Laurence Olivier: 1907-1989: Absolutely An Actor. Born to It

“I believe in the theater,” said the new Baron of Brighton in his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1971. “I believe in it as the first glamourizer of thought.” That was the theater to Laurence Olivier, and that was Olivier to all who fell under the glamorous spell he wove. More immediately and lastingly than any other modern actor, Olivier picked words off the playscript page, flung them passionately into the dark and secured them in the minds of theatergoers. Brilliance, for once, had its rewards. As critic Kenneth Tynan proclaimed in 1966, “Laurence Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the phrase ‘a great actor.’ ” Director, producer, prime mover of Britain’s National Theater, embodier of the most vital Shakespearean heroes, Olivier at his death last week at 82 held undisputed claim to yet another title: the 20th century’s definitive man of the theater.

Like the century he almost spanned, Olivier the actor displayed turbulent energy, embraced awesome excess; his genius and his folly fed each other spectacularly. Said Albert Finney, who in 1959 understudied Olivier as Coriolanus: “He makes the climaxes higher, and he makes the depths of it lower, than you feel is possible in the text.”

So too with the text and texture of Olivier’s life and career. He was the son of a fifth-generation Anglican clergyman, yet he found his soul upon the wicked stage. The foremost classical actor of his time, he attained his first eminence as a West End matinee idol, and his second as a Hollywood dreamboat in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Rebecca (1940). Though he pored over scripts like a new critical scholar, he was an irrepressibly physical stage performer, scaling balconies and executing dizzying falls with Fairbanksian elan. Like many men, Olivier housed a congeries of contradictions; uniquely, he transformed them into living art.

At the apex of his stage career — in the mid-’40s, when he and Ralph Richardson led the Old Vic company through triumphal seasons in London and New York City — Olivier could spread out the banquet of those contradictions in a single evening. In Henry IV, Part I, he was the stuttering, heroic Hotspur; in Part II, the cagey-senile Justice Shallow. The curtain would fall on his Oedipus, with its searing scream of self-revelation; after intermission he would mince on as Mr. Puff, the giddy paragraphist of Sheridan’s The Critic. It was all part of a 70-year striptease in which this consummate quick-change artist always had one more veil to remove, and proof of what director Peter Glenville called Olivier’s “greed for achievement.”

He first showed that good greed at age nine, on the auditorium stage of All Saints’ School in London. In the audience was Sybil Thorndike, then an Old Vic leading lady, who told Larry’s father, “But this is an actor. Absolutely an actor. Born to it.” From a list of his acting credits at school (Maria in Twelfth Night, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew), one imagines that his teachers had already spotted what director Elia Kazan would later cite as Olivier’s “girlish” quality. Throughout his career — as Lord Nelson in That Hamilton Woman, as Richard III, as the homicidal mystery writer in Sleuth — Olivier would bat his eyes at the audience, soliciting its surrender. But belying those feminine eyes were the cruel, pliant lips, and on them the smile of a tiger too fastidious to lick his chops in anticipation of a tasty meal.

Emlyn Williams once remarked that Olivier had “always seemed to be at the height of his career.” Not quite so. In 1929, his first regular stint of acting in the West End, he was in and out of half a dozen indifferent plays before Noel Coward cast him as the “other man” in Private Lives. Four years later, in Hollywood, he was fired from his first A-picture role as Greta Garbo’s lover in Queen Christina. Once again Coward rescued Olivier, casting him in Theatre Royal (1934) as a dashing figure fashioned after John Barrymore, whose lightning sexuality Olivier had long admired and would often emulate.

In 1935 John Gielgud, the leading exponent of romantic classicism, hired Olivier to play Romeo to Gielgud’s Mercutio. Then they swapped roles, and critics hailed the young boulevardier as a rising tragedian. Years later, when asked to enumerate his rival’s strengths, Gielgud acutely replied, “Attention to detail; complete assurance in his conception of character; athleticism; power; and originality.”

By 1943, when Olivier, as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was granted leave to make a film of Henry V, he had synthesized all his gifts. Here was a Henry true both to Shakespeare and to movie spectacle — a Henry with Napoleonic martial wiles and the careless charm of a Cary Grant. It was the first of Olivier’s three Shakespeare films as producer, director and star. In Hamlet (1948), which won him Oscars for best picture and best actor, he turned the melancholy prince into a manic-depressive swashbuckler and Elsinore into a film-noir castle. Richard III (1955) was his most masterly and entertaining picture. Looking eerily Nixonian, Olivier’s Richard murdered with a style that suggested both deformed ambition and a sly sexual perversity. All three films convinced moviegoers that sentiments expressed in iambic pentameter could be matters of life and death.

Except in the Shakespeare films, Olivier in this period usually appeared with Vivien Leigh, his wife from 1940 to 1960. They had fallen in love as co- stars of the 1937 film Fire over England; toured the U.S. in a Romeo and Juliet so poorly received that they had to refund money to angry ticket holders; returned to Broadway in 1951 in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra (dubbed by wags “Two on the Nile”). By the mid-’50s this beautiful actress was tobogganing into mental illness and Olivier was in desperate need of a new challenge. Luck smiled from a surprising direction: the angry young Royal Court Theater. As Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957, < filmed in 1959), a great actor found himself playing a seedy music-hall comic in a tantalizing blend of parody and autobiography.

Yet Olivier always remained a Proteus of the footlights; he bent, folded, spindled, mutilated himself to fit his dynamic conception of the roles. In early Shakespearean parts, Olivier padded his legs so as to look good in tights. In 1945 he went to a gym to sculpt those legs into felicitous muscularity before playing Oedipus in a Greek kilt. To deepen his natural tenor voice into Othello’s baritone, he studied with a vocal coach and was soon speaking a full octave lower. His most faithful theatrical aid was the makeup kit. Said Coward: “I cannot think of any other living actor who has used such vast quantities of spirit gum with such gleeful abandon.”

There was no Method to his masquerades. Graduates of the Actors Studio might psychoanalyze themselves into their roles; Olivier worked from the outside in, often finding character in caricature, refusing only to err on the side of restraint. Although it was what made him exciting to watch, his outsize playing occasionally exceeded conventional interpretations. Olivier’s Othello (1964, filmed the following year), with thick ruby lips and rolling Jamaican cadences, provoked charges of racism. His Shylock (1970, televised in 1974) was found by critic Clive James to resemble Disney’s stingy zillionaire Scrooge McDuck.

Late in his life Olivier might have retired on his laurels: the knighthood in 1946, the life peerage in 1970, the thanks of several nations and generations. But in 1974 nature played a dirty trick on this man for whom strength and agility were two tools of genius. Olivier was struck with dermatopolymyositis, a crippling degeneration of skin and muscular tissue. Although he had been robbed of the energy to seize the stage eight times a week, Olivier could not stop working; he even “appeared,” as a recorded hologram, in the 1986 West End musical Time. He guested in British mini-series (Brideshead Revisited, Lost Empires). And he worked for any movie producer with gall and a ton of money. Dozens of robust cartoons followed: MacArthurs and moguls (The Betsy), wily old Jews (The Boys from Brazil) and scheming Nazis (Marathon Man), all shamelessly strutting their charisma, all fulfilling critic Alan Brien’s dictum that “there is a kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable.”

Olivier was still capable of greatness. In 1982 he answered a last call from Shakespeare, playing King Lear for TV, in a magnificent portrayal that was also a literally death-defying gift to posterity. The boy of nine, mesmerized by the poetry of a 16th century playwright, was now a frail old man of 75, leaving a record of his transcendence for the electronic age and ages to come. The greatest actor of the century knew how to leave them begging for more.