Laurence Olivier

• 1. Introduction

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  Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on the 22nd of May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest child of a nomadic Church of England clergyman who never quite found a permanent post. By the time he was ten years old, Ellen Terry had written in her diary that the small boy playing Brutus in a school production of Julius Caesar was "already a great actor." It was a prophecy that would take decades to fully unfold, and a career that would reshape what British acting could mean.

  What made Olivier remarkable was not just the range of roles he conquered, but the contradictions he carried: a man who claimed he might easily have been a third-rate comedian called "Larry Oliver," yet who became the founding director of Britain's National Theatre. A screen actor who dismissed film as "this anaemic little medium which could not stand great acting," yet won the Academy Award for Best Picture with Hamlet. A husband to Vivien Leigh, one of the most celebrated couples of their era, who watched their marriage collapse under the weight of her illness and his restlessness.

  How did a clergyman's son with no theatrical connections become the defining actor of his generation? What drove him to risk his finances, his health, and his artistic reputation across more than six decades of stage, screen, and television? And what does it mean that, more than three decades after his death on the 11th of July 1989, his name still graces both London's largest theatrical auditorium and its most prestigious annual acting awards?

• 2. The Clergyman's Son

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  Gerard Olivier, Laurence's father, had begun his adult life as a schoolmaster before discovering a religious vocation in his thirties and being ordained as a priest of the Church of England. He belonged to the high church, ritualist wing of Anglicanism and was known as "Father Olivier" to his congregations, a style that not every Anglican parish welcomed. Because the only posts he was offered were temporary, deputising for absent incumbents, the family led a nomadic existence. For Laurence's first several years, he never lived in one place long enough to make friends.

  When Olivier was five, his father secured a permanent appointment as assistant rector at St Saviour's, Pimlico, in 1912, and held the post for six years. Stability arrived, though warmth did not. Olivier was devoted to his mother but found his father cold and remote. He also found, in his father's preaching, a masterclass in performance. Olivier later wrote that Gerard knew "when to drop the voice, when to bellow about the perils of hellfire, when to slip in a gag, when suddenly to wax sentimental." Those quick changes of mood and manner, Olivier wrote, absorbed him completely and he never forgot them.

  In 1916, Olivier passed the singing examination for admission to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street, in central London. The church's Anglo-Catholic style of worship, with its emphasis on ritual, vestments, and incense, appealed to him immediately. When the school staged Julius Caesar in 1917, the audience included Lady Tree, the young Sybil Thorndike, and Ellen Terry. Olivier's performance as the ten-year-old Brutus prompted Terry to reach for her diary. He followed that role with Maria in Twelfth Night in 1918 and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew in 1922.

  At St Edward's School, Oxford, where he enrolled in 1921, Olivier made little impression until his final year, when his performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream won him popularity among his classmates. In January 1924, his elder brother left for India as a rubber planter, and Olivier asked his father when he might follow. His father replied, "Don't be such a fool, you're not going to India, you're going on the stage."

• 3. Learning the Craft

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  Gerard Olivier, a habitually frugal man, told his son in 1924 that admission to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art was not enough: he must also win a scholarship with a bursary to cover fees and living expenses. Olivier's sister had been a student there and was a favourite of the founder, Elsie Fogerty, and Olivier later speculated that it was this family connection that secured him the bursary. One of his contemporaries was Peggy Ashcroft, who observed that he was "rather uncouth in that his sleeves were too short and his hair stood on end but he was intensely lively and great fun." Fogerty later said that Olivier and Ashcroft stood out among her many pupils.

  After leaving the Central School in 1925, Olivier made his first stage appearance in a sketch at the Brighton Hippodrome in August of that year. Sybil Thorndike, the daughter of a friend of his father's, took him on as a bit-part player, understudy, and assistant stage manager for her London company. His performing style at this time was modelled on the actor Gerald du Maurier, of whom Olivier said, "He seemed to mutter on stage but had such perfect technique. When I started I was so busy doing a du Maurier that no one ever heard a word I said."

  In 1926, on Thorndike's recommendation, Olivier joined the Birmingham Repertory Company. His biographer Michael Billington describes the Birmingham company as "Olivier's university," where in his second year he played a wide range of important roles, including Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, the title role in Uncle Vanya, and Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well. Billington also notes that the engagement led to a lifelong friendship with Ralph Richardson that would have a decisive effect on British theatre.

  In 1928, while playing the juvenile lead in Bird in Hand at the Royalty Theatre, Olivier created the role of Stanhope in R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, scoring a great success at its single Sunday night premiere. He was offered the part in the West End production but turned it down for the more glamorous role of Beau Geste. Journey's End became a long-running success. Beau Geste failed. The Manchester Guardian commented that Olivier "deserves and will get better parts" and that he was "going to make a big name for himself."

• 4. Hollywood, Shakespeare, and War

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  Lured by a salary of $50,000, Olivier traveled to Hollywood in late 1938 to play Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, alongside Merle Oberon and David Niven. He had not enjoyed his earlier brushes with American film, but director William Wyler was a hard taskmaster who taught him to remove what Billington described as "the carapace of theatricality" and replace it with a palpable reality. The resulting film was both a commercial and critical success that earned him his first Academy Award nomination. Caroline Lejeune, writing for The Observer, considered that Olivier's "dark, moody face, abrupt style, and a certain fine arrogance towards the world in his playing are just right" for the role.

  Rebecca followed in 1940, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and produced by David O. Selznick, earning him a second Academy Award nomination. Selznick kept Vivien Leigh off the project, reasoning that it was best to keep the couple apart until their divorces came through. Olivier and Esmond were granted their divorce in January 1940, and Olivier and Leigh married in August of that year at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, California.

  With Britain at war, Olivier wanted to contribute. He telephoned Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information under Winston Churchill, who advised him to speak with the film director Alexander Korda. With Churchill's support and involvement, Korda directed That Hamilton Woman, with Olivier as Horatio Nelson. Olivier spent the following year in the Fleet Air Arm, completing nearly 250 hours of flying time before leaving America, and rapidly eclipsing Richardson's reputation for crashing aircraft.

  In 1943, at the behest of the Ministry of Information, Olivier began working on Henry V. He had not originally intended to direct, but ended up directing, producing, and taking the title role. The battle scenes were filmed in neutral Ireland using 650 extras. John Betjeman, the press attaché at the British embassy in Dublin, played a key liaison role with the Irish government. The film was released in November 1944, with a score by William Walton that a music critic described as ranking "with the best in film music." Olivier was presented with an Academy Honorary Award for his "outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director" in bringing the film to the screen. He was unimpressed, and later commented that "this was my first absolute fob-off, and I regarded it as such."

  Hamlet followed in 1948, again directed by and starring Olivier, with the original play heavily cut to focus on relationships rather than political intrigue. It became the first non-American film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Olivier won Best Actor. Looking back, the critic Campbell Dixon called it "one of the masterpieces of the stage" made into "one of the greatest of films." Walton provided the score for this film too, as he would for Olivier's Richard III in 1955.

• 5. The Old Vic Triumvirate

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  By 1944, with the war turning in the Allies' favour, Tyrone Guthrie felt the time had come to re-establish the Old Vic company in London. He invited Richardson to head it, but Richardson made it a condition that he should share the acting and management in a triumvirate. When Gielgud was proposed as the third member, Gielgud declined, saying, "It would be a disaster, you would have to spend your whole time as referee between Larry and me." The third member was instead the stage director John Burrell.

  The Old Vic governors approached the Royal Navy to secure the release of Richardson and Olivier. The Sea Lords consented with, as Olivier put it, "a speediness and lack of reluctance which was positively hurtful." The triumvirate secured the New Theatre and opened with a repertory of four plays, including Richard III and Uncle Vanya. In Richard III, Billington wrote, Olivier's triumph was so absolute that the performance "became his most frequently imitated performance and one whose supremacy went unchallenged until Antony Sher played the role forty years later."

  In 1945, the company toured Germany, where they were seen by many thousands of Allied servicemen, and appeared at the Comédie-Française in Paris, the first foreign company to be given that honour. The critic Harold Hobson wrote that Richardson and Olivier quickly "made the Old Vic the most famous theatre in the Anglo-Saxon world." The second season featured double bills that demonstrated the range of both men: Richardson's Falstaff dominated the Henry IV productions, while Olivier's back-to-back performances as Oedipus Rex and Mr. Puff in The Critic impressed most critics and audience members.

  The third and final London season under the triumvirate, in 1946-47, included Olivier's King Lear. During the run, Richardson was knighted, to Olivier's undisguised envy. Olivier received the accolade six months later. By then, however, the new chairman of the Old Vic governors, Lord Esher, was actively working against the triumvirate. He had ambitions to head the eventual National Theatre himself and had no intention of letting actors run it. Guthrie, who had originally instigated the triumvirate's appointment, had come to resent their knighthoods and international fame, and encouraged Esher's opposition.

  In January 1948, while Olivier was on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand with the company, Esher terminated the contracts of all three directors, who were said to have "resigned." Melvyn Bragg and Richardson's authorized biographer John Miller both commented that the dismissal put back the establishment of a National Theatre by at least a decade. Bernard Levin later wrote that the Old Vic company of 1944 to 1948 "was probably the most illustrious that has ever been assembled in this country."

• 6. Vivien Leigh and the Years of Strain

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  Olivier had first met Vivien Leigh briefly at the Savoy Grill and again when she visited him during the run of Romeo and Juliet, probably early in 1936. An affair began sometime that year, while both were still married. Olivier later said: "I couldn't help myself with Vivien. No man could. I hated myself for cheating on Jill, but then I had cheated before, but this was something different. This wasn't just out of lust. This was love that I really didn't ask for but was drawn into."

  The couple shared the screen in Fire Over England in 1937, and Leigh joined Olivier in Hollywood in late 1938, explaining that her trip was "partially because Larry's there and partially because I intend to get the part of Scarlett O'Hara," the role in Gone with the Wind in which she was eventually cast. That Hamilton Woman in 1941, with Olivier as Horatio Nelson and Leigh in the title role, was their most prominent wartime collaboration. By that time Korda could see that the relationship between the couple was strained; Leigh was drinking to excess.

  By the end of the Australian tour in 1948, both were exhausted and ill. Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to two walking corpses." He later said he "lost Vivien" in Australia, a reference to her affair with the Australian actor Peter Finch, whom the couple met during the tour. Olivier subsequently auditioned Finch and put him under a long-term contract with Laurence Olivier Productions. Finch and Leigh's affair continued on and off for several years.

  In January 1953, Leigh traveled to Ceylon to film Elephant Walk with Finch. Shortly after filming started she suffered a breakdown and returned to Britain, where she told Olivier she was in love with Finch and had been having an affair with him. Olivier recorded the years of problems that Leigh's manic depression caused, writing that "throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness, an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me."

  Leigh became pregnant in 1956 and withdrew from a production. The day after her final performance in the play, she miscarried and entered a depression that lasted months. In May 1960, divorce proceedings started. The decree nisi was issued in December 1960, and Olivier married Joan Plowright in March 1961. Plowright had played the role of Archie's daughter Jean in The Entertainer, and their relationship had begun during the various runs of that production in 1957. Their son Richard was born in December 1961; two daughters, Tamsin Agnes Margaret and the actress Julie-Kate, followed in January 1963 and July 1966.

• 7. The National Theatre

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  Lord Chandos was appointed chairman of the National Theatre Board in 1962, and in August of that year Olivier accepted the invitation to become the company's first director. As his assistants he recruited the directors John Dexter and William Gaskill, with Kenneth Tynan as literary adviser. Pending construction of the new theatre on the South Bank, the company was based at the Old Vic.

  The opening production, in October 1963, was Hamlet, starring Peter O'Toole and directed by Olivier. Among those who made a mark during Olivier's decade in charge were Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi, and Anthony Hopkins. Robert Stephens, a member of the company, observed: "Olivier's one great fault was a paranoid jealousy of anyone who he thought was a rival." Evans, Gielgud, and Paul Scofield guested only briefly; Ashcroft and Richardson never appeared at the National during Olivier's tenure.

  His first leading role for the National was Othello, directed by John Dexter in 1964. The production was a box-office success and was revived regularly over the next five seasons. Franco Zeffirelli called it "an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the past three centuries." Dissenting voices included The Sunday Telegraph, which called it "the kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable," and director Jonathan Miller, who thought it "a condescending view of an Afro Caribbean person."

  For the first time in his career, Olivier began to suffer from stage fright during this period, which plagued him for several years. He was also treated for prostate cancer and hospitalised with pneumonia. In June 1970 he became the first actor to be created a peer for services to the theatre, though he initially declined the honour. Harold Wilson, the incumbent prime minister, wrote to him, then invited him and Plowright to dinner, and persuaded him to accept.

  In October 1976, the largest of the three theatres within the National's new building was named in his honour. His only appearance on the stage of the Olivier Theatre was at its official opening by the Queen, when he made a speech of welcome that Peter Hall privately described as the most successful part of the evening. By then, Hall had taken over as director of the National Theatre on the 1st of November 1973. Olivier felt he had been eased out and that he had not been properly consulted about the choice of successor.

• 8. Last Acts

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  Olivier's final years were shaped by two forces pulling against each other: deteriorating health and an undiminished appetite for work. Thrombosis and dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder, meant he spent the last three months of 1974 in hospital. His poor health also made it impossible to obtain the long-term insurance required for leading film roles, leaving him with cameo parts in films that Billington described as often undistinguished. He made a series of advertisements for Polaroid cameras in 1972, stipulating that they must never be shown in Britain.

  When the director John Schlesinger offered him the role of a Nazi torturer in the 1976 film Marathon Man, Olivier shaved his head and wore oversized glasses to enlarge the look of his eyes. The critic David Robinson, writing for The Times, thought the role was "strongly played" and that Olivier was "always at his best in roles that call for him to be seedy or nasty or both." He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and won a Golden Globe.

  Television, which he had once dismissed with characteristic haughtiness, became the medium of his finest late work. Olivier said: "I have stood out stiffly and coldly and pompously about TV for too long." In 1973 he provided the narration for a 26-episode documentary, The World at War. He won Emmy Awards for Long Day's Journey into Night in 1973, for Love Among the Ruins in 1975, and for Brideshead Revisited in 1981, in which he played Lord Marchmain. His fifth and final Emmy came in 1983 for playing Lear in a Granada Television production of King Lear.

  Of Lear, Olivier said: "No, Lear is easy. He's like all of us, really: he's just a stupid old fart." The critic Steve Vineberg, when the production aired in America, wrote that "Olivier seems to have thrown away technique this time, his is a breathtakingly pure Lear." Vineberg described the final speech over Cordelia's body as bringing the audience "so close to Lear's sorrow that we can hardly bear to watch." It was the last Shakespearean role Olivier would play. He died on the 11th of July 1989, and the Laurence Olivier Awards, given annually by the Society of London Theatre, continue to carry his name.