The O'Toole Story - Brilliance

Irish Times photographer Brenda Fitzsimons recalls how she bumped into O’Toole in Clifden many years ago, and how the talk turned, after an hour or so, to what he would like carved on his tombstone. 

O'Toole began telling the story of his favorite jacket, a buckskin suede number that had marked on it every drop of tear, blood, sweat and whatever else from his long career. 

Seems he made the mistake of sending it to the local dry cleaners, where it promptly disappeared, and he assumed with some regret that he would never see it again.

Years later, a package arrived at his house, and when he unsheathed it from its cellophane, there was his laundered jacket. Pinned on it was a large note attached by the cleaner.

“Sycamore Cleaners. It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.”

O’Toole looked at the label and thought, as an epitaph, that will do nicely.

Peter James O'Toole. British stage and film actor.
1932-2013

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