Everything about Laurence Olivier totally explained
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier,
OM (;
22 May 1907 –
11 July 1989) was an
English actor,
director, and
producer and the recipient of scores of awards. He is one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, along with his contemporaries
John Gielgud,
Peggy Ashcroft and
Ralph Richardson. Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the
National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is generally regarded to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as
David Garrick,
Richard Burbage,
Edmund Kean and
Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's
Academy acknowledgments are considerable—fourteen Oscar nominations, with two wins for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film
Hamlet, and two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five
Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time
Golden Globe and
BAFTA winner.
Olivier's career as a stage and film actor spanned more than six decades and included a wide variety of roles, from
Shakespeare's
Othello and Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night to the sadistic Nazi dentist Christian Szell in
Marathon Man and the kindly but determined Nazi-hunter in
The Boys from Brazil. A
High Church clergyman's son who found fame on the
West End stage, Olivier became determined early on to master Shakespeare, and eventually came to be regarded as one of the foremost Shakespeare interpreters of the 20th century. He continued to act until his death in 1989. Olivier played more than 120 stage roles:
Richard III,
Macbeth,
Romeo,
Hamlet,
Othello,
Uncle Vanya, and Archie Rice in
The Entertainer. He appeared in nearly sixty films, including
William Wyler's
Wuthering Heights,
Alfred Hitchcock's
Rebecca,
Stanley Kubrick's
Spartacus,
Otto Preminger's
Bunny Lake is Missing,
Richard Attenborough's
Oh! What a Lovely War,
Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
Sleuth,
John Schlesinger's
Marathon Man,
Daniel Petrie's
The Betsy, Desmond Davis'
Clash of the Titans, and his own
Henry V,
Hamlet, and
Richard III. He also preserved his
Othello on film, with its stage cast virtually intact. For television, he starred in
The Moon and Sixpence,
John Gabriel Borkman,
Long Day's Journey into Night,
The Merchant of Venice,
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and
King Lear, among others.
In 1999, the
American Film Institute named Olivier among the
Greatest Male Stars of All Time, at fourteen on the list.
Early life
Olivier was born in 1907 in
Dorking,
Surrey,
England. He was raised in a severe, strict, and religious household, ruled over by his father, Gerard Kerr Olivier (1869–1939), a
High Anglican priest. whose father was Henry Arnold Olivier, a rector. Young Laurence took solace in the care of his mother, Agnes Louise Crookenden (1871–1920), and was grief-stricken when she died (at 48) when he was only 12. Richard and Sybille were his two older siblings.
In 1918 his father became the new church minister at St. Mary's Church,
Letchworth,
Hertfordshire and the family lived at the Old Rectory, now part of
St Christopher School.
He performed at the
St. Christopher School Theatre, in December 1924 in
Through the Crack (unknown author) as understudy and assistant stage manager, and in April 1925 he played Lennox in Shakespeare's
Macbeth and was assistant stage manager.
He was educated at
St Edward's School,
Oxford, and, at 15, played Katherine in his school's production of
The Taming of the Shrew, to rave reviews. After his brother, Richard, left for India, it was his father who decided that Laurence — or "Kim", as the family called him — would become an actor.
Early career
Olivier then attended the
Central School of Dramatic Art at the age of 17. In 1926, he joined
The Birmingham Repertory Company. At first he was given only paltry tasks at the theatre, such as being the bell-ringer; however, his roles eventually became more significant, and in 1937 he was playing roles such as Hamlet and Macbeth. His tension towards
Gielgud came to a head in 1940, when Olivier approached
London impresario
Binkie Beaumont about financing him in a repertory of the four great
Shakespearean tragedies of
Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and
King Lear, but
Beaumont would only agree to the plan if Olivier and
Gielgud alternated in the roles of Hamlet/Laertes, Othello/Iago, Macbeth/Macduff, and Lear/Gloucester and that
Gielgud direct at least one of the productions, a proposition Olivier bluntly declined.
The engagement as Romeo resulted in an invitation by
Lilian Baylis to be the star at the
Old Vic Theatre in 1937/38. Olivier's tenure had mixed artistic results, with his performances as
Hamlet and
Iago drawing a negative response from critics and his first attempt at
Macbeth receiving mixed reviews. But his appearances as
Henry V,
Coriolanus, and Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night were triumphs, and his popularity with
Old Vic audiences left Olivier as one of the major
Shakespearean actors in
England by the season's end.
Olivier continued to hold his scorn for film, and though he constantly worked for
Alexander Korda, he still felt most at home on the stage. He made his first Shakespeare film,
As You Like It, with
Paul Czinner, however, Olivier disliked it, thinking that Shakespeare didn't work well on film.
Vivien Leigh
Laurence Olivier saw
Vivien Leigh in
The Mask of Virtue in 1936, and a friendship developed after he congratulated her on her performance. While playing lovers in the film
Fire Over England (1937), Olivier and Leigh developed a strong attraction, and after filming was completed, they began an affair.
Leigh played
Ophelia to Olivier's
Hamlet in an
Old Vic Theatre production, and Olivier later recalled an incident during which her mood rapidly changed as she was quietly preparing to go onstage. Without apparent provocation, she began screaming at him, before suddenly becoming silent and staring into space. She was able to perform without mishap, and by the following day, she'd returned to normal with no recollection of the event. It was the first time Olivier witnessed such behaviour from her.
Olivier travelled to Hollywood to begin filming
Wuthering Heights as
Heathcliff. Leigh followed soon after, partly to be with him, but also to pursue her dream of playing
Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone with the Wind (1939). Olivier found the filming of
Wuthering Heights to be difficult but it proved to be a turning point for him, both in his success in the United States, which had eluded him until then, but also in his attitude to film, which he'd regarded as an inferior medium to theatre. The film's producer,
Samuel Goldwyn was highly dissatisfied with Olivier's overstated performance after several weeks of filming and threatened to dismiss him. Olivier had grown to regard the film's female lead,
Merle Oberon, as an amateur; however, when he stated his opinion to Goldwyn, he was reminded that Oberon was the star of the film and already a well-known name in American cinema. Olivier was told that he was dispensable and that he was required to be more tolerant of Oberon. Olivier recalled that he took Goldwyn's words to heart, but after some consideration realized that he was correct; he began to moderate his performance to fit the more intimate film medium and began to appreciate the possibilities it offered.
The film was a hit and Olivier was praised for his performance, and was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Actor. Leigh won the
Academy Award for Best Actress for
Gone with the Wind, and the couple suddenly found themselves to be major celebrities throughout the world. They wanted to marry, but at first both Leigh's husband and Olivier's wife at the time, Jill Esmond, refused to divorce them. Finally divorced, they were married on
31 August 1940.
Olivier's American film career flourished with highly regarded performances in
Rebecca (1940) and
Pride and Prejudice (1940).
Olivier and Leigh starred in a theater production of
Romeo and Juliet in
New York City. It was an extravagant production, but a commercial failure.
Brooks Atkinson for
The New York Times wrote, "Although Miss Leigh and Mr Olivier are handsome young people they hardly act their parts at all." The couple had invested almost their entire savings into the project, and its failure was a financial disaster for them.
They filmed
That Hamilton Woman (1941) with Olivier as
Horatio Nelson and Leigh as
Emma Hamilton. With Britain engaged in World War II, the Oliviers returned to England, and in 1944 Leigh was diagnosed as having
tuberculosis in her left
lung, but after spending several weeks in hospital, she appeared to be cured. In spring she was filming
Caesar and Cleopatra (1945) when she discovered she was pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage. She fell into a deep depression which reached its nadir when she turned on Olivier, verbally and physically attacking him until she fell to the floor sobbing. This was the first of many major breakdowns related to manic-depression, or bipolar mood disorder. Olivier came to recognise the symptoms of an impending episode – several days of hyperactivity followed by a period of
depression and an explosive breakdown, after which Leigh would have no memory of the event, but would be acutely embarrassed and remorseful.
In 1947 Olivier was knighted as a
Knight Bachelor and by 1948 he was on the Board of Directors for the
Old Vic Theatre, and he and Leigh embarked on a tour of
Australia and
New Zealand to raise funds for the theatre. During their six-month tour, Olivier performed
Richard III and also performed with Leigh in
The School for Scandal and
The Skin of Our Teeth. The tour was an outstanding success, and although Leigh was plagued with
insomnia and allowed her understudy to replace her for a week while she was ill, she generally withstood the demands placed upon her, with Olivier noting her ability to "charm the press". Members of the company later recalled several quarrels between the couple, with the most dramatic of these occurring in
Christchurch when Leigh refused to go on stage. Olivier slapped her face, and Leigh slapped him in return and swore at him before she made her way to the stage. By the end of the tour, both were exhausted and ill, and Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you're talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he'd comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia.
The success of the tour encouraged the Oliviers to make their first
West End appearance together, performing the same works with one addition,
Antigone, included at Leigh's insistence because she wished to play a role in a tragedy.
Leigh next sought the role of
Blanche DuBois in the
West End stage production of
Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire, and was cast after Williams and the play's producer
Irene Mayer Selznick saw her in the
The School for Scandal and
Antigone, and Olivier was contracted to direct.
In 1951, Leigh and Olivier performed two plays about
Cleopatra,
William Shakespeare's
Antony and Cleopatra and
George Bernard Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra, alternating the play each night and winning good reviews. They took the productions to New York, where they performed a season at the
Ziegfeld Theatre into 1952. The reviews there were also mostly positive, but the critic
Kenneth Tynan angered them when he suggested that Leigh's was a mediocre talent which forced Olivier to compromise his own. Tynan's diatribe almost precipitated another collapse; Leigh, terrified of failure and intent on achieving greatness, dwelt on his comments, while ignoring the positive reviews of other critics.
In January 1953 Leigh travelled to
Ceylon to film
Elephant Walk with
Peter Finch. Shortly after filming commenced, she suffered a breakdown, and
Paramount Pictures replaced her with
Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier returned her to their home in England, where between periods of incoherence, Leigh told him that she was in love with Finch, and had been having an affair with him. She gradually recovered over
a period of several months. As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers' friends learnt of her problems.
David Niven said she'd been "quite, quite mad", and in his diary
Noël Coward expressed surprise that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."
Leigh recovered sufficiently to play
The Sleeping Prince with Olivier in 1953, and in 1955 they performed a season at
Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night,
Macbeth and
Titus Andronicus. They played to capacity houses and attracted generally good reviews, Leigh's health seemingly stable.
Noël Coward was enjoying success with the play
South Sea Bubble, with Leigh in the lead role, but she became pregnant and withdrew from the production. Several weeks later, she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. She joined Olivier for a European tour with
Titus Andronicus, but the tour was marred by Leigh's frequent outbursts against Olivier and other members of the company. After their return to London, her former husband Leigh Holman, who continued to exert a strong influence over her, stayed with the Oliviers and helped calm her.
In 1958, considering her marriage to be over, Leigh began a relationship with the actor
Jack Merivale, who knew of Leigh's medical condition and assured Olivier he'd care for her. She achieved a success in 1959 with the Noël Coward comedy
Look After Lulu, with
The Times critic describing her as "beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, she's mistress of every situation."
In December 1960 she and Olivier divorced, and Olivier married the actress
Joan Plowright, with whom he later had three children: Richard Kerr (b. 1961), Tamsin Agnes Margaret (b. 1963), and Julie-Kate (b. 1966).
In his autobiography he discussed the years of problems they'd experienced because of Leigh's illness, writing, "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, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."
War
When
World War II broke out, Olivier intended to join the
Royal Air Force, but was still contractually obliged to other parties. He apparently disliked actors such as
Charles Laughton and
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, who would hold charity cricket matches to help the war effort. but was never called to see action.
In 1944 he and fellow actor
Ralph Richardson were released from their naval commitments to form a new
Old Vic Theatre Company at the
New Theatre (later the Albery, now the
Noel Coward Theatre) with a nightly repertory of three plays, initially
Henrik Ibsen's
Peer Gynt,
Bernard Shaw's
Arms and the Man and Shakespeare's
Richard III (which would become Olivier's signature role), rehearsed over 10 weeks to the accompaniment of German
V1 ‘doodlebugs’. The enterprise, with
John Burrell as manager, eventually extended to five acclaimed seasons ending in 1949, after a prestigious 1948 tour of Australia and New Zealand, which included
Vivien Leigh in productions of
Richard III,
Richard Brinsley Sheridan's
School for Scandal, and
Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth.
The second New Theatre season opened with Olivier playing both
Harry Hotspur and
Justice Shallow to Richardson's
Falstaff in
Henry IV,
Parts 1 and 2, in what is now seen as a high point of English classical theatre. The magic continued with one of Olivier's most famous endeavours, the double bill of
Sophocles'
Oedipus and
Sheridan's The Critic, with Olivier's transition from Greek tragedy to high comedy in a single evening becoming a thing of legend. He followed this triumph with one of his favorite roles, Astrov in
Uncle Vanya.
Kenneth Tynan was to write (in
He Who Plays the King, 1950): ‘The Old Vic was now at its height: the watershed had been reached and one of those rare moments in the theatre had arrived when drama paused, took stock of all that it had learnt since
Irving, and then produced a monument in celebration. It is surprising when one considers it, that English acting should have reached up and seized a laurel crown in the middle of a war.’
In 1945 Olivier and Richardson were made honorary Lieutenants with
ENSA, and did a six-week tour of Europe for the army, performing
Arms and the Man,
Peer Gynt and
Richard III for the troops, followed by a visit to the
Comédie-Française in Paris, the first time a foreign company had been invited to play on its famous stage.
When Olivier returned to London the populace noticed a change in him. Olivier's only explanation was: "Maybe it's just that I've got older."
Hamlet
Olivier followed up on his success with an adaptation of
Hamlet. He had played this role more often than he'd Henry, and was more familiar with the melancholy Dane. However, Olivier wasn't particularly comfortable with the introverted role of Hamlet, as opposed to the extroverts that he was famous for portraying. The running time of
Hamlet (1948) wasn't allowed to exceed 153 minutes, and as a result Olivier cut almost half of Shakespeare's text. He was severely criticized for doing so by purists, most notably
Ethel Barrymore; Barrymore stated that the adaptation wasn't nearly as faithful to the original text as her brother
John's stage production from 1922. Ironically, Ethel presented the Best Picture Oscar that year--and was visibly shaken when she read,"Hamlet".
The film became another resounding critical and commercial success in Britain and abroad, Later, in 1960, Tony Richardson also directed the screen version with Olivier and Plowright repeating their stage roles.
He left Vivien Leigh for Plowright, a decision that apparently gave him a sense of guilt for the rest of his life.
Othello
For Othello, Olivier underwent a transformation, requiring extensive study and heavy weightlifting, in order to get the physique needed for the Moor of Venice. It is said that he bellowed at a herd of cows for an hour to get the deep voice that was required.
John Dexter's 1964 stage production of the play was
filmed in 1965, securing Olivier his 6th Oscar Nomination for Best Actor. It wasn't without criticism as director
Jonathan Miller called it "a condescending view of an Afro Caribbean person".
Three Sisters
Olivier's final film as director was the 1970 film
Three Sisters, based on the
Chekhov play of the same name, and his 1967 National Theatre production. It was, in Olivier's opinion, his best work as director. He began appearing more frequently in films, usually in character parts rather than the leading romantic roles of his early career, and received
Academy Award nominations for
Sleuth (1972),
Marathon Man (1976) and
The Boys from Brazil (1978). Having been recently forced out of his role as director of the
Royal National Theatre, he worried that his family wouldn't be sufficiently provided for in the event of his death, and consequently chose to do many of his later TV special and film appearances on a "pay cheque" basis. He later freely admitted that he wasn't proud of most of these credits, and noted that he particularly despised the 1982 film
Inchon, in which he played the role of General
Douglas McArthur.
In 1986, Olivier appeared as the pre-filmed
holographic narrator of the
West End production of the
multi-media Dave Clark rock musical Time.
One of Olivier's last feature films was
Wild Geese II (1985), in which, aged 77, he played
Rudolf Hess in the sequel to
The Wild Geese (1978). According to the biography
Olivier by Francis Becket (Haus Publishing, 2005), Hess's son
Wolf Rudiger Hess said Olivier's portrayal of his father was, 'uncannily accurate'.
In 1988 Olivier gave his final performance, aged 81, as a wheelchair-bound old soldier in
Derek Jarman's film
War Requiem (1989).
He died of
cancer in
Steyning,
West Sussex,
England, in 1989 at the age of 82. He left his son from his first marriage, as well as his wife and their three children. Lord Olivier's body was
cremated, his ashes interred in
Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey,
London. Olivier is one of only four actors to have been accorded this honour.
Interestingly, Olivier is buried alongside some of the people he's portrayed in theatre and film, for example King
Henry V, General
John Burgoyne and Air Chief Marshal
Hugh Dowding.
Fifteen years after his death, Olivier once again received star billing in a film. Through the use of computer graphics, footage of him as a young man was integrated into the 2004 film
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in which Olivier "played" the villain.
Bisexual claim
Since Olivier's death, multiple biographers have produced books about him, several of which include the claim that Olivier was
bisexual.
Joan Plowright has said,
in reference to biographer Donald Spoto's claim that Kaye and Olivier were lovers. According to Sir
Noel Coward, sexually speaking, Olivier had "a puppy-like acquiescence to all experiences", as quoted by friend the late Michael Thornton. Terry Coleman's authorised biography of Olivier suggests a relationship between Olivier and an older actor,
Henry Ainley, based on correspondence from Ainley to Olivier although the book disputes that there's any evidence linking Olivier sexually to Kaye. Olivier's son Tarquin disputed these rumours as 'unforgivable garbage'. and sought to suppress them, leading Dame Joan Plowright to privately state that "a man who had been to Eton and in the Guards might be expected to be a little more broad-minded". Also, during the filming of
A Streetcar Named Desire, which featured Olivier's wife,
Vivien Leigh,
David Niven discovered Leigh's co-star
Marlon Brando and Olivier kissing in the swimming pool.
In August 2006, on the radio program
Desert Island Discs, Plowright responded to the question of Olivier's alleged bisexuality by stating:
Theatre credits and filmography
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