'DO YOU believe in anything?" Jodie Whitaker asks Peter O'Toole in his comeback movie, Venus. He plays a hellraising actor now long in the tooth, but still with a roving eye.

She's the beguiling 19-year-old grand-niece of one of his doddering friends - 82-year-old Leslie Phillips - with whom he's helplessly infatuated.

"Pleasure, I like, " he tells her, smiling through his rheumy eyes and nicotine-stained teeth. "I've tried to give pleasure."

So does O'Toole himself, now 74, believe in anything? "That's a deep philosophical question, " he says with a rueful grin. "It would take me a minute or two." But it doesn't. "I believe the Number One bus goes to Hammersmith and Father Christmas isn't driving it, " he tells me.

This is at the Bluebird in Chelsea after the London premi�re of Venus. He's with his actress daughter Kate, who lives in Ireland, and younger actor son Lorcan, brought up by him after a custody battle with American model Karen Brown. He's wearing a tweed jacket over a shirt and tie and a purple v-necked pullover.

Whitaker is there too. The poignancy with which he embarks on one last lark with her in Venus won him an Oscar nomination - his eighth - which, he said, wouldn't "be worth a sausage" if he didn't win.

He came under pressure to lobby for Academy votes. Over the weeks leading up to last Sunday's Oscars he dutifully did talk shows in New York, saying, "To find out I still am in the game and have been dealt a really lovely hand, I am going to play it for what it's worth."

He even went to the Super Bowl and stayed with ex-Disney boss Michael Eisner before attending the annual pre-Oscars luncheon for nominees at the Beverly Hilton.

But he skipped the Golden Globes and the Baftas, losing both awards to Forest Whitaker. "I've never gone trophy hunting in my life, " he said. "I would be delighted to win.

If not, I will be the record holder for the one who never won."

Despite a late surge of support, that's the distinction he now holds.

When Reese Witherspoon opened the Best Actor envelope - watched live on television by over a billion viewers - he sat with Kate in the third row hiding his disappointment yet again as Forest Whitaker's name was read out.

He's well practised at being graceful in defeat, having failed to win in 1963 for Lawrence of Arabia, and then for Beckett, The Lion In Winter, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Ruling Class, The Stuntman and, in 1982, for My Favourite Year.

"Nobody realises how you have to run for office now, " Venus producer Kevin Loader tells me. "Forest has been on the stump since October. It's what you have to do.

But Peter's the opposite. He did go to the luncheon, he's not that stupid. But that was about all."

Since O'Toole played an English tutor in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in 1987 he has been getting by happily on cameos and the odd stage show. His drinking and philandering caught up on him in the late 1970s. He had a pancreas operation. He was dumped by his actress wife Sian Phillip, 19 years after he brought her back to Dublin for their marriage, his parents having emigrated to Hunslet when he was still a baby. He still regularly returns to Ireland to visit Kate, now a columnist with the Clare Champion - she's named after his one-time close buddy Katharine Hepburn, who used to visit him at his cottage in Connemara.

"I was not holding my breath when I sent him the script for Venus, " director Roger Michell tells me. "He hadn't done a leading role for 20 years, maybe more. So something in the script chimed sufficiently well with his sensibilities to make him want to take on a low-budget, lowly-paid, difficult English film that would involve getting up early every morning and standing around in the freezing cold of Kentish Town."

They met a week later in the Garrick Club in London, which was crowded that day with mourners from a memorial service for John Mills. "I could see immediately how perfect he would be because he was frailer than I thought and more delicate than I imagined and more vulnerable than I remembered, " says Michell.

"All those features of him were put against the baggage we have of Peter O'Toole, the great physical romantic swashbuckler. It's a wonderful paradox that really works for the film."

Actually, there's always been something fragile about O'Toole.

When we met in the Shelbourne Hotel in the 1960s while he was filming Country Dance I remember thinking that he might break as we shook hands. Of course he'd been carousing around city bars for several days, ending up in court one night. Yet he was perky enough to try getting my wife to have a drink with him.

Michell laughs. "Unlike other swashbucklers like Richard Burton that we associate with him, he was the most romantic, " he says.

"He was the most dashing and the most lyrical."

As luck would have it, O'Toole broke a hip filming Venus. "It was a very sorry lesson, " O'Toole tells me. "Once upon a time I used to say, and I say it with conviction, the only exercise I take was following the coffins of friends who took exercise. That was the case until a doctor wagged a finger at me and I ended up at Lord's spending six weeks working out with international cricketers, a little bit behind but doing the best I could. I came out at the end astonishingly fit and boring everybody stupid. Come Christmas and we'd been filming for several weeks - hard work - and I woke up on Boxing Day morning, a time when normally, if I even wake up, my eyes are slit open and I grope for coffee or a cigar, but this Boxing Day I hopped out of bed, tripped over a pair of shoes and banged my head, and all that exercise went to waste."

Or perhaps it didn't. He was fit enough to have a new hip put in and within three weeks he was back on the set, filming a scene that involved cutting Leslie Phillips's toenails and crawling around on the carpet picking up the clippings. If anything his accident helped the film, as a reminder of how old he is, particularly in scenes with Jodie Whitaker. "Sometimes I'd be leaning on him and he'd say, 'Oh, watch the hip, '" she tells me. "'Sorry, I forgot, ' I'd say. When he was crawling around on the carpet I kept whispering, 'Oh God, be careful.'" Venu s is a companion piece to Michell's earlier movie The Mother - also scripted by Hanif Kureshi - in which Ann Reid is a 64-year-old widow who has an affair with a much younger man, played by Daniel Craig. Not that O'Toole's character goes that far. For one thing, he's being treated for cancer of the prostate. "I'm impotent of course, " he says. "But I can still take a theoretical interest."

"This is a much sweeter and a much warmer picture, " says Loader. "It's not really about sex.

The Mother was very much about sexual desire as a way out of feeling cornered in later life. This is more about longing and friendship, an examination of different kinds of attachments one can have."

While Venus - the title refers to Velazquez's portrait of a reclining nude which O'Toole takes Whitaker to see at the National Gallery in the hope of persuading her to work as a nude model - involves, of course (as O'Toole puts it) "a dirty old man and a sluttish young woman having a romance, " it's also about the camaraderie between old actor friends who meet at a local caf�, and about the continuing love between O'Toole and his long-separated wife, wonderfully portrayed by Vanessa Redgrave.

O'Toole and Phillips are old friends in real life too, going back over 50 years. "The great thing about working with Peter is that he listens to everything you say, " Phillips tells me. "So we lived it, didn't we? It was such a good script, you didn't have to act. You listen to each other and you find the most extraordinary things.

With the script as the basis, you embellish by nature."

The fact that O'Toole is playing an ageing actor who led a swashbuckling life isn't to O'Toole relevant to his performance. "There is an absolute separation in performing from whom one is, " he says. "If things spill over, that's purely accidental. You can perhaps use it as an idiosyncrasy. I know no actor of any worth who acts himself."

O'Toole and Phillips last acted together in the 1991 comedy King Ralph. "Now there's an example of truly bottomless stupidity, very thin ice indeed, " says O'Toole.

"Nevertheless the skaters were there to do it. Leslie is as experienced in comedy as anyone in this country. I'm not bad either. And there was Johnny Hurt too, and Richard Griffiths who's also with us in Venu s . We could have skated very handily on that ice."

"We had a problem with the director, " cuts in Phillips.

"Oh holy mother of Jesus."

"It was like going on the set of High Noon."

"It really was."

"He wouldn't print a shot, would he? He wanted to go on and on.

When we got 35 takes the crew were on the floor with boredom."

"He thought he was dealing with The Madness of King George.

He wasn't. It was a little bit of fluff.

My favourite moment was when he complained that Jimmy Villiers was looking at his mark. 'I'm bowing to my monarch, you pillock, ' Jimmy retorted."

I leave the two of them reminiscing. The thing about O'Toole is he's always been a trooper, prepared to muck in. Whatever about Lawrence of Arabia, he's at heart a stage actor rather than a Hollywood icon. Although he was hailed in the 1950s as one of the Angry Young Men generation, he's rooted in an older tradition of theatre.

"The performance that knocked me sideways and still knocks me sideways was Laurence Olivier in Titus Andronicus in the 1950s, " he says. "I was performing at the nearby Garrick, but I was in different matinees so I saw it six times from seat A6 in the front row. It damn near undermined my own confidence about my abilities."

Maybe he'd like to have won an Oscar, finally. But it won't put him out that much. He's happy to have had a chance to play the ageing actor Maurice in Venus, celebrating the end of his life by taking a beautiful girl to the beach.

"It's Nietzsche, isn't it?" he says.

"It's die at the right time. Have a go and then pop."

Venus opened on Friday EIGHT NEAR MISSES 1963: Lawrence of Arabia 1965: Becket 1969: The Lion in Winter 1970: Goodbye Mr Chips 1973: The Ruling Class 1981: The Stunt Man 1983: My Favourite Year 2007: Venus