Laurence Olivier

Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of three children of Gerard Kerr Olivier, a High Church Anglican priest, and his wife Agnes Louise Crookenden ^[1]. The household was strict and moved often as his father took up new clerical posts, and money was frequently short. Agnes died in 1920 when her son was twelve, a loss he described in later life as the deepest wound of his childhood ^[2].

The church, oddly enough, supplied his first stage. As a choirboy at All Saints, Margaret Street, in London, the young Olivier appeared in school productions of Shakespeare, and his performance as Brutus in Julius Caesar at the age of ten drew praise from the actress Ellen Terry, who saw the production and noted the boy's promise ^[1]. His father, initially cool toward the theatre, eventually decided the profession suited him and steered him toward formal training.

In 1924 Olivier won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, then run by Elsie Fogerty, who worked on his voice and diction ^[3]. He left after a year to earn a living, taking small jobs as a bit player and assistant stage manager before joining the Birmingham Repertory Company in 1926, a troupe under Barry Jackson that gave many young British actors their grounding in a wide classical and modern repertoire ^[2].

Birmingham gave Olivier range; London gave him notice. By the late 1920s he was appearing in West End productions, and in 1930 he created the role of Victor Prynne in Noël Coward's Private Lives, a job Coward offered him partly, the playwright later said, to teach the young actor discipline ^[2]. That same decade he began working in films in Britain and Hollywood, though his early screen career was uneven and he was famously passed over for the lead opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina in 1933 ^[1].

The turning point came in 1935, when the director John Gielgud invited Olivier to alternate the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with him at the New Theatre in London. Critics quarrelled over Olivier's naturalistic verse speaking, which broke with the musical delivery Gielgud embodied, but the production made him a leading classical actor and set up a rivalry, mostly friendly, that ran for decades ^[3].

Between 1937 and 1938 Olivier joined the Old Vic company and worked through a punishing sequence of major parts: Hamlet (which he also played at Elsinore in Denmark), Sir Toby Belch, Henry V, Macbeth, Iago, and Coriolanus ^[1]. Hollywood then claimed him again, and this time it worked. His brooding Heathcliff in William Wyler's Wuthering Heights (1939) earned an Academy Award nomination, and he followed it with Rebecca (1940) for Alfred Hitchcock and Pride and Prejudice (1940), establishing him as an international film star ^[4].

Any account of Laurence Olivier achievements begins with his Shakespeare films. During the Second World War, after service in the Fleet Air Arm, he directed and starred in Henry V (1944), a Technicolor production designed in part to lift wartime morale; it opened with a reconstruction of the Globe playhouse and moved into painted, stylised landscapes for the battle of Agincourt ^[4]. The film earned Olivier an honorary Academy Award in 1947 for his triple work as actor, producer, and director ^[5].

Hamlet (1948) went further. Shot in stark black and white with long tracking shots through Elsinore's corridors, it won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Olivier took the award for Best Actor, the first performer ever to direct himself to an acting Oscar ^[5]. He completed his Shakespearean film trilogy with Richard III (1955), whose thin-voiced, limping king became one of the most imitated performances in screen history ^[4].

On stage his record was equally heavy. From 1944 he co-directed the Old Vic company with Ralph Richardson, leading celebrated seasons that included his Richard III and a double bill in which he played Sophocles' Oedipus and Sheridan's Mr Puff on the same evening ^[3]. In 1963 he became the first director of the National Theatre of Great Britain, building the company at the Old Vic while its permanent home on the South Bank was planned, and holding the post until 1973 ^[6]. His own National Theatre performances included a controversial Othello in 1964 and James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Honours followed the work: a knighthood in 1947, a life peerage in 1970 (the first ever given to an actor), and the Order of Merit in 1981 ^[6].

Olivier married three times, and all three wives were actresses. His first marriage, to Jill Esmond in 1930, produced a son, Tarquin, but faltered within a few years ^[2]. In the late 1930s he began a relationship with Vivien Leigh while both were married to other people; they wed in 1940, shortly after Leigh's triumph in Gone with the Wind, and for two decades the pair were treated as the reigning couple of the English-speaking theatre ^[1].

The marriage to Leigh was glamorous in public and difficult in private. Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder, then poorly understood and harder still to treat, and her episodes of illness strained joint ventures such as their 1948 Old Vic tour of Australia and New Zealand and their paired stage seasons in London and New York ^[2]. The couple divorced in 1960.

In 1961 Olivier married the actress Joan Plowright, with whom he had appeared in John Osborne's The Entertainer, the 1957 play whose seedy music hall comedian Archie Rice he counted among his proudest creations ^[3]. The marriage brought three children, Richard, Tamsin, and Julie-Kate, and lasted until his death. Colleagues described Olivier as a driven, competitive worker who planned performances in obsessive technical detail, down to false noses and altered voices, and who admitted to lifelong stage fright that grew acute in the 1960s ^[2].

Illness shadowed Olivier's final two decades. From the late 1960s he endured a sequence of serious conditions, including cancer, appendicitis, pneumonia, and dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder that eventually made sustained stage work impossible ^[2]. His last theatre performance came in 1974, after which he turned entirely to film and television.

The screen work of these years mixed distinguished projects with frankly commercial ones, a balance Olivier defended as providing for his young family. He was Oscar-nominated for Sleuth (1972), for his chilling Nazi dentist in Marathon Man (1976), and for The Boys from Brazil (1978), and he won Emmy Awards for television performances including Love Among the Ruins opposite Katharine Hepburn in 1975 ^[5]. Television also gave him King Lear in 1983, a role his body could no longer carry on stage, filmed for Granada when he was seventy-five ^[6].

The American Academy gave him a second honorary Oscar in 1979 for the full body of his work, and in 1984 the Society of West End Theatre renamed its annual prizes the Laurence Olivier Awards in his honour ^[5]. He died of renal failure on July 11, 1989, at his home in Steyning, West Sussex, at the age of eighty-two. His ashes were buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, an honour previously granted to only one other actor, David Garrick ^[1].

Olivier's name became shorthand for acting itself. For readers of any Laurence Olivier biography, the striking fact is how completely he dominated both of Britain's performing traditions: he was the most honoured stage actor of his century and, at the same time, an Oscar-winning film star and director whose Shakespeare adaptations proved the plays could work on screen ^[4]. Kenneth Tynan, the critic who later served under him at the National Theatre, ranked his Richard III and Othello among the defining performances of the age ^[3].

His institutional legacy is equally concrete. The National Theatre he founded remains Britain's flagship company, and its largest auditorium on the South Bank is named the Olivier Theatre after him ^[6]. The Olivier Awards, the West End's equivalent of Broadway's Tonys, keep his name before every new generation of theatre workers.

Among the memorable Laurence Olivier facts is the sheer span of his honours: ten Academy Award nominations for acting plus two honorary awards, a knighthood, a peerage, the Order of Merit, and five Emmy Awards ^[5]. Later actors have questioned his technical, outside-in method, and fashions in performance have shifted, but the record of what he built, played, and filmed between the 1920s and the 1980s remains without close parallel in British theatrical history ^[1].