Peter O'Toole, Star of Lawrence of Arabia, Dies

The actor Peter O'Toole, who found stardom in David Lean's masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia, has died at 81, his agent said.

The acclaimed leading man who overcame stomach cancer in the 1970s passed away on Saturday at the Wellington Hospital in London following a long illness, Steve Kenis said.

O'Toole announced last year he was stopping acting saying: "I bid the profession a dry-eyed and profoundly grateful farewell."

He said his career on stage and screen fulfilled him emotionally and financially, bringing him together "with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits."

Early in his career O'Toole became emblematic of a new breed of hard-drinking Hollywood hellraiser.

"We heralded the '60s," he once said. "Me, [Richard] Burton, Richard Harris; we did in public what everyone else did in private then, and does for show now. We drank in public, we knew about pot."

Last month it was reported he had been coaxed out of retirement to act in a film about ancient Rome called Katherine of Alexandria in which he would play Cornelius Gallus, a palace orator.

O'Toole is believed to have been born in Connemara in County Galway in Ireland, and lived in London. He shot to stardom in the 1962 film of T.E. Lawrence's life story and went on to star in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man and My Favorite Year. He received an honorary Oscar in 2003 after receiving eight nominations and no wins - an unassailed record.

He is survived by his two daughters, Pat and Kate O'Toole, from his marriage to actress Siân Phillips, and his son, Lorcan O'Toole, by Karen Brown.

Eleanor Parker, 91, Oscar-Nominated Actress, Dies

Eleanor Parker, who was nominated three times for a best-actress Oscar but whose best-known role was a supporting one, as the marriage-minded baroness in “The Sound of Music,” died on Monday in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 91.

A family friend, Richard Gale, told The Associated Press that the cause was complications of pneumonia.

Ms. Parker was an elegant, ladylike yet sensual film actress. Still, her most recognizable role, as the Baroness who loves Christopher Plummer’s character, Captain von Trapp, in “The Sound of Music” (1965), called for an icy demeanor. Uninterested in his houseful of children, she loses him to the governess, played memorably by Julie Andrews. (Laura Benanti played the part in the recent version on NBC.)

The highest accolades of Ms. Parker’s career came a decade before.

She was nominated for an Oscar for dramatic roles as a wrongly convicted young prisoner in “Caged” (1950), a police officer’s neglected wife in “Detective Story” (1951) and an opera star with polio in “Interrupted Melody” (1955), a biography of the Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. She also received an Emmy Award nomination in 1963 for an episode of “The Eleventh Hour,” an NBC series about psychiatric cases.

If she never became a star, admirers contended, it was because of her versatility. Sometimes a blonde, sometimes a brunette, often a redhead, Ms. Parker made indelible impressions but submerged herself in a wide range of characters, from a war hero’s noble fiancée in “Pride of the Marines” (1945) to W. Somerset Maugham’s vicious waitress-prostitute in a remake of “Of Human Bondage” (1946).

Eleanor Jean Parker was born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio, the daughter of a math teacher and his wife. She appeared in school plays as a child and, in her teens, headed for Massachusetts to study acting at the Rice Summer Theater in Martha’s Vineyard. Then she moved to California and studied at the Pasadena Playhouse.

According to numerous sources, she was approached by movie scouts at both schools but turned down their offers of screen tests in favor of completing her education. When she had done that, she got back to the Warner Brothers scout and was soon given a contract.

Her feature film debut, however, was delayed. It was supposed to be in the western “They Died With Their Boots On” (1941), with Errol Flynn, but her scenes were edited out. In 1942 she appeared in two war-promotion shorts and provided the voice of a telephone operator in a Humphrey Bogart gangster movie, “The Big Shot.” Finally, later that year, she appeared as a frightened bus passenger in “Busses Roar,” a black-and-white drama about wartime saboteurs.

Over the next quarter-century her career tended toward the deadly serious in films like “Between Two Worlds” (1944), about air-raid victims in the afterlife, and “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955), the drug-addiction drama, as Frank Sinatra’s unsupportive wife. But she won favorable reviews in the occasional comedy, like “The Voice of the Turtle” (1947), opposite Ronald Reagan, and “A Hole in the Head” (1959), in which she also starred with Sinatra, and in hybrids like “The King and Four Queens” (1956), with Clark Gable.

Ms. Parker appeared in numerous television movies and as a guest on several series, mostly in the 1960s and ’70s. She won new attention as a powerful movie-industry secretary in the NBC series “Bracken’s World” (1969-70). Her last theatrical film was “Sunburn” (1979), a poorly received comedy starring Farrah Fawcett, and her final television appearance a 1991 movie, “Dead on the Money,” with Kevin McCarthy.

Ms. Parker’s first husband was Fred L. Losse, a Navy dentist whom she met on the set of the pro-Soviet drama “Mission to Moscow.” Their marriage, in 1943, lasted 21 months. In 1946 she married Bert E. Friedlob, a film producer. Before their divorce, in 1953, they had three children together.

A third marriage, to Paul Clemens, an artist, lasted from 1954 to 1965. They had a son. In 1966, she married Raymond N. Hirsch, a Chicago businessman, who died in 2001. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

In 1953, with two recent Oscar nominations to her credit, Ms. Parker talked to The New York Times about her good career luck so far. “Things have a way of working out right for me,” she said, adding a bit later, “I maintain that if you work, believe in yourself and do what is right for you without stepping all over others, the way somehow opens up.”

“I even got my three wishes granted,” she said in the same interview. “To be in pictures, to give Mother a mink coat and buy the folks a house.”