Peter O'toole's

In a London restaurant, Peter O'Toole, 56, speared an oyster and reflected nearly three decades back, to the time when a little-known Irish actor was cast as Lawrence of Arabia. "These were events that altered my entire life," he told TIME correspondent Anne Constable. "It became a yardstick by which to measure practically anything -- even simple things like human endurance." Stepping into the 130 degrees F Jordanian sun on the first day of shooting, he recalls, "it was so hot it hurt. But within a month I adjusted. I knew it would be as much an adventure as a film, and it was my business to see it through to the end."

For O'Toole, director Lean was an inspiring teacher. "David doesn't play God," he says, "or if he does, he shares his godship. There wasn't a setup that he didn't invite me to look at through the camera. When he was editing, I'd sit on the cutting-room floor, watching." And at the end of the adventure, "we were shooting the last scene, and I was sitting in the jeep with my feet in a bucket of ice because it was so hot. David just shot it and shot it and shot it. He was amazingly reluctant to let go."

The two men reunited last April when O'Toole joined Alec Guinness to dub parts of the restored film under Lean's direction. "It could have been macabre," he acknowledges, "but it wasn't. It was fun. For one thing, David and I could see Lawrence in a different light. We were more detached, and the way to capture those moments seemed clearer. It's the old story: actors play Hamlet in their late 20s and then realize in their mid-50s that they now know how to do it."

O'Toole likes to say his life has been "either a wedding or a wake." The decades since Lawrence have given him opportunities for both: some scintillating screen achievements (Lord Jim, The Ruling Class, My Favorite Year) and the squiffy, self-parodying grandeur of so many talk-show turns and his West End Macbeth.

But age does lend perspective, especially to a son of Connemara. "There's always a hunger, when you're young, to go from peak to peak and avoid the valleys. I had a pretty hilariously gloomy few years in the '70s. But today I'm quite at home wandering those valleys and occasionally climbing a peak." So does he regret anything? "No." An actor's delicious pause. "Well, sure. I'm not a French singer."