Peter O'Toole Trivia
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48 free Peter O'Toole trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Peter O'Toole trivia quiz covers the blue-eyed hellraiser from his disputed birth in Leeds or Connemara to his final roles. The easy questions ask which desert epic made him a star, which English king he played in two different films, how many competitive Oscars he won, which Pixar villain he voiced and who presented him with his honorary Academy Award. From there it moves through the classics: Becket, The Lion in Winter, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man, My Favorite Year and Venus. The hard end is for people who have read both volumes of Loitering with Intent: the RADA classmates he called 'dotty', the actor who turned down Lawrence before him, Noël Coward's 'Florence of Arabia' quip, the Macbeth that drew the worst reviews of his career, the football club he supported, the reason he refused a knighthood, the sonnets he read every day and the letter he wrote asking the Academy to wait so he could 'win the lovely bugger outright'. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on Peter O'Toole, Lawrence of Arabia, Becket, The Lion in Winter, The Ruling Class, The Stunt Man, My Favorite Year, Venus, Ratatouille, How to Steal a Million, Man of La Mancha and Siân Phillips before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Lawrence of Arabia, Richard Burton and classic British actors quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Peter O'Toole shot to international fame playing which real-life figure in David Lean's 1962 epic?
T. E. Lawrence
T. E. Lawrence was a far smaller man than his screen self: O'Toole, at 6 ft 2 in, stood some nine inches taller than the officer he played.
Q 02As of 2025, which actress shares O'Toole's record for most acting Oscar nominations without a win?
Glenn Close
Glenn Close matched his eight losing nominations in 2021; two years earlier she had been the predicted winner for The Wife, only to see Olivia Colman take the prize.
Q 03Which English king did O'Toole play in both Becket (1964) and The Lion in Winter (1968)?
Henry II
Henry II brought him two Oscar nominations four years apart: after the young king of Becket, he played the monarch at 50 while still only 35 himself.
Q 04In Pixar's Ratatouille (2007) O'Toole voiced which character?
Anton Ego, the food critic
Anton Ego, the food critic, arrives ready to savage the restaurant, until one bite of Remy's ratatouille sends him back to his mother's kitchen and he writes a glowing review.
Q 05Who presented O'Toole with his Academy Honorary Award in 2003?
Meryl Streep
Meryl Streep handed it over after he had first asked the Academy to hold off until he was 80, saying he was still in the game and might yet win one outright.
Q 06O'Toole's birth certificate from Leeds says he was born there in 1932, but he believed he might have been born where?
Connemara
Connemara was the family's version of his birth, and from the 1960s he kept a home in that corner of County Galway and carried an Irish passport as well as a British one.
Q 07At which English regional theatre did O'Toole make his name in the 1950s, playing dozens of roles?
Bristol Old Vic
The Bristol Old Vic took him on straight from RADA, and stories of his Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger there soon spread well beyond the city.
Q 08Why did the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin turn the young O'Toole away?
He could not speak Irish
He could not speak Irish, so the Abbey turned him away, and he took up a scholarship at RADA in London instead.
Q 09Which two future stars were O'Toole's classmates at RADA?
Albert Finney and Alan Bates
Albert Finney and Alan Bates trained beside him in what he called 'the most remarkable class the academy ever had', though he recalled that 'we were all considered dotty'.
Q 10Which actor passed a screen test for O'Toole's 1962 desert role but refused to sign producer Sam Spiegel's long contract?
Albert Finney
Albert Finney was David Lean's first choice; Marlon Brando also said no, preferring Mutiny on the Bounty, before the role fell to the little-known O'Toole.
Q 11Noël Coward joked that if O'Toole had been any prettier in his 1962 epic, the picture would have had what title?
Florence of Arabia
Florence of Arabia was Coward's teasing tribute to the blond, blue-eyed newcomer, whose looks, one critic later wrote, were no small part of the film's appeal to young fans.
Q 12Who beat O'Toole to the Best Actor Oscar for his 1962 desert epic?
Gregory Peck
Gregory Peck won for To Kill a Mockingbird, though the epic itself took Best Picture; oddly for so long a film, not one woman in it has a speaking part.
Q 13Which actor played Thomas Becket opposite O'Toole's king in Becket (1964)?
Richard Burton
Q 21In The Stunt Man (1980), O'Toole was Oscar-nominated for playing what kind of character?
A ruthless film director
A ruthless film director is the part: Eli Cross descends from the sky on a camera crane and hires a fugitive as his stunt double. The Oscar went to Robert De Niro for Raging Bull.
Q 22In My Favorite Year (1982), O'Toole's drunken swashbuckler Alan Swann is widely seen as a portrait of which real star?
Errol Flynn
Errol Flynn is the model for Swann, a faded screen hero who panics on learning the TV show is live; the part brought O'Toole a seventh Oscar nomination, lost to Ben Kingsley.
Q 23Who beat O'Toole to Best Actor on his eighth and final nomination, for Venus (2006)?
Richard Burton and O'Toole were both nominated for Best Actor for the film and both lost to Rex Harrison, an early entry in the long run of Oscar near-misses the two friends shared.
Q 14Who played Eleanor of Aquitaine opposite O'Toole in The Lion in Winter (1968)?
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn, 25 years his senior, played his wife and won her third Best Actress Oscar for it, sharing the award in a tie with Barbra Streisand.
Q 15O'Toole's 1969 Oscar-nominated role in Goodbye, Mr. Chips was in a musical adaptation co-starring which singer?
Petula Clark
Petula Clark played the music-hall singer who marries his shy schoolmaster; the pairing won him a Golden Globe, though the Oscar went to John Wayne.
Q 16In The Ruling Class (1972), O'Toole's paranoid schizophrenic Earl of Gurney first believes he is whom?
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ is who the 14th Earl thinks he is, sleeping upright on a cross, until a 'cure' leaves him secretly convinced that he is Jack the Ripper instead.
Q 17In Man of La Mancha (1972), O'Toole played Don Quixote and which other role, opposite Sophia Loren?
Miguel de Cervantes
Miguel de Cervantes tells the knight's story to fellow prisoners while awaiting the Inquisition; O'Toole's songs had to be dubbed by a tenor, and the film flopped.
Q 18In How to Steal a Million (1966), O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn steal a forged statuette attributed to which artist?
Cellini
Cellini is the supposed sculptor of a Venus really carved by the heroine's grandfather, so she has it stolen from the museum before scientific tests can expose the family's forgeries.
Q 19Which comedian wrote his first produced screenplay for O'Toole's 1965 farce What's New Pussycat?
Woody Allen
Woody Allen also made his acting debut in it. O'Toole's part was first meant for Warren Beatty, whose way of greeting girlfriends on the phone inspired the title.
Q 20In the notorious Penthouse-funded Caligula (1979), O'Toole played which Roman emperor?
Tiberius
Tiberius was his part in a film whose producer, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, later slipped back into the studio to shoot hardcore scenes the director had not wanted to film.
Forest Whitaker
Forest Whitaker won for playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, so Venus, Hanif Kureishi's tale of an ageing actor smitten with a young woman, left O'Toole with eight nominations and no win.
Q 24In Venus, O'Toole's ageing actor recites a Shakespeare sonnet that compares its subject to what?
A summer's day
A summer's day, from Sonnet 18, was his own pick: he told NPR he had argued for an old favourite over the obscure ones, and that he knew every sonnet by heart.
Q 25In The Last Emperor (1987), O'Toole played Reginald Johnston, who was what to the young Puyi?
His Scottish tutor
His Scottish tutor was a real man: Reginald Johnston's memoir Twilight in the Forbidden City fed the film, and he retired to a small Scottish island where he flew Puyi's Manchukuo flag.
Q 26Which king did O'Toole play in the 2004 epic Troy?
Priam
Priam, king of Troy, steals into the Greek camp to beg Achilles for the body of his son Hector, the scene that put O'Toole face to face with Brad Pitt.
Q 27O'Toole won a Primetime Emmy for playing Bishop Pierre Cauchon in a 1999 CBS miniseries about whom?
Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc was condemned at a trial that Cauchon ran as judge, so O'Toole's only Emmy came for playing the bishop who sent a future saint to the stake.
Q 28Which actor played the young Casanova in the 2005 BBC serial in which O'Toole played the older one?
David Tennant
David Tennant played the young seducer for most of the serial, whose writer, Russell T Davies, went on to cast him as the Doctor in Doctor Who soon afterwards.
Q 29In which TV drama did O'Toole play Pope Paul III, who excommunicates Henry VIII?
The Tudors
The Tudors brought him in for its second season, where his papacy not only casts the king out of the Church but backs a failed plot to assassinate Anne Boleyn.
Q 30In which play did O'Toole take the title role for the National Theatre's very first production in 1963?
Hamlet
Hamlet, directed by Laurence Olivier, launched the company, but its star was 'sick with nerves': to know what it is to be really lonely, he said, 'try playing Hamlet'.