Was O'Toole criticized for his larger-than-life performances?
The drama of it all! Some found my approach, perhaps, a touch… exuberant. They mistook a certain theatricality, a deliberate embrace of the grand gesture, for mere histrionics. But how else does one convey the colossal weight of a king's dilemma, the fevered dreams of an explorer lost in the vastness of his own creation? To shy away from the epic in portraying the epic? A rather timid notion, I would venture. I sought to harness the full spectrum of human emotion, to paint with broad strokes when the subject demanded it, to give voice to the magnificent, sometimes terrifying, scale of our existence.
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