Day O’Reilly missed out on Hollywood
THE MAN TRULY IN THE KNOW
When he last spoke in public, at his old Dublin rugby club a few hefty punts from the church where they held his funeral mass on Thursday, Tony O’Reilly summed up his extraordinary life in one sentence:
“You win and you lose and if you don’t know how to lose, you don’t know how to live.’’
Long before he began making millions by the hundred running the Heinz ketchup empire from Pittsburgh, before Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton began beating a presidential path to his Irish mansion, O’Reilly knew what it was like to be humiliated by defeat.
That it took place at a packed Twickenham made the humiliation infinitely greater. On February 11, 1956, when O’Reilly was still in his teens but all the rage after his exploits for the Lions in South Africa the previous summer, England hammered Ireland 20-0, a veritable rout by the low scores of the time.
One third of the Irish XV were dropped never to return, among them the captain, Jim Ritchie of London Irish. On top of the missed tackles, O’Reilly missed something else that day, a meeting which might have shot him to stardom on a universal scale as a movie star.
In Hollywood, plans were being finalised for a blockbuster which would break all box-office records for any film since Gone With The Wind.
Noel Purcell, a distinguished Irish actor of stage and screen, knew everyone in Tinseltown including Al Corfino, the casting director for Ben Hur.
Corfino asked Purcell if he could think of any athletic young actors in Ireland who might fill the bill. The old actor made inquiries back in Dublin and rapidly concluded that a budding Ben Hur was to be found in the Irish three quarter line.
Ivan Fallon, author of the definitive O’Reilly biography, tells of Corfino flying to London to see the would-be charioteer for himself with Purcell arranging a post-match meeting-cum-audition at Twickenham. MGM, with its roaring lion trademark, would quite possibly end up with a real Lion of their very own.
The story was front-page news in every Irish newspaper; unionist, nationalist, republican. All over the country, north and south, people were talking about someone who played a sport they had never seen.
As for the meeting-cum-audition, it never happened. O’Reilly, bruised in every sense, beat a hasty retreat to Dublin, much to Purcell’s annoyance. He thought the 19-year-old had missed the opportunity of a lifetime.
“Purcell asked O’Reilly why he didn’t follow through on the offer,’’ writes Fallon. “‘Mr Purcell,’ he replied. ‘I have two ambitions. One is to qualify as a solicitor and the other is to play rugby football’.”
To his dying day, Purcell regretted O’Reilly’s refusal to audition. “There was every chance he would have got it,’’ he said. “He was perfect for the part with his build, such a fine-looking young man.’’
Charlton Heston got the part instead, and with it an Oscar for best actor. O’Reilly, perhaps sensing all along that there was more to life than hurtling around the Coliseum in a spiked chariot, found the answer in a mountainous morass of splattered tomatoes.
At the funeral mass in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Donnybrook, Cameron O’Reilly described his father as ‘a titanic figure, a trailblazer who saw no limits to what he could achieve. “Where people saw obstacles, he saw opportunities and he almost always went for the gap, whether on the rugger field or in the boardroom. He inspired so many people to be bigger, to think bolder and to never accept second place. His was a life of highs and lows, of ebbs and flows.’’
From billionaire to bankruptcy takes some doing, even for someone like Tony O’Reilly whose 38 tries in 38 matches for the Lions shall forever remain untouchable, a monumental high beyond human reach.
