Peter O’Toole, 74, is wonderful as an ageing roue in the new film “Venus”. This should come as no surprise since he’s been wonderful from the beginning, starting with his first major role in David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. No actor ever kicked off his career more auspiciously.

Lean actually had Marlon Brando in mind for Lawrence, and Albert Finney was another early contender. When he was cast, O’Toole had been a member of the Bristol Old Vic company and a secondary player in films like “The Savage Innocents” and “The Day They Robbed the Bank of England”. However, Lean recognised a majesty in O’Toole that was perfect for Lawrence.

He needed an actor beautiful enough to upstage the vast desert panoramas. After he saw the film, Noel Coward supposedly said, “If he was any more beautiful, they’d have to call it ‘Florence of Arabia’.”

With his hawkish features, blinding blond hair and radioactive blue eyes, O’Toole is a magnificent camera subject in “Lawrence of Arabia”. His bristling passion and savage melancholy were far beyond the waxworks heroism of the standard Hollywood icon, but his greatest acting came later.

In “Becket” (1964), O’Toole plays King Henry II opposite Richard Burton’s Archbishop of Canterbury. It’s a peerlessly strange performance in which Henry’s overfond attachment to Becket becomes the film’s driving force. Seen today, the film is closer to “Brokeback Mountain” than to a typical Hollywood historical pageant.

In “The Lion in Winter” (1968), O’Toole again played Henry II, this time opposite Katharine Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitane, and he was suitably lionish. O’Toole is one of the few actors who can roar his lines and still give them the subtlest of shadings.

A year later O’Toole gave what may be his best performance in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”, a musical remake of the 1939 war horse starring Robert Donat. Imperially fastidious, O’Toole’s Mr. Chips represents the essence of the musty British scholar. But O’Toole shows us the frailty and pride beneath the persnickety facade.

Two unheralded performances followed, in the upper-class comedy “Brotherly Love” (1970) and especially in “Under Milk Wood” (1972).

As the blind Captain Cat, the wraithlike O’Toole gave Dylan Thomas’s dramatic poetry an ineffable lilt.

That same year O’Toole appeared in “The Ruling Class” as a royal British heir who is under the delusion he is Jesus Christ. O’Toole is so exhaustingly loony that his performance often seems more like callisthenics than acting, but the movie has its ardent admirers. The same year he starred as Don Quixote in “Man of La Mancha”; looking as gaunt as an El Greco, he was marvellous. O’Toole had the effrontery to reach inside this Broadway kitsch and pull something great out of it.

Passing right over “Caligula”, we come to “The Stunt Man” (1980) probably the most emblematic O’Toole performance after Lawrence. He plays Eli Cross, a megalomaniacal movie director patterned on both Lean and John Huston (who directed O’Toole in “The Bible”). He also seems to be patterned on Jesus Christ, and this time around, he got it down pat.

As the sloshed and impossibly narcissistic TV series guest star in “My Favorite Year” (1982), O’Toole shows off his high comic manner to best effect. He has the ability to kid his grandeur while at the same time never allowing us to forget just how grand he is. It’s an unbeatable combination.