they couldn’t. The admin person said, ‘We’ll just fudge it for now and we’ll sort it out later’.”
Kate continued, “I couldn’t do it now. It was amazing because not only did I get in but I got into the MA programme—having left school at 16! It was while I was at Yale that I got bitten by the acting bug.”
Kate found Yale liberating because nobody there cared that she had famous parents. “America’s different. America isn’t as impressed by fame as people are here or in England,” she explained.
Kate had once contemplated attending the prestigious acting school RADA, where both her parents had excelled. “I physically couldn’t go. I couldn’t go into the building because at the bottom of it, there was a bust of my father and, you know, boards everywhere saying things like the Siân Philips Memorial Trophy for best actor . . . it was like, ‘I cannot go here. It’ll fucking do my head in’. It was impossible; the whole place was full of ghosts.
“It would’ve been a nightmare. Every single day I would’ve walked in there I would’ve seen them. It’s not what you need when you’re trying to evolve. So, Yale was better because they didn’t really have any consciousness of that, you know?”
Did she feel like she was living under the shadow of her father, or that people might think she was trading on the family name when she finally broke into acting?
“No, because I was in America. It would’ve been if I had been living in England. Big time. I didn’t get any jobs because of them [my parents] in America because America is very hard-nosed. They didn’t give a shit. All they care about is bang for their bucks.”
Did her father give her any advice when she started acting?
“The only thing he said when I told him I was thinking of switching from writing to acting was, ‘Can you starve?’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah. I can. Have done that living in the squat. Yeah, I can starve’. He said, ‘Well then, you’ll be okay’.
“He’s always been good. He’s always come to see me in everything I’ve ever done, really. He likes to keep an eye on me. He doesn’t ever give me any advice. He’s never taught me anything about acting. Never. He’s just not like that.”
Peter O’Toole once hopped on stage as a last-minute replacement when an actor didn’t turn up one night when Kate was starring in a Jim Sheridan’s production of The Hostage, off-Broadway in a tiny theatre in 1984.
“My dad came to see the show and the next night I must have mentioned to him that the black guy who plays the drag queen wasn’t turning up and he said, ‘Oh, are you short of a cast member? Well, I’ll do it’,” she recalled.
Sadly, father and daughter never shared any stage time that night. And, despite talks about working together down through the years, they have never acted together since that one night in Brendan Behan’s play.
Despite all the critical acclaim, Peter never won an Oscar—even though he was nominated something like eight times and was eventually given an honorary one. “I was sitting next to him when he didn’t get it [forVenus (2006)]. He wasn’t [upset] because he calls the Oscars—and this is completely on the record—the dog and pony show! It’s a High School prom for movie stars. It would’ve been nice to get that one,” she admitted.
She revealed that he was pressured into accepting the honorary Oscar in 2003. “They forced one onto him. He said, ‘No, I don’t want it because it’s not in competition’. He turned it down. They said, ‘That’s grand but we’re giving it to you anyway because we call the shots. If you don’t turn up you’re going to look like shit. So, up to you’. Horrible,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.
As she started out acting in New York, Kate was so desperate to stay there that she fell into a marriage of convenience”. She needed a Green Card to work in the US and her then lover, also an actor, needed a UK working visa for a small role in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) shot on location in London’s docks, which was doubling for Saigon because the eccentric film director had a phobia about flying. Ironically, her new hus-
band’s big scenes in Kubrick’s movie ended up on the cutting room floor. “He wasn’t the person I wanted to marry and I wasn’t the person he wanted to marry. We were living together—it’s not like he was a complete stranger and I paid a lawyer six grand,” she said, laughing. “I stayed married to him for quite a long time even after we’d broken up as boyfriend and girlfriend. I had moved back here for work. One day I got a phone call from his brother who’s a lawyer who said, ‘He’s met somebody he wants to marry, so now it’s time to draw up the divorce papers’. I said, ‘Fine’. I hadn’t spoken to him for years. It wasn’t a big deal.”
What did her parents make of the marriage?
“They didn’t know! They know now. I wasn’t in touch with them [at the time]; I was doing my own thing.”
She never remarried, but almost came close on one occasion when she was in a long-term relationship that happened after she had moved back to Ireland. Did she have any regrets about not having children?
“No. I don’t thing so. I have no patience whatsoever. I don’t even like looking at babies! I like being on my own.”
Has she ever had any high-profile romances? After all, the gossip columns are full of stories about actors having flings on film sets.
“Not fit for print,” she quipped.
Despite a fine body of work—including roles in John Huston’s The Dead (1987), appearing in the Meryl Streep’s movie Dancing at Lughnasa (1998), alongside Ewen McGregor in Nora (2000) and starring alongside U2’s drummer Larry Mullen in his film debut, Man on The Train (2011)—one could hardly blame Kate for being irked by how the first information to come up on an internet search is that she was arrested for drunk driving in 2008. She received a three-year driving ban for being over the limit when driving home from the local hotel after a Christmas function to her home in a remote part of Clifton.
“I’m not proud of it, but neither am I covered in sackcloth and ashes. I am not the only person in the area who was doing the exact same thing that very night. I just ended up in the newspapers—that’s the only difference,” she explained.
“There is no public transport whatsoever out there. None. This isn’t an excuse for what I did but it is very much the reason. That’s an important point. Taxis are few, maybe four in total, and therefore impossible to get at Christmas, either they’ve been booked months in advance, or they’re not working because they’re at the big Christmas party with everyone else.
“I was wrong to do it—even if there were no other cars for miles around I still could have injured myself steering home like that. That’s why I said [to the Garda], ‘It’s a fair cop’. I was over the limit and should not have been driving. End of story.”
Typical of her optimistic nature, Kate tried to look at the positive side of the incident. “The ban was lifted two years ago,” she said in 2012, “but I now prefer life without a car. I have learned my lesson. The punishment was 100 percent justified and I will never do it again.
“I am the poster child for how being punished for drunk driving can transform one’s life for the better. I’m glad it happened. When I have the time I choose to walk six miles a day. Walking does very good things for one’s mind and body. It’s both energising and meditative at the same time. I thoroughly enjoy it and wouldn’t dream of giving up the walks now. I’d never have discovered this if the ban hadn’t happened.”
Kate’s father Peter announced his retirement in a press release in 2012. He wrote: “Dear All, It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won’t come back.”
What did Kate make of his decision to retire?
“I can’t improve upon his beautifully worded public statement which, as far as I’m aware, is unique. He’s 80 and I believe he’s earned a break—most people retire long before that age. I applaud him for setting his own agenda and doing it on his own terms,” she told me at that time.
“As for myself, I feel a little too young to be contemplating the end of my career but ask me again when I’m 80 and I’ll probably have some thought on the matter by then,” she said, smiling, with a twinkle in her blue eyes that makes it hard not to make comparisons of her father—both physically and with her character, especially after listening to her extraordinary life story.
The adage about the apple not falling far from the tree is certainly true when it comes to Kate O’Toole.
© Jason O’Toole