During the first year of our marriage, I left Peter O’Toole.
God knows, I had cause: when he drank, he’d sometimes disappear for days at a time.
At home, he’d criticise me constantly, usually for not having been a virgin bride. With my confidence in shreds, I’d finally fled to friends with our baby daughter, Kate.
Several weeks later, O’Toole turned up one day to drive me to the theatre where I was rehearsing. Strange to sit so close to O’Toole again.
Recognizing my feelings for him, I reluctantly admitted to myself. It was impossible to part ways with him.
Sian Phillips and her husband Peter O’Toole. They were married 18 years, and they had two children before splitting in 1977.
He was wary of my belief and I took a picture with him to illustrate newspaper and magazine features.
He’d just been offered the lead role in David Lean’s film, Lawrence Of Arabia, and was soon to depart for the Middle East to live with the Bedouin, learn some Arabic and get fit.
We learned that his alcohol intake had dropped drastically and it was impossible for him to work or live in heat of 49c (120f).
He flew me out shortly after to meet me in Jordan. The film was in pre-production and he’d been installed in a trailer.
He looked extraordinary, a thousand times fitter and healthier than he’d ever looked; his eyes were clear, his curly black hair had been straightened and bleached and, for the first time in his life, he was tanned.
He looked — I couldn’t quite think what he looked like. It hit me. He looked like a movie star. He’d been living with the Bedouin camel-patrol as they travelled around the desert.
As he talked about these wonderful people and their code of honour, I realised we were moving into the familiar territory of my lack of ‘honour’.
‘I’ve never regretted leaving O’Toole, but I look back on him with love,’ said Phillips. It was great when it was.
Once again, we were reprising the wretched, circular debates about my (modest) sexual past, which I’d assumed to be behind us for ever. Incredulous, I couldn’t think of anything to say except: ‘Well, shall I go home then?’
‘Maybe that would be best,’ was the reply, and he slammed out. That little trailer was my oven. I lay there. As I began to puzzle out how to get home, the door opened, O’Toole entered, and we fell into each other’s arms, laughing and crying.
This was my first real home and it marked the start of one of the most memorable times in my life. Back in London, I bought our first real home: a large wreck of a Georgian house in Hampstead.
I visited O’Toole on location and there were stupendous homecomings when he returned for short breaks. At the same time, we were planning to have our second child.
After Lawrence Of Arabia turned him into a star, O’Toole was much in demand. O’Toole was known for being a good-natured, hardworking man who also had a moderate personality.
He became unpredictable after work was finished, and turned night into day. When drunk, he’d resort to icy criticism of me and order me to get out of the car, or a restaurant, or our home.
To the list of work for the builders, I added ‘green baize-lined double doors’, so that the children and my mother — who’d moved in with us — would never have to witness his drunken rages.
After these episodes, he’d sleep and sleep, wake penitent and spend days being attentive and charming. No one ever failed to forgive him, no matter how badly he’d hurt them, and I was as susceptible.
His attitude towards my acting career was the hardest to accept. Our relationship would be ruined if I had any success. I’d try to calibrate my work so I wouldn’t be too successful.
I wanted to perform Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana in 1965. O’Toole was fine with that because it was on at Fairfield Hall in Croydon — not exactly the most appealing of theatres — for just a few weeks.
We received rave reviews the night it opened and were then offered six to seven West End theatres as a transfer.
It was all too much. The phone kept ringing with interview requests, and there were many bouquets in the house. But I felt anxious. This success could have a negative impact on our relationship. This was exactly what I worried about.
Sian Phillips, a Welsh actress, poses with her insignia following being made a Dame Commander in the Order of the British Empire in 2016.
The night before we opened at the Savoy Theatre, O’Toole invited everyone from the pub back to our home for an all-night party.
He kept checking on me — ‘Are you all right?’ — so I got no sleep. He made my work life very difficult by not forbidding any of the roles he offered me.
He said that the Old Vic play Cleopatra rarely works and that I had to make sure every aspect of it was flawless.
Unlike him, I wasn’t in a position to make demands. As the arguments raged on at home — becoming more concerned with my character and less about the job — I withdrew from the play. Domestic harmony was restored instantly.
The Cherry Orchard went the same. However, I realized that I must be taking on the enormous roles I was offered. Director’s dropped me, because they were always refusing to hire me.
My career was affected by the fact that I lost a decade of my working life in my 30s.
Someone once asked me: ‘How do you manage to combine your busy private life with your career?’ O’Toole answered: ‘She doesn’t have a career. She has jobs.’
The moment passed without me commenting. We’d both grown up at a time when male-dominated households were normal, so part of me embraced the task of being a ‘good’ wife: supportive, undemanding, avoiding censure.
O’Toole certainly had no intention of changing his behaviour. ‘If you don’t like me, leave me alone,’ he’d say wearily. He’d patronise me, call me ‘a silly girl’.
More threatening was the question: ‘Who owns this house?’
The rules were set by the property owner. As a mole, I started to gain some power. It took the unfortunate form of a strict diet and becoming very thin.
Being thin — never giving way to temptation — made me feel more in control than I actually was. However, despite my best efforts to suppress it, I felt more resentful.
Unable to bear the pain when love and approval were withheld, I began gradually to reduce my dependence on O’Toole, to loosen the ties that bound us so lethally. My life would be easier if I experienced less ecstasy and more despair.
In 1975, nearly 16 years into our marriage, O’Toole was rushed to hospital with a life-threatening form of pancreatitis, undoubtedly caused by his vast alcohol intake.
These were the most difficult weeks of my life. I stood vigil as he hovered between death and life, then returned home to change my clothes.
I swear that if I was allowed to see him get better, I wouldn’t entertain any disloyal thoughts. I never felt resentment nor complained.
His doctors did not mention the term alcoholism, but they warned me to expect the worst. I’d never before felt such grief.
He finally opened his eyes a few weeks later. Soon after coming home, he insisted — against doctors’ advice — on going abroad to recuperate.
Barely able to walk, he’d been forbidden to lift anything heavier than a teacup.
The month we spent in an all but-empty hotel in Positano, Italy, was an intensely happy time; I’d never felt such love for him and our partnership seemed to advance to another level.
On our return to London, however, O’Toole decided to do a film in Mexico, and refused to let me accompany him.
Worried that he was still frail, I pleaded with him — but he was adamant. It was hard to believe that he had been so happy with me in Italy. That’s when something in me snapped.
Instantly, it was clear that I was not going to see any change and that there was no way forward for me. He didn’t even want me to visit him on location, as I always had before. Was there a reason he wanted to be alone?
Before his illness, he’d dumped some letters for me to deal with on my desk. One was from a girl called Anna who wrote that she’d obviously misunderstood all that had passed and apologised for her presumption.
It was Anna, a Mexican girl I remembered working on one of his movies. Is it Anna?
When the day came to say goodbye to O’Toole, I felt as though we were saying goodbye for ever.
One night, a young actor — who had a minor part in the play I was appearing in — asked me out for a drink with him and a friend. It was a great compliment. No one asked Mrs O’Toole out. Not ever.
Because my children had been away from home with me mother, I invited them to come back. The two of us sat down and talked, and then the one-year-old man went and offered his assistance in locking up.
He grabbed my hand and threw the key away before I could finish. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
But even though I believed I had made a horrible mistake, I could still feel a smile coming over my face.
Accustomed all my life to untroubled, wonderful sex, the worries and heartbreak of the last six months made this coupling more extraordinary than usual.
My lack of guilt surprised me. Robin Sachs was sixteen years younger than me. They spent the weekend together and split up when the play was over. Even though I tried my best to end the affair, it kept coming back.
Bizarrely, on the night I first slept with Robin, O’Toole had a strange experience: I’d ‘appeared’ to him. He pled his trust to me again in the letter. This implied that he regrets what had attracted him to Mexico.
In August 1975, he returned home. No longer drinking, he’d moved on to marijuana which made him benign and boring. His inability to see a shift in me made it seem as if he didn’t care. I was feeling shadowy and unnecessary.
In 1976, O’Toole went to Rome to film Caligula with John Gielgud and Helen Mirren, while I was making the BBC series I, Claudius.
It seemed that everything was happening in slow motion. O’Toole, finally noticing something was amiss, sprang into attack mode, interrogating me until I confessed.
Useless to say that Robin — for whom my passion was diminishing — was a symptom, not a cause; useless to say that all I really wanted was to live on my own.
In February 1977, he assembled my mother and our teenage daughters, Kate and Pat, to tell them I was ‘exhausted’ and needed to leave home for a ‘rest’.
It was clear I’d been dismissed. That night, I took two bags with me and left. I knew I’d never see O’Toole again; he prided himself on his resolutely unforgiving nature.
Much later, I read in a paper that he’d moved a Mexican girl called Anna into the house.
When I walked out, I still loved O’Toole but I was numb with exhaustion. It was the first time I had slept well in years. Robin came back into my life. On the day my divorce came through, he turned up with a special licence and said he’d arranged a party for after the wedding ceremony.
I told him our marriage wouldn’t last two minutes. He seemed to have lost his mind. I simply didn’t have the heart to say no.
That was the first time I regretted. Even though we lived together in a house for three years, we barely saw one another after that. I can’t say I cared: without O’Toole to hold me back, I was working again and that made me happy.
Robin met me in America when I was almost 50. He was amazing. Since then, I have never had to be a part of a relationship with a man. Never again. Sex was something I liked, but it dwindled away.
I went back to what I’d wanted when I was young: to work. Thank goodness, it worked out.
My high regard for O’Toole’s many virtues remained intact. He was in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, which I saw him perform in 1989. It was pure joy because he was so good, but I wasn’t tempted to go backstage. I would have spit on him.
In 2013, however, I went to his funeral — he couldn’t spit on me then, could he?
I’m 88 now, fit and happy still to be working. I’ve never regretted leaving O’Toole, but I look back on him with love. It was wonderful when it was.
And he knew me so well — though he didn’t know the depths of my resolve and fury.