The effect on the rest of the cast was dramatic. Infected by the gloom of their leading actor, they had embarked on their first night in a mood of resigned depression; within a few minutes they found themselves caught up in a gale which bore them away to triumph. For Roger Braban, then only a boy and playing a very minor part, it was like being “a speck of dust on a carpet with a bloody great hoover coming at it”. Olivier exuded evil. The cast shrank from him. It was his voice as much as anything which gave force to his performance: “It is slick, taunting and enviously casual,” wrote Tynan, “nearly impersonal … pulling and pushing each line into place.” “The thin reed of a sanctimonious scholar,” is how Olivier himself described it. It was hard to believe that only a few months before that same voice had been urging on the English troops: “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” It is perhaps his death, though, which lingers most tenaciously in the mind. Writhing like a demented spider, arms and legs shooting out in fearful convulsions, seeking to bring down his enemies even though himself doomed, he performed what Harold Hobson called “a horizontal dance”. James Agate, harking back to Hazlitt’s celebrated description, says that this is how Kean must have done it. Olivier himself admits – or perhaps claims – that he took Kean’s performance as a model. In the case of Shakespeare he always found the legacy of the past particularly rich, sometimes oppressive: “Almost every bit of business that does occur to one makes one feel that it had been thought of before.”23
Within a few moments of the curtain rising Olivier knew that the audience was with him; by the end of the evening the theatre was permeated by “that sweet smell (it’s like seaweed) of success”. It was “a fabulous hit: the first time in my life I ever felt equally a junction of successful acceptance by public, critics and my colleagues”. He managed not to let it go too obviously to his head. At the end of the first run he was persuaded by Sybil Thorndike to make a curtain call. (“He needed much pressure as he modestly wanted to give the others all the credit,” David Boyle told Duff Cooper – an observation which suggests that Olivier’s histrionic skills were employed as much in dealing with his admirers as in playing the King.) His speech, Boyle went on, was “so simple and from the heart that it will be treasured by all who heard it”. Some exultation could have been forgiven him, but he had little time to gloat over his success. This was London in wartime. His cousin, Edith Olivier, went round to see him in his dressing room when the play had been running for three weeks or so. He was exhausted and could hardly speak, yet he was just about to go on duty “as a Firewatcher in the Theatre, in which he has to take his turn each week”.24
The most generous tribute came from John Gielgud. In 1939 his mother had given him the sword that Edmund Kean had worn when he played Richard III in the early nineteenth century. “It will be a nice thing to be handed on again to another young hopeful when I am too old to play Hamlet anymore,” Gielgud wrote in his letter of thanks. Olivier could hardly be described as a “young hopeful”, but Gielgud judged the time had come to pass it on. He had the sword inscribed by a master of the trade – the man who had inscribed London’s tribute to Russian heroism, the Sword of Stalingrad – and charged Alan Dent with carrying it to Olivier in the New Theatre. He suggested Dent should “carry it on a tray, like John the Baptist’s head”. Such a gesture, towards a man who was not only a rival but in direct competition, was almost sublimely magnanimous. Olivier treasured the sword. He did not emulate its previous owner by passing it on to a young challenger but it was among the trophies that were processed up the aisle in Olivier’s Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey.25
As if it were not enough to have completed the film of “Henry V” and triumphed in “Richard III” within a few months of each other, Olivier now took on his first serious work as a stage director. He was reading every new play that came his way with a view not only to acting in it himself but also finding a part for Vivien Leigh. He was sent a new play by Thornton Wilder – an American dramatist whom Olivier knew, liked and thought well of. “The Skin of Our Teeth” was rambling, incoherent, brilliantly intelligent, provocative and enormous fun. Olivier would have liked to play the leading role himself, but he was fully committed at the Old Vic; the part of the maid Sabina, however, which had been played by Tallulah Bankhead on Broadway, would, he saw, be a marvellous vehicle for his wife. Whoever directed it would have an unusually free hand, for Wilder had given no instructions of any kind. Olivier leapt at the opportunity. “I always encourage actors to invent like mad,” he claimed. This was a piece of self-deception. More often, he invented like mad on their behalf and expected them to follow his bidding. Roger Braban, aged twelve, found himself forced for financial reasons to leave school and go onto the stage. Olivier, who knew his recently deceased father, offered him the chance of playing a baby elephant in “The Skin of Our Teeth”. The boy looked dubious. Olivier then got on to all fours and cavorted around the floor in baby elephantine mode. “Can you do that?” Olivier asked. “Yes, but I don’t want to.” “Then why are you wasting my time, ungrateful brat?” He got the job all the same and was enormously impressed by the trouble Olivier took to help him along the way. He had the pleasure of burying his head in Vivien Leigh’s skirts and was patted on the head by George VI when the King visited the theatre and went behind stage after the performance.26
Olivier as a director could be fiercely protective of his actors and, most of all, his wife. On the first night James Agate was late coming back into the theatre after the interval and groped his way towards his seat. “Sit down, damn you!” snarled Olivier, striking Agate on the shoulder. “Who’s that?” asked the bemused critic. “You know who I am!” said Olivier menacingly. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, Agate gave the play an excellent review. “That’s the way we should treat critics,” Olivier told Binkie Beaumont with satisfaction. “We should do it more often.” Agate was not the only critic to praise the production; it got a rapturous reception and Vivien Leigh in particular was acclaimed for her performance. Best of all, Thornton Wilder came to one of the earlier performances. “I never knew I’d written such a play,” he said in awe.27
“The Skin of Our Teeth” opened in May 1945. It had already been a year of miracles for Olivier. There was more to come.
In 1914. He maintained that he was an unattractive child but here looks notably cherubic.
Olivier’s much-loved mother Agnes, and feared and detested father Gerard.
As Katherina (back, right) in “The Taming of the Shrew” – a performance improbably attended and praised by Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndike and Theodore Komisarjevsky.
Aged eighteen. “My mouth is like a tortoise’s arse,” he complained. “It’s an absolute slit.”
As Uncle Vanya in 1927. Almost incredibly, he was only nineteen at the time.
With Adrianne Allen, watching Noël Coward and Gertrude Lawrence slug it out in “Private Lives”. As the photograph suggests, his role was very much that of a looker-on.
Working out in 1931. William Gaskill said that he had never met an actor so concerned about his physical appearance.
Arriving in New York in 1933 with his first wife, Jill Esmond. Olivier thought he was on his way to co-star with Greta Garbo in “Queen Christina”. He was to be disappointed.
Edith Evans as the Nurse in “Romeo and Juliet” seems notably ill at ease between Olivier (Romeo) and Gielgud (Mercutio).
As Romeo to Peggy Ashcroft’s Juliet in 1935. He and John Gielgud alternated in the parts of Romeo and Mercutio.
Tarquin Olivier, showing early signs of the intrepidity that marked his life.
With Cherry Cottrell as Ophelia in “Hamlet”.
Olivier followed Hamlet with Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night”: a part, as he himself remarked “designed to demonstrate my staggering versatility”.
As Henry V. “He’s a scoutmaster,” Ralph Richardson said. “But he raised scoutmastership to godlike proportions.”
As Macbeth, conceived by Michel Sai
nt-Denis. “Larry’s make-up comes on,” remarked Vivien Leigh, “then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on.”
With Vivien Leigh in “Fire Over England”, the film that brought them together.
Sybil Thorndike as Volumnia to Olivier’s Coriolanus at the Old Vic in 1938. She refused to play the part unless Olivier promised to act in “a natural, straightforward way”.
In “Wuthering Heights”. “Thees actor es the ogliest actor in pictures,” Sam Goldwyn protested.
With Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice” – “I thought darling Greer was as wrong as could be”, Olivier remarked.
Planning “Rebecca” with Hitchcock and Joan Fontaine. Olivier disliked Fontaine from the start, deeming her “skinny and unattractive”.
Making-up for “Lady Hamilton”. Olivier attached enormous importance to this operation and would spend hours in front of the mirror.
Olivier directed, produced and starred in “Henry V”. “He would play each part himself as he conceived it and expect the actors to copy it,” said Dallas Bower.
“This day is called the Feast of Crispian” – the speech with which Olivier is above all identified and a recording of which was played at his memorial service.
With Ralph Richardson in Hamburg on an E.N.S.A. tour shortly after the end of the war.
Vivien’s Leigh’s dressing room in Sydney, smothered in flowers. Though Olivier grumbled about their reception in Australia they were, in fact, fêted wherever they went.
Perched rather uncomfortably between his first wife, Jill Esmond, and his second, Vivien Leigh.
On the set of the film of “Hamlet” in 1948. Vivien Leigh had wanted to play Ophelia, but instead Jean Simmons, described by Olivier as a “ravishing sixteen-year-old”, was given the part.
CHAPTER NINE
“Hamlet”
“Amazement upon amazement,” Olivier wrote to Jill Esmond in the autumn of 1944, “all wonderful successes … quite unbelievable. Nothing like it has ever happened to me before.” By the time he wrote the Old Vic had already embarked on the second phase of its triumphant progress. The two parts of “Henry IV” will be remembered above all for Richardson’s Falstaff. No performance of any part can be definitive, but few indeed of those who saw him doubted that they were witnessing something which they could never hope to see rivalled in their lifetime. But though Richardson was the hero – and admitted by Olivier to be so – Olivier was much praised for his extraordinary virtuosity. In “Part One” he played Henry Percy, that paradigm of hot-headed and turbulent fighting men; in “Part Two” the twittering and absurd Justice Shallow. The contrast between the two characters could hardly have been more striking; but these were merely sighting shots for what was to be one of the most ambitious and audacious performances of his life.1
It seems to have been Olivier’s idea that there should be a double bill, in which “Oedipus” would be followed by “The Critic”: the supremely tragic Oedipus by W. B. Yeats out of Sophocles followed by that prattling ninny, Sheridan’s Mr Puff. Olivier cheerfully admitted: “I wanted to show off. Ralph had had everything up to then.” The purists were outraged: “Would Irving have followed Hamlet with Jingle?” demanded the Sunday Times: “No!” But Garrick might, as Bryan Forbes has pointed out. “I feel that there are more than passing similarities between Garrick and Olivier,” Forbes went on to say, “even a certain physical resemblance and certainly numerous parallels in their approach to the art of acting.” Garrick or no Garrick, Tyrone Guthrie was opposed to what he saw as unspeakable vulgarity. “Over my dead body!” he declared. “That could be arranged,” was more or less Olivier’s response. Guthrie recognised that he could do nothing to stop the performance and returned, fulminating, to New York. “Oedipus” and “The Critic” had their first showing in October 1945, two months after the Japanese surrender and the end of the Second World War.2 Since the end of the war in Europe in May, the London theatre had been regaining its former vigour. There could not have been a better time for Olivier and the Old Vic to strike gold.
What sticks most vividly in the mind of those fortunate enough to have seen Olivier as Oedipus was the great cry he uttered when he discovered that the prophecy had been fulfilled; he had killed his father; he had committed incest with his mother, he had driven his mother to suicide and, despairing, he gouges out his eyes with the gold pins from his mother’s dress. He based the cry, he claimed, on the anguished protest of an ermine which has licked salt scattered on hard snow and found itself held fast and unable to escape. Both this explanation and the cry itself teeter on the edge of absurdity. Henry Root, the inspired creation of the satirist William Donaldson, showed how it could be parodied when he explained that the cry was based on the mating call of the North American bull moose: “Ever a perfectionist, Olivier spent nine months practising in a forest thirty miles from Quebec. With such success, in fact, that he got shot four times.” Only an actor of extraordinary powers could have made this ghastly denouement convincing to a sophisticated London audience. “I never hoped for so vast an anguish,” wrote Tynan. “Olivier’s final ‘Oh! Oh!’ when the full catalogue of his sins is unfolded must still be resounding in some high recess of the New Theatre’s dome: some stick of wood must still, I feel, be throbbing from it.”3
An interval devoted to a change of costume and of mood, and Olivier was on stage again as Mr Puff. Some critics felt that he overdid the comedy; that Sheridan’s wit was weakened by indulgence in slapstick. Tynan thought that it was a bad example of an actor not trusting his author; Noël Coward, on the other hand, thought it “quite perfect. Technically faultless and fine beyond words.” For Olivier it was a glorious relief after the rigours of Oedipus. If he took it lightly this did not mean that, for a moment, he relaxed his rigidly professional approach: Alan Dent remembered him withdrawing “from the company of his wife and myself [to] practise Mr Puff’s fantastic ways of taking snuff for quite ten minutes on end, totally unaware that we were gazing at the solo rehearsal from the other end of the room.” He also took physical risks. He evolved an elaborate device by which he would be swept up into the flies, borne to earth again on a painted cloud, propelled violently into the heavens and finally delivered back to earth where he performed a somersault. It was a prime example of the extravagance which Tynan condemned; it also nearly cost him his life. The equipment somehow went awry and Olivier found himself dangling thirty feet above the stage with no apparent means of extricating himself. Eventually the fly-man managed to lower him to the ground. “And that,” he wrote, “was how my very favourite invention became a living dread for the next six months.” It never occurred to him, however, to cut out or even to reduce the scale of this piece of business. He had convinced himself that it was an important element in his success; there could be no question of accepting anything below the best; the show must go on.4
There was to be one more major role that season. Olivier had never thought that he would play King Lear; he knew Richardson coveted the part and was happy to let him take it. But when the time came to apportion the parts between them, Richardson had first pick and chose Cyrano de Bergerac. Olivier wanted the part for himself and, as a means of wresting it back, made Lear his first selection. Richardson looked disconcerted and Olivier felt sure that, after the meeting, it would be possible to swap the one part for the other. When it came to the point, however, it became clear that Richardson had no intention of surrendering Cyrano. Olivier was stuck with Lear. It is often said that Lear is the impossible part: by the time one is old enough to play it one is too old to play it. Olivier, only thirty-nine, was too young. Next time he played it he would be too old. He underestimated the problems ahead of him. “Frankly, Lear is an easy part,” he claimed boldly. “We can all play it. It is simply being straightforward … He’s like all of us really, he’s just a stupid old fart …” This somewhat insouciant approach led to a Lear that was bad-tempered, blustery, eccentric from the start and not particularly royal. “His Lear was a failure,” judge
d Max Adrian. “I hated it, and I told him so.” Not many people were so bluntly condemnatory. Gielgud thought him “brilliantly clever and absolutely complete in his characterisation, but it is a little doddering King without majesty or awesomeness. However,” he added wryly, “the critics were lyrical, and I hope I am not jealous.” “Lyrical” was perhaps too generous, but on the whole Olivier was highly praised. It is remarkable, however, that given his capacity to dominate a stage, the image which even today often predominates in the memory of those who saw the performance is not of Olivier’s Lear but the chill, stark white face of Alec Guinness’s infinitely pathetic Fool. “Not Larry’s part, I fear,” said Wolfit with satisfaction. “You see, Lear’s a bass part, Larry’s a tenor.” He was right in thinking that Olivier never felt that he belonged in “Lear”. He made a sound try, but by his own standards he fell short of triumph.5
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