Laurence Olivier

British actor

• Born: May 22, 1907
• Birthplace: Dorking, Surrey, England
• Died: June 11, 1989
• Place of death: Steyning, West Sussex, England

Olivier is widely considered one of the greatest twentieth century actors in the English-speaking world. He was also a distinguished theater manager and stage and film director and producer who did more than anyone else to bring William Shakespeare’s works to the screen.

Early Life

The third and youngest child of the Reverend Gerald Olivier, Laurence Olivier (oh-LIHV-ee-ay) grew up in a series of Anglican parsonages in and around London. The ritual and pageantry of Anglican worship gave young Laurence, a choirboy, a sense of the theatrical. At the age of nine, he entered All Saints School in London and the next year played Brutus in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In the audience were the great players Ellen Terry and Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who found Olivier’s performance remarkable and saw him as a potentially great actor. Later, at school, Olivier played Maria in Twelfth Night and Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew. The latter show was so impressive that it was put on again at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon, Olivier’s first appearance in a professional theater. In 1921, Olivier entered St. Edward’s School, where he was cast as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When his older brother went off to India, Olivier wanted to follow him, whereupon his father said, “Don’t be such a fool; you’re not going to India, you’re going on the stage.” Accordingly, Olivier studied under Elsie Fogerty at the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art. On graduation, he started off as callboy, bit player, and understudy in various theaters; toured with the Lena Ashwell Players; acted with Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson; and, in 1927, joined the Birmingham Repertory. In Birmingham and London, he played a great variety of roles, taking advantage of all opportunities.

Olivier’s break came when a London theater club put on a new play by R. C. Sherriff, then an unknown author. In Journey’s End, directed by James Whale, Olivier played the lead of Captain Stanhope, trying to survive the stress of command in the trenches during World War I. Instantly hailed as a masterpiece, Journey’s End has come to be considered one of the great war plays of all time. Olivier’s performance made him a star. The play was slated for a brief run, however, and Olivier had auditioned for and been selected to play the lead in a stage version of P. C. Wren’s Beau Geste. Beau Geste failed dismally, while a professional revival of Journey’s End, now starring Colin Clive, became an immense hit, ran for several years, and was filmed. At first Olivier seemed to have made a fatal mistake, but as it turned out, he may have done well after all, for while Clive played Stanhope repeatedly, Olivier was able to play a variety of roles and established himself as a versatile and dynamic performer.

Life’s Work

The most notable of Olivier’s early roles was Victor Prynne opposite Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence in Coward’s Private Lives. In 1933, Olivier starred as a neurotic homosexual in a stage adaptation of Louis Bromfield’s novel The Green Bay Tree in New York. Motion-picture producers had noticed him, and beginning in 1929 he began a film career, starring in a number of competent but undistinguished films in both England and the United States. Hollywood then saw him as another Ronald Colman, and in fact, Olivier wore a Colman mustache and admitted to imitating Colman during the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Olivier was tested for the lead opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933), a part that might have elevated him to stardom, but Garbo was dissatisfied with his audition and had him replaced with her frequent costar John Gilbert. Olivier’s film career slipped back into mediocrity.

Onstage, Olivier continued to make a strong impression, in such roles as Tony Cavendish, a satiric portrait of John Barrymore, in Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Theatre Royal (1934; directed by Coward). His major break came in 1935, when John Gielgud, who had directed him as Bothwell in Gordon Daviot’s Queen of Scots the year before, invited him to alternate with him as Romeo and Mercutio in the production of Romeo and Juliet that Gielgud was directing. Gielgud, a few years older than Olivier, was then considered the great Shakespearean actor of the time, and alternating roles with him gave Olivier a chance to showcase his talent. Their performances were quite different, Gielgud almost singing his lines with a flutelike voice, while Olivier played with a raw, realistic energy and sexuality that disturbed some traditional critics but excited audiences. Romeo and Juliet was Olivier’s first professional appearance in Shakespeare; he would go on to become the leading Shakespearean actor of the twentieth century on both stage and screen.

Olivier made his first Shakespearean film the next year as Orlando in As You Like It (1936), costarring Elisabeth Bergner and directed by her husband, Paul Czinner. The film has considerable charm but is flawed by Bergner’s German accent. Olivier thought it a failure, but in his later Shakespeare films he cast some of its players and commissioned scores by its composer, William Walton. Also in 1936, Olivier appeared in J. B. Priestley’s Bees on the Boat Deck, a forgettable work, but notable for its casting of Olivier for the first time with Ralph Richardson, with whom he would act frequently and who became one of his closest friends. With As You Like It, Olivier’s film career began to pick up. The next year, he was cast as the swashbuckling hero of Fire over England (1936), a historical epic about the Spanish Armada. Playing Queen Elizabeth was Flora Robson, who would be a frequent costar of Olivier. Cast opposite him as the female romantic lead was Vivien Leigh, a rising young star. Though she was married to barrister Leigh Holman, and Olivier in 1930 had married actress Jill Esmond with whom he had a son, Tarquin Leigh had announced to a friend, when she first saw Olivier onstage in 1934, that she was going to marry him. During the filming of Fire over England, they became lovers.

In 1937, Olivier joined London’s Old Vic Company, of which he was to be a member off and on until 1949. His first role with the company was Hamlet, under the direction of Tyrone Guthrie; after a successful London engagement, it was performed at the play’s actual location, Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Leigh appeared as Ophelia. Also for the Old Vic in 1937, Olivier played Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and the title roles in Henry V and Macbeth. The next year he played Coriolanus and was Iago to Ralph Richardson’s Othello. Within three years, he had demonstrated an amazing versatility and established himself as the leading young Shakespearean actor.

The year 1937 saw him in the romantic comedy The Divorce of Lady X, his first film in color and the first in which he played opposite Richardson. His costar was Merle Oberon. When William Wyler cast Oberon as Cathy in Samuel Goldwyn’s film of Wuthering Heights (1939), he cast Olivier as Heathcliff. In the role of the foundling stable boy who, alternately loved and spurned by Catherine Earnshaw, disappears, to return as a mysteriously wealthy gentleman determined to win her back from Edgar Linton, the man she married during his absence, Olivier made a dynamic impact and became an international star. Heathcliff is one of the roles for which he is best known, yet he almost failed in the part. Olivier confesses to having scorned filmmaking up to that time and to overacting shamelessly until director Wyler taught him to restrain his performance, to respect the medium, and to think in cinematic terms. From Wyler, Olivier learned film acting and direction. As Heathcliff, he won his first Academy Award nomination as best actor but lost to Robert Donat. The Best Actress Oscar that year went to Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939). Suddenly, Heathcliff and Scarlett, lovers in private life, became the hottest romantic performers in motion pictures.

In 1940, the two actors capitalized on their popularity by costarring on the American stage in a production of Romeo and Juliet directed by Olivier. Surprisingly, it was a commercial failure, in which they lost most of their savings. To recoup, they returned to films, and in 1940, each of them had a great hit, Leigh in Waterloo Bridge and Olivier as the moody Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Rebecca , for which he received his second Oscar nomination. Also in 1940, Olivier played Mr. Darcy opposite Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennett in a superb film version of Pride and Prejudice. That year, having divorced their respective spouses, Olivier and Leigh secretly married at Colman’s ranch and honeymooned on his yacht.

World War II had erupted in Europe, and to boost morale for the British war effort, Olivier and Leigh played Lord Nelson and Lady Hamilton in Alexander Korda’s That Hamilton Woman (1941), with a literate script by Walter Reisch and Sheriff, climaxed by a spectacular Battle of Trafalgar. As the illicit and tragic lovers, the stars were at their best; the picture remains one of the great romantic films and is reputed to have been Winston Churchill’s favorite film. Returning to England in 1940, Olivier joined the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm from 1940 to 1944, serving as a pilot except for two stints in propaganda films. The first was 49th Parallel (1941), in which he plays a French Canadian trapper shot by the invading crew of a Nazi submarine. In the second, The Demi-Paradise (1943), he plays a Soviet engineer who goes to England to invent a propeller that will enable ships bringing supplies to Russia to navigate the ice to Archangel and Murmansk.

Olivier’s greatest propaganda film, however, and one of the greatest films ever made, is Henry V (1944), which he produced, starred in, and directed. Because of wartime economy, little money could be used to make the film, but Olivier turned the budgetary limitations into an artistic triumph. “On your imaginary forces work,” says Shakespeare’s chorus, and Olivier developed the concept to its fullest potential. He opens the film in 1600 at its first performance in the Globe Theatre, showing how plays were performed in Shakespeare’s day. One sees a panoramic view of Tudor London, then moves into the theater, sees the audience gathering, vendors selling oranges, the actors preparing, the orchestra playing the overture. Then the players perform the first few scenes in the Globe itself. Not until the Chorus’s second invocation of the imagination does the film shift to the fifteenth century, as one sees the king taking sail at Southhampton. Thereafter, instead of building lavish sets, Olivier used obviously painted backdrops that resembled the medieval illuminations Les Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry. The result was a work of consummate artistry. He filmed the battle of Agincourt in Ireland, and the charge of the French knights, cut down by a hail of English arrows, is one of the most exciting moments in film. The acting was flawless; Olivier’s performance ranged from regal dignity to sinister irony to the tense quiet of the night before the battle to ringing battlefield exhortations to the romantic humor of his wooing the French princess. Filmed in color, Henry V has the look of a sumptuous epic, despite its pinched budget. It was first shown to the troops in Europe, who supposedly took heart from such lines as “Once more into the breach” and “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” Not until 1946 did it show in New York, but there it ran a record forty-six weeks. Olivier won a special Academy Award for “outstanding achievement as an actor, producer, and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”

Meanwhile, Olivier returned to the stage with equal success. In June of 1944, he took a five-year contract as director of the Old Vic, where he and Richardson starred in hit after hit. In 1944-1945, Olivier played the Button Moulder in Peer Gynt, Sergius in George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, and had a stunning success as Richard III, one of his greatest roles. The next year, he played Astrov in Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I, and Justice Shallow in Henry IV, Part II, opposite Richardson’s Falstaff, and did a double bill of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, followed by Mr. Puff in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s satiric farce The Critic in the same evening. These enormous successes he followed with the title role in King Lear (1946), with Alec Guinness as the Fool. In 1948, Olivier and Leigh toured Australia and New Zealand, with Olivier playing Sir Peter Teazle in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, an encore of Richard III, and Mr. Antrobus in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.

Meanwhile, Olivier was preparing another Shakespearean picture, Hamlet (1948), which he filmed in black and white, dying his own hair blond to look Scandinavian. Though Hamlet is Olivier’s favorite of his Shakespeare films and though it won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1948 and for Olivier as Best Actor, it is not as successful as Henry V. Olivier cut several key soliloquies and instead spent much time having the camera move around the gloomy corridors of the castle, and his Freudian interpretation of the relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet is questionable. Nevertheless, Olivier’s Hamlet is one of the most dynamic productions ever, stunningly directed and acted, with Olivier himself as an intense, brooding, ironic, dashing, even swashbuckling prince, who at the end makes a spectacular swan dive off a fifteen-foot wall onto the murderous king. More accessible to audiences than the experimental Henry V, Hamlet was even more popular. In addition to winning the Oscar for it, Olivier received a knighthood.

Back on the stage, Olivier directed Leigh in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and then became manager of London’s St. James Theatre, where he directed Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed and played the role of the duke of Altair. Next, opposite Leigh as Cleopatra, he was Caesar in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, playing on alternate nights at the St. James, followed by a run in New York.

Aside from a cameo as a Cockney police officer in The Magic Box (1951), Olivier made no films for four years. In 1952, he returned to the screen as Hurstwood in Wyler’s Carrie , adapted from Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900). Olivier’s first Hollywood film in twelve years, Carrie was a failure, despite brilliant performances by Olivier and Jennifer Jones and sterling direction by Wyler, because of the script by Ruth and Augustus Goetz, which turned Dreiser’s grimly naturalistic novel into a romantic love story full of noblesse oblige. Olivier then coproduced and starred in Peter Brook’s technicolor film of the eighteenth century musical drama The Beggar’s Opera (1952), in which Olivier did his own singing and turned in a dashing performance as Macheath the highwayman. Though the script cuts some of playwright John Gay’s more ironic dialogue and lyrics, the film has much brilliance and is by far the best cinematic rendering of an eighteenth century play. Unfortunately, it was caviar to the general and failed at the box office.

For the next two years, Olivier did no acting. One reason was Leigh, who for some years had been suffering from bipolar disorder and who broke down while filming Elephant Walk (1954) in Ceylon and had to be flown home. By 1955, she had recovered sufficiently to costar with Olivier during the summer season at Stratford-upon-Avon. Olivier played a hilarious Malvolio in Twelfth Night, a profoundly tragic king in Macbeth (hailed by many critics as the best Macbeth in memory), and a harrowing Titus in Titus Andronicus. Leigh was a sprightly Viola, a sinister Lady Macbeth, and a suffering Lavinia. It was possibly the best summer Stratford ever had.

Meanwhile, Olivier had been at work directing Richard III (1955) as a technicolor film drenched in blood red. For film audiences, he repeated his sensational performance as Richard, with Richardson as Buckingham, Gielgud as Clarence, and Claire Bloom as Lady Anne. Though it rivals Henry V as Olivier’s best Shakespearean film, it failed at the box office, partly because Olivier blundered by having it shown first on American black-and-white television, thus undercutting the potential theatrical audience. Olivier won another Oscar nomination but lost to Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956).

Olivier wanted to film Macbeth next but needed a commercial film first to make money and so agreed to direct and star opposite Marilyn Monroe in Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince, a play he had done four years earlier. Unfortunately, he found Monroe quite difficult to work with; she was tardy, temperamental, and instead of taking Olivier’s direction, turned to Paula Strasberg, wife of the dean of Method acting, Lee Strasberg, whom she had brought to coach her and lend moral support. A master of thespian technique, Olivier had no use for Method acting’s dialectic and mumbling search for motivation. Consequently, though Monroe looked ravishing, the film, retitled The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), had the wrong chemistry, and it, too, failed at the box office, destroying Olivier’s hopes of getting funding to film Macbeth.

At that point, Olivier turned from the classics to a work by John Osborne, England’s angriest “angry young” playwright. In The Entertainer (1957-1958), Olivier was Archie Rice, a seedy, middle-aged, music-hall song-and-dance man whose lost popularity parallels the decline of the British Empire and its humiliation during the Suez Crisis, in which Archie’s son is killed. Doing his own song-and-dance numbers, Olivier gave a brilliantly rancid performance that some critics still rank as his best. In 1959, he was Coriolanus again, at Stratford-upon-Avon, and the next year, directed by Orson Welles, he played Berenger in Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros on the London stage.

Meanwhile, films lured him back to Hollywood, as General Burgoyne in The Devil’s Disciple (1959) and Crassus, opposite Kirk Douglas, in Stanley Kubrick’s Roman epic Spartacus (1960). In 1960, Olivier repeated his role of Archie Rice in Tony Richardson’s film The Entertainer and got yet another Oscar nomination.

Cast as Archie Rice’s daughter was a young actress named Joan Plowright, with whom Olivier fell in love. His marriage to Leigh had been affected by her bipolar disorder and her intermittent affair with actor Peter Finch. Though the Oliviers had been England’s “Theatre Royal” for two decades, their marriage was falling apart, and in 1961 they were divorced. Ten days later, Olivier married Plowright. The marriage endured, and the couple had three children.

Meanwhile, Olivier, always ready for something new, was one of the first British stars to act for television, playing the title role in Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman in 1950, the Gauguin-type painter in the stage adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence in 1959, and the whiskey priest in a stage version of Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory in 1961. He did much distinguished work on television, hosting as well as acting in some programs and playing myriad roles, including James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night in 1972, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1973, Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1976, and Lear in King Lear in 1983.

On the stage, Olivier played Becket and then King Henry in Jean Anouilh’s Becket in Detroit and New York (1960-1961). The next year, he directed the Chichester Festival, where he starred in John Ford’s seventeenth century tragedy The Broken Heart and repeated his role of Astrov in Uncle Vanya, a part he also played on television in 1963, under his own direction. Olivier’s work as director of the Chichester Festival Theater led to his appointment in 1962 as first director of the newly created National Theater of Great Britain. Olivier collected a company of some of the finest performers in England, managed the National’s seasons, directed Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and acted in numerous plays.

In 1964, Olivier undertook one of his most demanding and controversial roles: Othello. Twenty-six years earlier, he had played Iago; now he would be the Moor himself. With a voice that critics have called trumpetlike, Olivier worked to lower his range an octave and develop a cellolike sound. With Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago, and Derek Jacobi as Cassio, the show was extremely popular with audiences. Yet by 1964, with civil rights battles being fought and won by blacks, there was some controversy over a white performer acting in blackface. Hostile critics charged that Olivier played Othello like a “Harlem negro,” but in fact, his Othello in voice, facial expressions, and movement was an uncanny reproduction of an African from a country such as Nigeria. When the production was filmed in 1965, Olivier won another Oscar nomination. For the film, however, Olivier’s larger-than-life performance was almost too large; had he, instead of Stuart Burge, directed it and designed it in cinematic terms rather than as a filmed stage play, it might have ranked with his three great Shakespeare films; as it is, the filmed Othello is not wholly satisfactory. An interesting pendant to Olivier’s Othello was his performance as the Sudanese Mahdi who defeats General Gordon in Khartoum (1966).

So far, Olivier had been boundlessly energetic and a remarkably athletic performer. In 1967, however, his health began to deteriorate. He was diagnosed as having cancer of the prostate. He conquered that disease, however, and when he had an appendectomy in 1967, the surgeon found the cancer completely gone. Yet thrombosis and eye trouble began to slow his pace. From 1966 to 1972, he played mainly cameo roles in films, though he managed such demanding stage roles as Edgar in August Strindberg’s The Dance of Death (1967), a performance that some critics considered his greatest; Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1970); and James Tyrone in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1971). In 1972, he played his first starring film role in seven years in Sleuth , in which he and Michael Caine were the only actors; it was an immense hit and won for Olivier yet another Oscar nomination.

In 1970, Olivier was elevated to the peerage as Lord Olivier of Brighton, the first actor ever to enter the House of Lords. Unfortunately, his days on the stage were numbered. In 1974, Olivier was diagnosed as having dermatopoly-myocitis, a muscle-wasting disease. He combated it by taking steroids and exercising, swimming fifty laps a day, and he fought it to a standstill. Yet the disease made him unable to sustain a long stage role. In 1973, he played his last role onstage and resigned as director of the National. Afterward, he threw himself into film and television work with a vengeance, making twenty-nine motion pictures and television films between 1975 and 1987, playing such diverse roles as a Nazi war criminal, a hunter of Nazi war criminals, a rabbi, a Parisian boulevardier, a vampire hunter, Douglas MacArthur, Zeus, and King Lear. Some of these roles were for potboilers, such as The Betsy (1977), from Harold Robbins’s novel, but for Marathon Man (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978), Olivier won two more Oscar nominations, making him the most nominated actor in history, while for Brideshead Revisited, he won a television Emmy. In the 1980’s, he turned to writing, producing his autobiographical Confessions of an Actor (1982) and On Acting (1986). Olivier died in July of 1989.

Significance

Olivier was a titanic figure in the theater, comparable in the twentieth century to Richard Burbage in the sixteenth, Thomas Betterton in the seventeenth, David Garrick in the eighteenth, and Edmund Kean in the nineteenth; in some ways he surpassed them all, since he did groundbreaking work in motion pictures and television as well as on the stage. One can debate whether he was the greatest actor in English; Gielgud, Richardson, and Guinness have sometimes rivaled him. Yet Olivier has shown greater range and daring than any of them. Not only was he a consummate character actor in such diverse roles as Archie Rice, Justice Shallow, Mr. Creakle, Dr. Chebutikin, and a host of others, but also, unlike Gielgud, Richardson, and Guinness, he was able to play intense romantic figures and larger-than-life heroic and demoniac ones. He played all the great tragic Shakespearean roles (Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Othello, Antony, Coriolanus, Brutus, Titus Andronicus, Shylock), the consummate villains Richard III and Iago, such heroic figures as Henry V and Hotspur, and comic ones such as Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch. Though he did most of the great classics, he did not hesitate to take on avant-garde works and to play such nonclassic roles as a cockney cop or a seedy music-hall song-and-dance man. His repertory ran from Sophocles to Sheridan to Chekhov to Strindberg to Shaw to Osborne. Besides acting, Olivier was a great theater director-producer-manager who established Great Britain’s National Theatre. The three great Shakespearean films that he produced, directed, and starred in have been cinematic landmarks that made Shakespeare viable on film and led to subsequent Shakespearean films by Grigori Kosintsev, Franco Zeffirelli, Joseph Mankiewicz, Roman Polanski, Akira Kurosawa, and others. Olivier was the only actor ever to have been made a lord and life peer of the realm.

Bibliography

Coleman, Terry. Olivier. New York: H. Holt, 2005. Coleman, whom the Olivier estate authorized to write a biography, provides a well-researched book that strips some of the myths of previous biographies to present the facts of Olivier’s life and career.

Cottrell, John. Laurence Olivier. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975. The definitive scholarly biography for the first sixty-eight years of Olivier’s life. Illustrated, with an extensive bibliography.

Dent, Alan. Hamlet, the Film and the Play. London: World Film, 1948. A study of Olivier’s film Hamlet. Illustrated.

Edwards, Anne. Vivien Leigh. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1977. A biography of Olivier’s second wife and frequent costar. Thorough and readable, but gushing and “pop” in style. Illustrated.

Gourlay, Logan, ed. Olivier. New York: Stein and Day, 1974. A collection of interviews with Olivier’s theatrical friends, associates, directors, and fellow players. Illustrated.

Morley, Margaret. The Films of Laurence Olivier. Vol. 3. New York: Citadel Press, 1978. A comprehensive, illustrated history of Olivier’s films and television performances through 1978, in addition to an article by Olivier on filming Hamlet.

Olivier, Laurence. Confessions of an Actor: An Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982. Concentrates on the author’s personal life, with less space devoted to his interpretation of roles as actor and director. Illustrated.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. On Acting. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. Supplements Confessions of an Actor by concentrating on Olivier’s work on stage and screen, with detailed analysis of his key roles and of his Shakespeare films. Illustrated.

Plowright, Joan. And That’s Not All. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001. Plowright’s autobiography focuses on her marriage to Olivier.

Tynan, Kenneth. William Shakespeare’s “Othello”: The National Theatre Production. London: Rupert-Hart-Davis, 1966. A history and analysis by the literary manager of the National Theatre. Illustrated.