Hollywood

‘It is time for me to chuck in the sponge,’ said Peter O’Toole with characteristic singularity. The 79-year-old has announced his retirement from stage and screen, after a career that will span 56 years: with two films in post-production to be released next year. He goes, he said, ‘dry-eyed and profoundly grateful.’ He will devote his time to finishing a third volume of memoirs, which will record the ‘meat’ of his Hollywood career. The two previous volumes — Loitering with Intent: The Child and Loitering with Intent: The Apprentice — stand largely unread on my bookshelves. I dip into them from time-to-time; they’re that sort of book. O’Toole is wonderful

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?   I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing

I only ever heard my mother admit twice to fancying other men. One, remarkably, was Saddam Hussein, the other was Richard Burton, and of each she said, ‘He’s a good-looking old man.’ She said this the way only a Welsh Baptist matron could: grimly, and because she was secure in the knowledge that she was not likely to meet either in chapel or on the streets of Carmarthen. Richard Burton, once of Port Talbot, later of the Dorchester Hotel, was cat-nip to women. He had a face ravaged by acne and his feet smelt, but he managed to sleep with the most beautiful leading ladies of his time, something his

If you wanted to write about Marilyn Monroe, how would you go about it? The pile of biographies, memoirs and novels about poor, sad Marilyn is already teetering. How could you make something new of her life? Clever Andrew O’Hagan has come up with an answer: by writing as her pet dog. How the hound came to be in her possession is a terrific story in itself. Maf, a Maltese terrier, was given to Marilyn by Frank Sinatra (the dog’s name was her sly reference to Sinatra’s alleged mafia connections). Sinatra got the dog from Natalie Wood’s mother, who regularly travelled to Britain to scoop up puppies, in much the

Just as there are people who are their own worst enemies, so there are books that are their own worst reviews. Mark Griffin’s A Hundred or More Hidden Things, a new biography of the Hollywood film-maker Vincente Minnelli, is one such. No review could possibly be as damning as a verbatim reproduction of its irresistibly putrid pages. Minnelli’s achievement certainly does merit attention. In fact, for the auteurist critics of Cahiers du Cinéma, who argued that a film’s distinction derived primarily, even exclusively, from the degree to which it reflected its director’s own personal visual and thematic preoccupations, his was practically an open-and-shut case. At least to the initiated, a

In his memoir Somebody Down Here Likes Me, Too, the boxer Rocky Graziano, on whom Paul Newman based his performance in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), describes the actor in perfect Runyonese: I could see right off there ain’t one thing phony about this guy. Maybe there was. He was too good-looking. In fact, the guy is pretty… He’s got bright blue eyes, but when you look in ’em you see a hard look dancing around inside. Only one other guy I see these same eyes on an’ that was another friend of mine, Frank Sinatra. When their blue eyes spot a wise guy, the eyes say, ‘Don’t fuck

Many years ago I invited a young student of mine to see Psycho, a film of which she had never heard, made by a director (Hitchcock) with whose name she was unfamiliar and shot in a format (black-and-white) whose apparent old-fashionedness so mystifed her she wondered aloud why no one thought to complain to the projectionist. Yet, shrieking on cue at all the spooky moments, she ultimately admitted to having been so bowled over by the film that she asked what other Hitchcocks she ought to see. I recommended North by Northwest — only subsequently to learn, to my stupefaction, that she had found it boring. Boring? The most euphoria-inducing