Peter O'Toole

When Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, his acceptance speech began with these words: "No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the prize can accept it other than with humility." Although he did not name those writers, certainly Proust and Joyce would have been among them.

We thought of this today on learning that Peter O'Toole had died. O'Toole was nominated eight times as Best Actor by the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. He won not once.

In all of those nominations, the performance for which he most clearly deserved the Oscar was in "Lawrence of Arabia." By not winning, he joined a most distinguished list of players who should have won--Peter Sellers, for "Dr. Strangelove," Jean Hagen for "Singin' in the Rain," Richard Jaeckel for "Sometimes a Great Notion," Paul Newman for "The Verdict."

 O'Toole finally was given an honorary Oscar, one of those lifetime achievement things, and Newman was given a best actor Oscar for "The Color of Money" as a kind of apology for messing up on "The Verdict," but really, one wishes the voters would get things right at the right time.

Tonight on our small screen, O'Toole and Omar Sharif will meet again, riding camels across the Arabian sands.