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“ ‘Don’t worry about it, John,’ he said. He didn’t want to have to come to the studio two hours early and have a lot of stuff put on his face. He played the whole part with very, very little makeup—extraordinary, actually, because his skin is quite smooth, and yet he does convey very well the feeling of a man in his late sixties.”

The strain of his disintegrating marriage took its toll during filming, but it’s difficult to pin down whether Peter’s shattered emotional state was due to his collapsing marriage or whether the marriage collapsed owing to Peter’s mental deterioration. “Peter was breaking down into tears now and again,” Guillermin recalls. “In fact, the scene when he’s about to commit suicide—he gets a revolver and he’s going to blow his brains out—was a very bad day for Peter. He said, ‘I can’t work.’ I finally persuaded him to just sit down at the desk. He was in tears, but it worked for the scene, which we shot. That was one of the tragic moments. He was tortured. A very complicated man.”

Waltz of the Toreadors was widely critiqued for being a kind of pratfall-ridden bowdlerization of Anouilh’s play. Guillermin himself agrees. “The film was fucked up by the producers,” he declares. “They wanted to make a slapstick comedy. And they ruined a wonderful scene that Anouilh wrote for his play and I shot. It was a long take—a whole reel, ten minutes—of Peter and Maggie Leighton in their quarters, and they tear each other apart.”

But Guillermin did not have the right of final cut. “I was thrown off the editing of the film,” he says, still bitter. “They brought in a yes man, and they intercut it with a light comedy scene of Dany Robin and John Fraser larking about in the fields. There were doves fluttering about! They intercut Peter and Maggie’s scene three or four or five times, and it totally took the heart out of the film.”

Because Peter had such high expectations of his own talent, gripped by idealized goals that were thus impossible to achieve, he was increasingly struck by deep depression after seeing his films. “The whole thing looks terrible, amateurish, bad,” he told a British reporter after seeing Waltz of the Toreadors. “And you want to pack it all in and look round quickly for a means of employment. Suicide? No, not that. But who can you talk to? Who’d understand your problem?”

But of course there were multiple Peters. He was elated when he won the Best Actor award at the San Sebastian Film Festival for Waltz of the Toreadors. His press agent, Theo Cowan, found him to be “like a ten-year-old, going about with four cameras slung around his neck, taking thousands of snaps. . . . His great joy was to mingle with the crowds outside the hotel where the stars were staying and do what he called ‘seeing myself go in.’ ”

• • •

During the filming of Waltz of the Toreadors, the distance between Paris and London hardly mattered as far as Peter’s marriage was concerned, since fighting and begging could continue by long-distance telephone. David Lodge tells of Peter sitting in his trailer one day stewing over his most recent argument with Anne. “Everyone cooled their heels outside, including the cavalry horses needed for the scene.” With his marriage in tatters, the mercurial star was being even more so; the film’s producer, Julian Wintle, “went out of his mind as the costs climbed hourly.” Eventually Peter handed Lodge a vast pile of pennies and told him to call Anne on his behalf and apologize.

Lodge did so. Anne refused to accept remorse by proxy.

As Lodge reports, “I couldn’t tell Peter that in his state of mind. So I reported back, ‘She says she’ll talk to you tonight, so get on with your work now.’ ”

Graham and Audrey Stark joined him for a weekend at the Raphael hotel, where Peter was staying during the production, and the three of them spent some time with Dany Robin. By that point, Peter’s heart had taken the predictable turn: “I’m in love with her, and she’s in love with me,” he confided to Graham. The fact of Dany Robin