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Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM (; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. 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.
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Quotations
Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real.
We used to have actresses trying to become stars; now we have stars trying to become actresses.
Work is life for me, it is the only point of life-and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
Of all the things I've done in life, directing a motion picture is the most beautiful. It's the most exciting and the nearest that an interpretive craftsman, such as an actor..can possibly get to being a creator.
If I wasn't an actor, I think I'd have gone mad. You have to have extra voltage, some extra temperament to reach certain heights. Art is a little bit larger than life- it's an exhalation of life and I think I you probably need a little touch of madness.
Encyclopedia
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM (; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. 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 AMPAS 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, Brideshead Revisited, 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 22 May 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 (née Crookenden; 1871–1920, and herself the younger sister of an Anglican vicar), and was grief-stricken when she died (at 48) when he was only 12. Gerard Dacres "Dickie" (1904 – 1958) and Sybille (1901 – 1989) 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, Dickie, 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 1927 he was playing roles such as Hamlet and Macbeth. Throughout his career he insisted that his acting was pure technique, and he was contemptuous of contemporaries who adopted method acting popularized by Lee Strasberg. Olivier met and married Jill Esmond, a rising young actress, on 25 July 1930 and had one son, Simon Tarquin, on 21 August 1936.
Olivier was not happy in his first marriage from the beginning, however. Repressed, as he came to see it, by his religious upbringing, Olivier recounted in his autobiography the disappointments of his wedding night, culminating in his failure to perform sexually. He renounced religion forever and soon came to resent his wife, though the marriage would last for ten years.
He made his film debut in The Temporary Widow, and played his first leading role on film in The Yellow Ticket; however, he held the film in little regard. His stage breakthroughs were in Noel Coward's Private Lives in 1930, and in Romeo and Juliet in 1935, alternating the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with John Gielgud. Olivier did not agree with Gielgud's style of acting Shakespeare and was irritated by the fact that Gielgud was getting better reviews than he was. 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. However, 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 did not 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 had 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 had 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 theatre 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 are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he would 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. (Leigh would go on to star as Blanche in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, earning her second Academy Award for Best Actress.)
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 learned of her problems. David Niven said she had 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 would 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 is 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 had 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. Olivier took flying lessons, and racked up over 200 hours. After two years of service, he rose to the rank Lieutenant Olivier RNVR, as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm 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."
A 2007 biography of Olivier, Lord Larry: The Secret Life of Laurence Olivier by Michael Munn, claims that Olivier was recruited to be an undercover agent inside the United States for the British government by film producer and MI5 operative Alexander Korda on the instructions of Winston Churchill.
According to an article in The Telegraph, David Niven, a good friend of Olivier's, is said to have told Michael Munn, "What was dangerous for his country was that (Olivier) could have been accused of being an agent. So this was a danger for Larry because he could have been arrested. And what was worse, if German agents had realised what Larry was doing, they would, I am sure, have gone after him."
Shakespeare trilogy
After gaining widespread popularity in the film medium, Olivier was approached by several investors (namely Filippo Del Giudice, Alexander Korda and J. Arthur Rank), to create several Shakespearean films, based on stage productions of each respective play. Olivier tried his hand at directing, and as a result, created three highly successful films: Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III.
Henry V
Olivier made his directorial debut with a film of Shakespeare's Henry V. At first, he did not believe he was up to the task, instead trying to offer it to William Wyler, Carol Reed, and Terence Young. The film was shot in Ireland (due to the fact that it was neutral), with the Irish plains having to double for the fields of Agincourt. During the shooting of one of the battle scenes, a horse collided with a camera that Olivier was attending. Olivier had had his eye to the viewfinder, and when the horse crashed into his position, the camera smashed into him, cutting his lip, and leaving a scar that would be prominent in later roles.
The film opened to rave reviews, despite Olivier's initial reluctance. It was the first widely successful Shakespeare film, and was considered a work of art by many. The film received Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Actor, but the Academy, in Olivier's opinion, did not feel comfortable in giving out all of their major awards to a foreigner, so they gave him a special Honorary Award. Olivier disregarded the award as a "fob-off".
Hamlet
Olivier followed up on his success with an adaptation of Hamlet. He had played this role more often than he had Henry, and was more familiar with the melancholy Dane. However, Olivier was not 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) was not 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 was not 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, winning Olivier Best Picture and Best Actor at the 1948 Academy Awards. It was the first British film to win Best Picture, and Olivier's only Best Actor win, a category he would be nominated for five more times before his death. Olivier also became the first person to direct himself in an Oscar-winning performance, a feat not repeated until Roberto Benigni directed himself to Best Actor of 1998 for Life Is Beautiful. Also, Olivier remains the only actor to receive an Oscar for a Shakespearean role. Olivier, however, did not win the Best Director Oscar that year, losing that award to John Huston for Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Richard III
Olivier's third major Shakespeare project as director and star was Richard III. Alexander Korda initially approached Olivier to reprise on film the role he had played to acclaim at the Old Vic in the 1940s. This role had been lauded as Olivier's greatest (rivaled only by his 1955 stage production of Macbeth and his performance as the broken down music hall performer Archie Rice in The Entertainer), and is arguably considered to be his greatest screen performance. During the filming of the battle scenes in Spain, one of the archers actually shot Olivier in the ankle, causing him to limp. Fortunately, the limp was required for the part, so Olivier had already been limping for the parts of the film already shot.
Although the film was critically well received (Olivier would be nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for the fourth time), it was a financial failure. Korda sold the rights to the American television network NBC, and the film became the first to be aired on television and released in theatres simultaneously. Many deduce that from the enormous ratings that the NBC transmissions received, more people saw Richard III in that single showing than all the people who had seen it on stage in the play's history.
The Entertainer
Since the end of World War II, apart from his Shakespeare trilogy, Olivier had made only sporadic film appearances.
In the second half of the 1950s, British theatre was changing with the rise of the "Angry Young Men". John Osborne, author of Look Back in Anger, wrote a play for Olivier entitled The Entertainer, centred on a washed-up stage comedian called Archie Rice, which opened at the Royal Court on 10 April 1957. As Olivier later stated, "I am Archie Rice. I am not Hamlet."
During rehearsals of The Entertainer, Olivier met Joan Plowright, who took over the role of Jean Rice from Dorothy Tutin when Tony Richardson's Royal Court production transferred to the Palace Theatre in September 1957. Later, in 1960, Tony Richardson also directed the screen version with Olivier and Plowright repeating their stage roles. Olivier received his fifth Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for The Entertainer.
He left Vivien Leigh for Plowright, a decision that apparently gave him a sense of guilt for the rest of his life. Olivier married Plowright on St. Patrick's Day, 1961, finally providing him with domestic stability and happiness. Leigh died in 1967.
National Theatre
Olivier was one of the founders, and the inaugural director, of the National Theatre. He became first NT Director at the Old Vic before the South Bank building was constructed with his opening production of Hamlet in October 1963.
During his directorship he appeared in twelve plays (taking over roles in three) and directed nine, enjoying particularly remarkable personal successes for his performances in Othello (1964), The Dance of Death (1968) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (1971). Reportedly, some felt that his tenure as the director of the NT was marred by his jealousy towards other performers when he maneuvered to block famous names like John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson from appearing there, although young actors like Michael Gambon, Derek Jacobi, Alan Bates, Frank Finlay and Anthony Hopkins (who understudied Olivier) made their names there during the period. Olivier's career at the National ended, in his view, in betrayal when the theatre's governorship decided to replace him with Peter Hall in 1973 without consulting him on the choice and not informing him of the decision until several months after it had been made.
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 sixth Oscar nomination for Best Actor. It was not 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. The film was co-directed by John Sichel.
In addition his most fondly remembered National Theatre performances at the Old Vic were as Astrov in his own production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, seen first in 1962 at the Chichester Festival Theatre, of which he was the founding director; his Captain Brazen in William Gaskill's December 1963 staging of George Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer; Shylock in Jonathan Miller's 1970 revival of The Merchant of Venice; and his definitive portrayal of James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, produced in December 1971 by Michael Blakemore. These last two were later restaged for television, and telecast both in England and in the United States.
He played an unforgettably droll supporting role as the ancient Antonio in Franco Zeffirelli's 1973 production of Eduardo de Filippo's Saturday, Sunday, Monday, with his wife Joan Plowright in the starring role of Rosa. His final stage appearance, on 21 March, 1974, was as the fiery Glaswegian, John Tagg, in John Dexter's production of Trevor Griffiths' The Party.
The only appearance he made on the stage of the new Olivier Theatre was at the royal opening of the new National Theatre building on 25 October, 1976.
Later career
Famous throughout his career for his commitment to his art, Olivier immersed himself even more completely in his work during his later years, reportedly as a way of distracting himself from the guilt he felt at having left his second wife Vivien Leigh. 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; Supporting Actor) 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 would not 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 was not 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 MacArthur.
In 1967 Olivier underwent radiation treatment for prostate cancer, and was also hospitalised with pneumonia. For the remainder of his life, he would suffer from many different health problems, including bronchitis, amnesia and pleurisy. In 1974, at age 67, he was diagnosed with dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder, and nearly died the following year, but he battled through the next decade.
One of Olivier's enduring achievements involved neither stage nor screen time. In 1974, UK Thames Television released The World at War, an extensive 26-part documentary on the Second World War which Olivier narrated.
His last decade did contain three great roles for the television medium. In 1981 he appeared in Brideshead Revisited, the final episode of which revolved entirely around Olivier's character Lord Marchmain, patriarch of the Flyte family, as he came to his deathbed. Brideshead Revisited was credited with having been adapted for the screen by John Mortimer, and in the year following Brideshead, Olivier was cast in the much-praised television adaptation of Mortimer's own stage play A Voyage Round My Father, in the role of Clifford Mortimer, the author's blind father. Finally, in 1983 Olivier played his last great Shakespearean role, which inevitably was King Lear, for Granada Television. For Voyage Olivier received a BAFTA nomination, but for the final episode of Brideshead Revisited and for King Lear he won Emmys in the Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor categories, respectively.
When presenting the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards for 1984 (held 25 March 1985), he absent-mindedly presented it by simply stepping up to the microphone and saying "Amadeus". He had grown forgetful, and had forgotten to read out the nominees first.
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).
Death
In March 1989 Olivier fell and endured his last operation, for a hip replacement. He died at his home in Steyning, West Sussex, England, from the effects of dermatomyositis, on 11 July 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 and 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 has portrayed in theatre and film, for example King Henry V, General John Burgoyne and Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding.
Reprise
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. Biographer Donald Spoto stated that Danny Kaye and Olivier were lovers. Joan Plowright, Olivier's widow, denies the affair with Kaye in her memoir but does not deny that Olivier may have been bisexual. 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 is any evidence linking Olivier sexually to Kaye. Olivier's son Tarquin disputed these rumours as 'unforgivable garbage' and sought to suppress them, leading his stepmother 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—in Hollywood to star in William Wyler's film Carrie—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:
Honours
Olivier was created a Knight Bachelor on 12 June 1947 (in the King's Birthday Honours, and created a life peer on 13 June 1970 (in the Queen's Birthday Honours) as Baron Olivier, of Brighton in the County of Sussex, the first actor to be accorded this distinction. He was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1981. The Laurence Olivier Awards, organised by The Society of London Theatre, were renamed in his honour in 1984.
Though he was a knight, a life peer, and one of the most respected personalities in the industry, Olivier insisted he be addressed as "Larry", which he made clear he preferred to "Sir Laurence" or "Lord Olivier".
Centenary
To mark the 22 May 2007 centenary of Olivier's birth, Network Media and ITV released DVD libraries of his work:
Network Media – The Laurence Olivier Centenary Collection (10 disks):
ITV – Laurence Olivier Shakespeare Collection (7 disks):
- King Lear (1983)
- Henry V (1944)
- Hamlet (1948)
- As You Like It (1936)
- Richard III (1955)
- The Merchant of Venice (1973)
ITV - The Laurence Olivier "Icon" Collection (10 disks):
Both DVD sets include a Michael Parkinson interview with Olivier from the 1970s.
In September 2007 the National Theatre marked the centenary of his birth with a Centenary Celebration.
This told the story of Olivier's working life through film and stage extracts, letters, reminiscence and readings, the participants included Eileen Atkins, Claire Bloom, Anna Carteret, Derek Jacobi, Charles Kay, Clive Merrison, Edward Petherbridge, Joan Plowright, Ronald Pickup, Billie Whitelaw and Richard Attenborough.
Prior to the evening celebration, a new statue of Olivier as Hamlet, created by the sculptor Angela Conner and funded by private subscription, was unveiled on the South Bank, next to the National's Theatre Square.
In addition in September 2007, as part of the BBC Summer of British Film series, Olivier's film of Henry V shown at selected cinemas across the UK.
Awards and nominations
Theatre credits and filmography
Further reading
- Coleman, Terry (2005). Olivier: The authorised biography. Bloomsbury. ISBN 0-7475-7798-6
- Plowright, Joan (2001). And That's Not All: The Memoirs of Joan Plowright. Weidenfeld. ISBN 0-29764594-3
- Hall, Lyn, editor (1989). Olivier at Work: The National Years. Nick Hern Books/National Theatre. ISBN 1-85459-037-5
- Holden, Anthony (1998). Olivier. Weidenfeld. ISBN 0-297-79089-7
- Olivier, Laurence (1987). Confessions of an Actor. Sceptre. ISBN 0-340-40758-1
- Olivier, Laurence (1986). On Acting. Weidenfeld. ISBN 0-297-78864-7
- Olivier, Laurence (1982). Confessions of an Actor. Weidenfeld. ISBN 0-297-78106-5
External links
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