The Lion in Summer : LOITERING WITH INTENT: The Apprentice.<i> By Peter O’Toole</i> .<i> Hyperion: 410 pp., $24.95</i>

Peter O’Toole is a theater animal through and through. When he enters a stage door, his nose sniffs eagerly, as if he were a Thoroughbred approaching the starting gate at a classic race. His biographical theater program notes make no reference to his distinguished cinematic career. No mention of “Lawrence of Arabia.” No hint of “Becket.” No suggestion of “The Last Emperor.”

Way back in Leeds, where he was born in 1932, he flirted briefly with journalism. The instinct to be a writer never went away, and now an endless journey of reading pleasure stretches out before us. His first volume of autobiography, “Loitering With Intent: The Child,” evoked the atmosphere of his Dickensian back-street life in a northern English industrial town, growing up under the shadow of Hitler, who became an obsession. You won’t find anything about his movie triumphs or his movie rubbish (of which there has been plenty) in either of these volumes. So rejoice that in his second book there is confirmation that we are in for a slow, majestic progress through a wealth of minute detail--a sort of A la Recherche d’O’Toole Perdue. In style and wit, its 410 pages are as intoxicating as the 198 in the earlier book.

Hollywood can go hang, I would estimate, for several more volumes. Recently O’Toole has rationed his stage performances as well. In his time a fine Hamlet and sensational as Petruchio and Shylock, he played a Macbeth at the Old Vic in 1981 that the press judged disastrous. However, such is his magnetism that he broke box-office records with it and toured large provincial houses playing to capacity. Since then he has limited himself to a little Shaw (his idol--the long speeches a wonderful showcase for his amazing technique and breath control) and two plays by the modern English playwright and novelist, Keith Waterhouse. In 1989, in the first, “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell,” a dramatic poem to the seamier side of Soho and its most elegant chronicler, he set the West End alight, standing room only. A year later, he revived it in a 1,500 seat theater that also sold every seat for a 10-week season.

Volume 1 of “Loitering With Intent” left the roaring boy entering the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art under the amused gaze of Shaw’s bust. Readers looking for on-set scandal will not find a whiff of celluloid. He ends this book 12 months later, poised for his second year at the academy (1954). There are two more years to go as a student, but first a wild vacation as a navvy with “my pack of wild Paddies” and playing a small part in an American courtroom drama with other students in the open air of leafy parklands, “to an audience of ducks.”

O’Toole writes as he acts, extravagantly. He is a living reproach to so many actors who, after a lifetime acquaintance with fine words, allow their “ghosts” to ill use the language. O’Toole always permits his prose an echo of Shaw, “very affable,” or a hint of Shakespeare, “with all convenient speed.”

To what plums in this rich pudding should I direct you?

There is the fresh, insightful dissection of the plays examined in rehearsal: “As You Like It,” Shaw’s “You Never Can Tell,” “Trelawney of the Wells” by Pinero. It comes as no surprise that O’Toole despises the espousal of realism advocated by the fictional playwright, Tom Wrench, in the Pinero piece. O’Toole is made for the grand romantic gesture, not teacup drama, and when he attends a professional production of Trelawney, he mercilessly skewers an unnamed singer who murders her magic musical moment in that play.

“King John” is read and reflected upon before he witnesses it from the gallery at the Old Vic with Michael Hordern as the King and Richard Burton as the Bastard. After O’Toole has queued for his ticket, he sees Burton passing regally along the Cut, the street in which the Vic stands, with his lover and leading lady, Claire Bloom. There is electricity as the impoverished student’s eyes lock with those of Burton, already the star. Friendship is a long way in the future.

There are the teachers at the academy, a gallery of eccentrics drawn with the elegant certainty of a Beerbohm cartoon: the teacher of dance, Madam “Stretcher” Fletcher, who forces his “trotters at an unaccustomed quarter to three”; John Gabriel, a veteran acting coach, demonstrating the ease with which Sir Gerald du Maurier--the thespian father of writer Daphne--would take off a coat, light a cigarette and answer the telephone while making a speech.

There is Ernest Milton, another teacher and a great Shakespearean--a fine-mannered Hamlet and a memorable King John in his day, who--because he was born in San Francisco--is known to his students by an irreverent nickname, “The Cisco Kid.” From this gallery of characters he learns fencing, dancing, technique and voice--how to de-lisp an errant tongue. (“Recite ‘amidst the mists and coldest frosts’--10 times on waking and on retiring.”)

See how he evokes another old actor, a presence at the academy, Robert Atkins, who propped up the early years of the Old Vic and created the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. “Robert famously was a womanizer, drank whiskey by the bucket, could curse blisters on granite; a martinet at work, he was a rollicker in leisure; erudite, theatrical, godless, practical, his industriousness was boundless, his will and determination invincible, his phrasemaking raw, plangent, packed with salt and wit, his fists and boots available for those who fancied a taste. He was a loyal and generous friend, he feared no one and no thing.” More than half these qualities can be ascribed to O’Toole.

On the distaff side there is Ingelrica Bloodaxemansdotter, an Icelandic Celia, who drops out soon after “As You Like It” on account of incompetence. There are other women, other romances. There is a beautiful American girl remembered with affection only as “Pocahontas, the Chicagoan Hebrew Hopi Indian.” There are Nina Van and Nina Von, the two blonds in his crazy cast of flat-sharers, and Jeannie. O’Toole reflects tenderly on the suicide, years later, of this gentle girl to whom, rehearsing “As You Like It,” he once had to explain the word “hymen.”

There is the first meeting and the early acting challenge of Albert Finney. In his previous book, O’Toole counter-pointed his own story with that of Hitler. Here he has an infinitely more attractive parallel theme--the great early 19th century tragedian Edmund Kean, of whom Coleridge wrote, “to see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.” The grandeur and the carousing lifestyle of Kean are clear templates for the young O’Toole.

There is the obligatory diatribe against directors cogently shaped. There is even an Irish joke. Is there nothing to which this most unusual autobiographer will not sink? Probably not, thank God! A Dublin taxi driver has a black eye. “How did you get it?” O’Toole’s girlfriend wants to know. “I swerved to avoid a child,” says the cabby, “and fell out of bed.”

I hope, nay, demand another 20 volumes before the last 65 years are all remembered--but you may have to wait for five or six more before you meet Omar Sharif.