Peter O'Toole

Peter O'Toole was born in Leeds in 1932, died in 2013, claimed both England and Ireland, and was doing bit parts as late as 1960, in The Savage Innocents and Kidnapped, before Lawrence of Arabia made him internationally famous at thirty. Almost nobody has had a debut on that scale and then had to work out what to do afterwards.

What he had was a voice engineered for irony and a face that could look ruined and amused at once. He played Henry II twice, in Becket in 1964 and The Lion in Winter in 1968, and the two performances have almost nothing in common: the first is a king who cannot understand why his friend will not simply agree with him, the second a man conducting a family argument as a military campaign. That range, grandeur and pettiness inside a single historical figure, is the whole act.

The seventies and eighties scattered him. There is Murphy's War and Lord Jim, the deranged aristocrat of The Ruling Class, Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha, the notorious Caligula, Zaltar in Supergirl, and then two comebacks that stuck: the film director in The Stunt Man and the drunken matinee idol Alan Swann in My Favorite Year, which is the funniest thing he ever did.

Late work suited him. He is Reginald Johnston in The Last Emperor, Priam in Troy, an ageing man in love in Venus, Pope Paul III in The Tudors, and the food critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille, a performance given entirely in voice that still contains the best writing about criticism in any animated film. His accolades include a Primetime Emmy for supporting work in a miniseries, a BAFTA, four Golden Globes and an Academy Honorary Award.