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Backstage at Comes a Day he got drunk and trashed his dressing room; he broke one of his hands hitting some scenery during The Wall when he could no longer tolerate one of his costars. After a period on the wagon, he got drunk and, knowing he could not perform well, deliberately missed a performance of The Andersonville Trial. During rehearsals of Plaza Suite, in later years, Maureen Stapleton confided to Mike Nichols: "I'm so frightened of George I don't know what to do." Nichols replied: "My dear, the whole world is frightened of George."
By the early '60s, Scott had won his second Oscar nomination for The Hustler—and refused it. He had been acclaimed for his Shylock in another Papp production ("the greatest acting experience of my life"), almost stolen the show from Peter Sellers in Strangelove, and played in Desire Under the Elms opposite his wife Colleen. They now had two sons, but as his talent matured, his personal life began to crack. Everything broke open in 1964, after Scott left for Rome to play Abraham in John Huston's behemoth film The Bible.
Scott pursued his co-star Ava Gardner around the set, and subsequently across much of Europe. After the film was completed, he had to be put into a nursing home to dry out. According to a friend, "he was really in love with Ava and wanted to marry her. But she didn't want to marry him." Even now he will not talk about it. It was in this same period that Scott was fired from a movie called How to Steal a Million after showing up five hours late for the first day of filming. Separated for some time, he and Colleen were finally divorced.
The Prosaic Gentleman
For the next few years, Scott wandered: from a clumsy production of The Three Sisters co-starring Sandy Dennis, who drove him almost berserk with her mumbling mannerisms, to a role in a mindless service comedy with Tony Curtis called Not With My Wife, You Don't. Then, gradually, he began to pick up the pieces. He worked for the first time under Mike Nichols' direction in the Lincoln Center revival of The Little Foxes. And he appeared in what may be his finest screen portrayal, the doctor in Richard Lester's superb film Petulia.
Scott seems to have invested more than the usual portion of his personal anguish and anger in the role of Archie, an affluent San Francisco physician newly separated from his wife, who falls crazily in love with a tormented bitch named Petulia. Lester's film contains some of the best sequences of sexual and romantic tension ever caught by a camera, and Scott provides most of them. In one memorable scene, his ex-wife has come to visit him and brings a bag of homemade cookies with her as a peace offering. As the discussion becomes edgier and more hostile, Scott finally pivots around and hurls the bag of cookies at her. The bag explodes against her back, and the cookies fly apart like a fragmentation grenade. It is a moment of powerful artistry for actor as well as director. Not surprisingly, Scott dismisses his portrayal as "pretty cut and dried." Those who know him well say that in Petulia he played as close to himself as he ever has.