Peter O'Toole

Peter Seamus O'Toole was born on 2 August 1932, the son of Constance Jane Eliot (née Ferguson), a Scottish nurse, and Patrick Joseph "Spats" O'Toole, an Irish metal plater, football player, and bookmaker. O'Toole claimed he was not certain of his birthplace or date, stating in his autobiography that he accepted 2 August as his birth date but had birth certificates from England and Ireland. The birth certificate recorded at the Leeds General Register Office says he was born at St James's University Hospital in Leeds, Yorkshire, England, on 2 August 1932.

O'Toole had an elder sister named Patricia and grew up in the south Leeds suburb of Hunslet. When he was one year old, his family began a five-year tour of major racecourse towns in Northern England. He and his sister were brought up in their father's Catholic faith. O'Toole was evacuated from Leeds early in the Second World War, and went to a Catholic school for seven or eight years: St Joseph's Secondary School in Hunslet, Leeds. He later said, "I used to be scared stiff of the nuns: their whole denial of womanhood—the black dresses and the shaving of the hair—was so horrible, so terrifying. [...] Of course, that's all been stopped. They're sipping gin and tonic in the Dublin pubs now, and a couple of them flashed their pretty ankles at me just the other day."

Upon leaving school, O'Toole obtained employment as a trainee journalist and photographer on the Yorkshire Evening Post, until he was called up for national service as a signaller in the Royal Navy. As reported in a radio interview in 2006 on NPR, he was asked by an officer whether he had something he had always wanted to do. His reply was that he had always wanted to try being either a poet or an actor.

He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London from 1952 to 1954 on a scholarship. This came after being rejected by the Abbey Theatre's drama school in Dublin by the director Ernest Blythe, because he could not speak the Irish language. At RADA, he was in the same class as Albert Finney, Alan Bates and Brian Bedford. O'Toole described this as "the most remarkable class the academy ever had, though we weren't reckoned for much at the time. We were all considered dotty."