Five days after he opened the National Theatre of Great Britain, Peter O’Toole sat in a BBC studio talking about ghosts. The date was October 27, 1963. His stage that week was the Old Vic, where the National had launched itself on October 22 with an uncut Hamlet, four and a half hours of it, directed by Laurence Olivier and starring O’Toole, thirty-one years old and world famous off the back of Lawrence of Arabia. On television he had company worth the license fee: Huw Wheldon hosting the late-night arts program Monitor, Orson Welles holding forth across the table, and the veteran Ernest Milton, who had worn the black doublet himself decades before. That conversation survives, and I have been living inside it for a week.

Continue reading → The Ghost, the Pope, and Peter O’Toole