Sunday, December 15, 2013

An Actor and a Movie Star

Among my least-favorite days would have been yesterday, as legendary actor Peter O'Toole passed away at the age of 81. That he was nominated for an Oscar eight times but never won says as much about the excellent quality of some of his competition in his early races, as well as the myopia of Academy voters during the latter ones.

The title of the post is a nod to his Oscar-nominated role as Alan Swann, the Errol-Flynn-esque swashbuckling actor appearing on a live TV show in the 1950s, in 1982's My Favorite Year. Confronted with the reality that the show is live, Swann panics -- he has not been before a live audience since he was a very young man and the idea terrifies him. "I'm not an actor!" he laments to Mark Linn-Baker's Benjy Stone. "I'm a movie star!"

He was, of course, among the best of both.

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