"I tell my children to avoid theatre and go into cinema and TV"
About this Quote
There is a sly cruelty in the advice: Peter O'Toole, a man mythologized by stage-trained bravado and epic-screen glamour, tells his own children to skip theatre, the supposedly purer art, and chase the camera instead. It lands because it sounds like fatherly pragmatism while quietly mourning an entire ecosystem he helped romanticize.
O'Toole is speaking from the late-20th-century actor's reality: theatre offers prestige and craft, but not stability. Cinema and TV offer reach, repetition, and a paycheck that doesn’t vanish when the curtain falls. Underneath the blunt career counseling is a clear-eyed inventory of what fame actually runs on: distribution. The stage can make you great; the screen can make you known. For a working actor, known is leverage.
The subtext is also generational and protective. Theatre demands physical stamina, nightly perfection, and an almost monastic commitment to rehearsal and rejection. It can be thrilling, but it’s punishing in ways that don’t scale into security, especially for someone watching the industry shift toward blockbuster economics and television’s long-form boom. O'Toole’s line doubles as a warning about romantic suffering: don’t confuse artistic virtue with a life you can live.
It also carries an actor’s dark joke: the theatre is where you learn to act; film and TV are where you learn to survive. Coming from O'Toole, it’s less a betrayal of the stage than a diagnosis of modern culture’s attention span - and the costs of trying to outshout it from a proscenium.
O'Toole is speaking from the late-20th-century actor's reality: theatre offers prestige and craft, but not stability. Cinema and TV offer reach, repetition, and a paycheck that doesn’t vanish when the curtain falls. Underneath the blunt career counseling is a clear-eyed inventory of what fame actually runs on: distribution. The stage can make you great; the screen can make you known. For a working actor, known is leverage.
The subtext is also generational and protective. Theatre demands physical stamina, nightly perfection, and an almost monastic commitment to rehearsal and rejection. It can be thrilling, but it’s punishing in ways that don’t scale into security, especially for someone watching the industry shift toward blockbuster economics and television’s long-form boom. O'Toole’s line doubles as a warning about romantic suffering: don’t confuse artistic virtue with a life you can live.
It also carries an actor’s dark joke: the theatre is where you learn to act; film and TV are where you learn to survive. Coming from O'Toole, it’s less a betrayal of the stage than a diagnosis of modern culture’s attention span - and the costs of trying to outshout it from a proscenium.
Quote Details
| Topic | Career |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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