Film Studies: What has a man got to do to get an Oscar round here?

Having lately enjoyed his 70th birthday, Peter O'Toole will be at nearly 9,000 feet this weekend, receiving the tribute of the Telluride Film Festival in mountainous south-western Colorado. As to the inevitable question – whether he is well or unwell – like any 70-year-old who over the course of time has given up parts of his own body on the operating table and indulged his favourite and inspiring libations, he would likely say that he has been better. But O'Toole has lived to enjoy the demise of several premature obituarists, and it has been in his most recent decade that he has enjoyed perhaps his greatest personal success – with the stage production of Keith Waterhouse's play, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, proof that there is always an audience for eloquent self-destructiveness as it goes down the greasy chute. Not that Telluride reckons to mount another night for the living dead. It is a festival that has a loyal audience of film people, and it has the habit of drawing attention to careers that deserve attention from such illustrious bodies as the Academy.

For Peter O'Toole holds a special record – and shares it with an old chum, Richard Burton, someone who didn't last nearly as long as O'Toole, no matter that their careers and drinking bouts often went hand-in-hand.

Quite simply, Peter O'Toole has been nominated for the best actor Oscar seven times – and seven times he has been denied. What I am suggesting is that, on numbers alone, O'Toole is a most deserving candidate for one of those honorary, life-time Oscars by which the Academy is able to redeem its misguided history.

But it isn't just the numbers. It's the astonishing versatility, the boundless love of invention, melodrama and theatricality in O'Toole's nominations. Indeed, his movie record is the larger version of an amazing appetite for different things – such as he demonstrated as a youth at the Bristol Old Vic in the 1950s, when he was not just the Hamlet of his age, Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger and one of the tramps in Waiting for Godot, but a Dame in pantomime, too. Peter O'Toole has always been one of those actors who enjoyed putting on costume and a false nose and pretending. And having a grand time.

And so, his "seven" read as follows: the insolent scholar-soldier, very happy in long robes, and quite ready to upset the whole Middle East (Lawrence of Arabia); a king of England in Becket; that same king at war with a beloved old enough to be his mother in A Lion in Winter; the gentle, modest English school teacher in Goodbye Mr Chips; the mad as a hatter English lord in The Ruling Class; the pastiche of Errol Flynn, a drunken swashbuckler, staggering from one disaster to another in My Favourite Year; and Eli Cross, the monstrous movie director (as much for his charm as his devilry) in The Stunt Man, a film that has gone strangely out of fashion as its view of a demented Hollywood has been more firmly established in reality. And while you recount the numbers and agree with yourself that, surely, no other actor could have handled all of those scattered roles, let me add confirmation – yes, seven means there wasn't even a supporting actor nomination for his quite brilliant English tutor on a bicycle in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.

Yes, of course, it's true that not all those films are exactly respectable. My Favourite Year was a fairly routine comedy raised to the level of the exquisite by O'Toole's identification with a wreck. But Lawrence of Arabia and A Lion in Winter were entirely respectable films.

Indeed, it has always been a vital part of O'Toolery to leave us a little perplexed as to where solemnity ends and passion begins. He has had failures; he has had disasters: there was the Scottish play at the Old Vic. There has been the immense, good-humoured struggle to survive. And always there has been the notion that an actor is a kind of Victorian scoundrel, a fraud who can move you to tears, raised in provincial boarding houses, on hard liquor and the legend of Donald Wolfit and Wilfred Lawson. That kind of career can be terrifying to behold, but O'Toole has made it seem exhilarating from his point of view. And truly there is a lot to be said for the riotous wreck who never stops working, as opposed to those actors who grow large on their own fatuous reflection but hardly ever work. Such as? Well, let's just say that O'Toole won his breakthrough role, Lawrence, because Marlon Brando was not available.

Through thick and thin, Peter O'Toole has been available, at our service, the thoughtful Dane and a panto Dame, terrific in both and capable of this startling insight, that they are mother and son...

d.thomson@independent.co.uk