Just one day before Peter O'Toole was scheduled to sit down with me and other journalists at the Toronto International Film Festival to discuss his critically cheered new film, "Venus," word came that he's too ill to travel from Britain.

The news has stunned fest-goers. Is the 74-year-old acting legend gravely ill or just temporarily indisposed? Miramax says the latter. A press rep told me, "Peter is having intestinal problems, which he's had before." But it's not like that gung-ho acting trouper to miss a curtain call — especially this one since it's clear that "Venus" seems likely to bring Oscar's biggest loser (7 defeats) his "lovely bugger" — what he calls the elusive statuette — at last. Peter wants the bugger so badly that he nearly refused an honorary Oscar from the academy three years ago because he feared it might affect his future chances in the best actor race. Only when he was reminded that Paul Newman, Henry Fonda and Charlie Chaplin all received a competitive Oscar after accepting an honorary one did he consent to the tribute.

Now "Venus" is in perfect alignment in the cinema firmament to deliver that win for him. When it debuted in Toronto on Friday, the audience was wowed and awestruck. He gives a tour-de-force turn as an aging actor facing his imminent death while shamelessly pining for a defiant teenage tart who reluctantly accepts morsels of his life's wisdom and his innocent advances while scarfing down cheese doodles and chow mein noodles. At first she rudely ignores him and gets nasty, then slowly warms to his brilliant glow within as she grows to depend on him for money and attention and knowledge about the world she's ignored for too long. The uneducated brat has good reason to shun him at the start. He shamelessly lusts after her, but she knows she's safe because he's really impotent after a prostate operation and she also comes to understand that he's just an expiring actor recreating his old randy role as lothario one last time with gusto. Their fierce love-hate relationship is all a bawdy game of sexual teases and power dominance plus a crash course on the meaning of life and love that must be taught before his light goes out.

It's a bravura performance, screamingly funny and fiercely dramatic, that shouts "Oscar! Oscar!" Academy members are likely to give it to him, too (read my in-depth dish on his Oscar background, CLICK HERE) because "Venus" is so good and they usually respond to guilt trips over their past oversights if enough fuss is made.

That means Sir Peter's health must rally so he can get back out onto the campaign trail and seduce everyone with his charm, as he always does, and a fab film.

Get better soon, Sir Peter. Your overdue moment of Oscar glory is nigh and we are cheering you on.

Photo: In "Venus," O'Toole gets "his first meaty leading film role in perhaps two decades, and the still charismatic and silver-tongued star scores a bull's-eye," says Variety.
(Miramax)