With the urge to conform went the ability to render himself inconspicuous. The actress Billie Whitelaw – Samuel Beckett’s “perfect actress” – said that the first thing she noticed about Olivier was that “in the street I wouldn’t have noticed him at all. Offstage, Olivier looked as if he might have worked in a bank.” He was capable of leaving a theatre, outside which a dense crowd was waiting to cheer him, and disappear round the corner without anyone realising he had been and gone. He gloried in his ordinariness. Interviewers, he complained, “always want to give me eccentricities, they want me to be quaint and Dickensian and full of character, very romantic”. He was none of those things. He was an ordinary man of extraordinary talents. Where he was extraordinary as a human being was in his lack of humanity, his failure to connect with others on anything except a superficial level. Up to a point he could love but he could not feel deep and lasting affection; he could represent characters to perfection on stage, but he could not truly understand them outside the theatre. Wyndham Lewis in 1936 painted a canvas called “Players upon a Stage”, in which a group of actors, composed of an assembly of props and bits of costume, perform to an audience of their own reflections. It was a scene in which Olivier might have felt himself at home.3
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Early in 1952 Olivier was invited to take a company to Canada in the following year. He refused. “It is not easy to visualise what sort of a company we shall be having around us so far in the future, or what nature of repertoire we shall have to offer (should we in fact have any such).”4 He felt unusually uncertain about the future. L.O.P. needed something substantial, to do in Coronation year what the two Cleopatras had done during the Festival of Britain, but what that something should be he had no idea. Orson Welles offered readings from MobyDick, but even had this been aesthetically desirable the Board of L.O.P. – in effect Olivier himself – decided that it would not be “a good economic undertaking”. Terence Rattigan came to the rescue. At his best Rattigan was a playwright capable of work which was both well constructed and socially challenging. “The Sleeping Prince” was not in this category. It was a frothy romance about the Crown Prince of Carpathia, who fell in love with a chorus girl. Olivier claims that Rattigan thought this would suit the Oliviers very well; Rattigan says he thought it all wrong for them: “my little ‘occasional fairy tale’ couldn’t contain one of those two gigantic talents, let alone both.”5
Olivier had taken on the play largely because he thought it contained an excellent part for his wife. In this he was wrong. As Rattigan himself observed, she was “one of nature’s Grand-Duchesses”, unsuited for her chorus-girl role. When Rattigan went backstage in the interval on the first night Olivier asked him: “Tell me, Terry, how are they liking Puss?” “Very much indeed,” said Rattigan. “I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think she’s going over as well as she should be.” Rattigan thought Olivier’s performance was “magic … I would watch, in rehearsal, utterly spellbound as, over the weeks, he built his performance slowly and with immense application from a mass of tiny details, some discarded, some retained.” But, confronted by his wife’s difficulties in the part – compounded by the fact that she had by no means recovered from her breakdown – Olivier reined in his performance. It was not a disaster, commercially indeed it was a tolerable success, but the critics for the most part thought little of it. “Once upon a time,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, “there was an actor called gruff Laurence Olivier, whose wife was an actress called pert Vivien Leigh, and a playwright called clever Terence Rattigan wrote a play for them with a gruff part for him and a pert part for her, and to nobody’s surprise it ran happily ever after, with twice weekly matinées.” It was, he said, “a quilted cushion of a play”.6
With some gallantry Olivier, on behalf of his wife and of himself, as both actor and director, apologised formally for mucking up the play. “Darlings,” Rattigan replied, “please accept my apologies for having written such a mucky, trivial, little play.” Noël Coward, who witnessed this orgy of humility, then contributed: “Children, may I say that as an author, producer and actor I have frequently managed to muck up my own acting, plays and productions and still survive.” After that, everyone felt better.7
“It is so wonderful to see him relaxed and relieved and happy about ‘Sleeping Prince’,” Vivien Leigh told Mu Richardson in an undated letter, presumably written when rehearsals were still in progress. “We have only seen ‘The Country Wife’ since we got back. It is a huge success but I can’t honestly say we cared for it much except for Miss Plowright who is very engaging.” Too engaging by half, she would no doubt have thought a few years later.8
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It was a bad season otherwise – “the worst anyone can remember”, in the opinion of the Daily Sketch. The Royal Court, where the engaging Miss Plowright was enjoying such success, was one of the few beacons of hope in the London theatre. Olivier looked to Stratford. Before then, however, he made his third great Shakespearean film: “Richard III”. Vivien Leigh, according to Angela Baddeley, opposed the project – in part, at least because she had been denied the chance to play Princess Anne. Olivier was too old, she said; he would make himself ridiculous. Anyway, she needed him to be with her that summer: “Larry was betraying her by putting his career first.” In fact he was still prepared to make great sacrifices to sustain his wife, but when it came to the point, as always throughout his life, he would put his acting first. He had hoped to produce the film with Mike Todd, believing that that would ensure he would get Richard Burton as Richmond and Orson Welles as Buckingham. Todd was killed in a flying accident and, instead, he settled for Korda. His relationship with that charismatic yet evasive figure remained equivocal. Olivier found Korda “very amusing, very witty, fantastically well self-educated”, but “there was something about him I didn’t like and didn’t trust”. On this occasion he did Olivier proud: neither Burton nor Welles but Gielgud, Richardson and Cedric Hard-wicke – making an unprecedented quartet of theatrical knights – and Claire Bloom as Lady Anne. Claire Bloom was not merely seduced by Richard III on the screen but by Olivier off it. Neither party seems to have attached great importance to the affair.9
This plethora of stars caused some jostling for position. Gielgud and Richardson insisted on equal billing with Olivier in all the advertising. Olivier agreed. But they were still suspicious. What about the line: “Laurence Olivier presents”? Would that be of the same size too? Again Olivier promised it would. “But I had it in copperplate writing, so it looked a bit different,” he remembered with satisfaction. The rivalry continued in the filming. Gielgud’s “false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence” was much praised but it was noticed that his scenes were poorly lit. “Was this the director’s jealous hand at work?” speculated Gielgud’s biographer. Probably it wasn’t; but it could have been. As for Richardson, he matched Olivier in his reluctance to take direction. Olivier wanted Buckingham to be an out-and-out villain, almost as nefarious as Richard III himself; Richardson, either through perverseness or a genuine inability to summon up the necessary nastiness, played the part for sympathy; thus, in Olivier’s eyes, upsetting the balance of the production.10
“Olivier was superb, really superb … Oh my word, what a film!” was Harold Nicolson’s breathless verdict. It was, indeed, a memorable performance in what, on the whole, was a successful film. And yet the rabid fury of Olivier’s stage performance failed to translate to the screen. He seemed, curiously, to be in a different production to the rest of the cast. “I felt a lack of reality about Larry,” wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary. “It was indeed a theatrical Richard, with funny walk, crook back, unformed hands and a plasticine nose. This, surrounded by so many realistic performance, looked somewhat bogus.” Olivier himself was dissatisfied but undiscomfited: “I call it a waggish performance,” he said. “I mean, it was pretty clever.” It was quite successful enough to whet his appetite to produce, direct and play the lead in at least one more of the great Shakespearean dramas. If
it was humanly possible, that play would be “Macbeth”. In the end it turned out not to be humanly possible, but at least in 1955 he was able to play the part at Stratford in a season that was also to include some of the finest Shakespearean performances of his life.11
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Olivier was then at the summit of his powers. There was much still to come and a whole new world yet to open in the running of the National Theatre, but his total mastery of the Stratford stage produced one of the great glories, perhaps the greatest glory, of the twentieth-century theatre. This was the more astonishing given that his private life was in tatters and that he insisted on playing all the major roles with, as his partner, a wife who was not merely unfaithful when off the stage but teetering on the edge of breakdown when on it.
It should have been an easy start, for Vivien Leigh at least. Viola in “Twelfth Night” is an important but not particularly taxing role, and well within her powers. “She was enchanting,” wrote John Gielgud, who was supposed to be directing the play, “but she was torn between what I was trying to make her do and what Olivier thought she should do.” She survived relatively unscathed, which is more than can be said for Gielgud himself. He took against Olivier’s concept of Malvolio – “like a Jewish hairdresser, with lisp and an extraordinary accent”. When Olivier insisted on falling backwards off a bench in the garden scene – “though I begged him not to do it” – Gielgud roundly, and in front of the whole cast, accused him of vulgarity.12 Olivier was offended. “You’ve no idea how damaging that is,” he protested (another version has him saying: “Johnny, you just winged me”). From that moment it was open war. Angela Baddeley, who was playing Maria, said: “The basic antagonism between Larry and Johnny came out during rehearsals. I think Larry was a bad boy about it. He was very waspish and overbearing and Johnny became intimidated by him. Almost everyone in the cast sided with Larry, laughing at his wisecracks about John’s direction. I felt very sorry for Johnny.” Gielgud himself admitted that he was “very restless as a director and very apt to change my mind”; under Olivier’s bombardment he became even more indecisive and the production seemed to be drifting towards disaster. “Darling John,” Olivier finally flung at him, “please go for a walk along the river and let us just get on with it.” Gielgud’s summary of the affair in a letter to his friend, Stark Young, is a perceptive and on the whole generous comment on his rival.
Olivier is brilliant as Malvolio, though he is ultra-realistic in his approach and his gift of mimicry (as opposed to creative acting) sticks in my gizzard at times. His execution is so certain and skilled that it is difficult to convince him that he can be wrong in his own exuberance and should occasionally curb and check it in the interests of the general line and pattern of the play. The truth is he is a born autocrat and must always be right. He has little respect for the critical sensitivity of others; on the other hand he is quite brilliant in his criticism of my directing methods and impatient with my hesitation and (I believe) necessary flexibility. He wants everything cut and dried at once, so that he may perfect with utter certainty of endless rehearsal and repetition – but he is good for me all the same.13
He was good for himself as well. “Larry was absolutely superb,” wrote Coward in his diary. “He’s a great actor, and that’s all there is to it.” Most of the critics and, to judge by the volume of applause, the vast majority of the paying public, agreed: his performance was extravagant, even self-indulgent, but it delighted almost all who saw it. Gielgud continued to feel that Malvolio unbalanced the rest of the production, but, as he handsomely told Olivier: “The character is brilliantly conceived and consummately executed – and I know you will delight with it.” Vivien Leigh fared less well. In the early rehearsals she was anxious and uncertain. It could still work, Gielgud thought, if Olivier “would let me pull her little ladyship (who is brainier than he is but not a born actress) out of her timidity and safeness. He dares too confidently while she hardly dares at all and is terrified of overreaching her technique.” This is a little unfair – it is the combination of Olivier and Gielgud which seems to have disturbed her, rather than either one of them – but the result was that her performance, though competent, seemed lacklustre compared with the explosive vitality of her husband. Tynan described it as being one of “dazzling monotony”. “It was absolutely untrue,” said Olivier. “She rang every vocal change that anybody could do.” But it did little for her morale in the build-up to what was to be her stiffest test.14
Olivier had had doubts about “Macbeth”; not for his wife but for himself. “Glennie, I’ve played Macbeth. I’m no good as Macbeth,” he told Byam Shaw. He allowed himself to be persuaded without too much difficulty. Byam Shaw knew that Olivier was going through “a difficult and worrying time”, but, he wrote, “I believe that the greatest achievements are often accomplished through the most difficult circumstances, and so I feel that your Macbeth may well be your greatest of all triumphs.” As for Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth, Byam Shaw hoped that their partnership would help “bring about a perfection of subtle reality between those two great characters”: an observation which, if taken literally, seems to suggest a somewhat unenthusiastic judgment on the Oliviers’ marriage. What the partnership did bring depends on whose judgment prevails. Olivier himself maintains that his wife was up to the part – “she was good, she was marvellous in the sleep walk.” “Wonderful,” thought Godfrey Winn, “wonderful,” echoed Christopher Fry: both men adding that they preferred her performance to her husband’s. But this was not the opinion of most of the critics who, with Tynan as ever at their head – “more niminy-piminy than thunderyblundery” was his verdict – dismissed her as a lightweight who wilted when exposed to the blazing fury of her husband. Probably Gielgud got it right. Olivier, he considered, was “the finest Macbeth I have ever seen”; Leigh’s performance was, “I think, almost the best thing I ever saw her do – but on a small scale. She would have been enormously effective if a film had been made.”15
Olivier continued to protest at any suggestion that he was lowering the level of his performance so as to accommodate his wife. “I was keeping my end up for all I knew how,” he protested. “I was acting opposite her as if I was acting opposite Sarah Bernhardt. I was doing my nut to act her off the stage. I couldn’t.” In fact this charge was levelled at him more often over “Twelfth Night” than “Macbeth”; the critical response to his Macbeth was adulatory, even awestruck. Harold Hobson, by now the doyen of British theatre critics, rarely missed a chance to praise Olivier and on this occasion outdid himself. “As distress and agony enter into him, Laurence Olivier multiplies in stature before our eyes until he dominates the play, Stratford-upon-Avon and, I would say, the whole English theatre. The performance is full of unforgettable things … I don’t believe there is an actor in the world who can come near him.” His physical presence on a stage, always daunting, became overwhelming. Harry Andrews, who played Macduff, was one of the few actors in Britain who would not have been eclipsed by him. They flung themselves into the fight in the last act with an abandon that left the rest of the cast aghast. “We both enjoyed it more than any other two people who fought on the stage, I swear it,” Olivier remembered. “We were wonderful together … two peacocks who weren’t afraid of hurting each other.” Or of being hurt. Other actors were less hardy and protested that their lives, or at the least limbs, were being put at risk. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Olivier exclaimed. “Have I hurt the dear boys? I’ll do better in future, but I do like to show there’s life in the old dog yet.”16
Rattigan told him that his was the definitive Macbeth. Olivier made no bones about agreeing. “I just thought of it the right way,” he explained. “It was just the right mixture of style and down-to-earth bone reality. I found the right cocktail, the right ingredients and the right proportion. I’m very proud of it.”17
Third and last in this majestic season was “Titus Andronicus”, a horror-comic with some magnificent poetry but so macabre a plot that it is not ofte
n staged. Any play which accommodates thirteen deaths, two mutilations, a rape and a cannibal banquet at which a mother inadvertently eats a pie made out of her two sons, must teeter on the brink of absurdity. T. S. Eliot considered it “one of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written”; more importantly for the purposes of this production, Olivier himself had doubts about it. “I don’t think I really admire ‘Titus Andronicus’,” he told Basil Rathbone, while to Colin Blakely he complained that he would rather play characters like Richard III or Macbeth than Titus, who was “one of the moaners. Those are the difficult ones, the ones that do nothing but suffer.” But he moaned majestically. Peter Brook was the director. It was the first time the two men had worked together since the ill-fated “Beggar’s Opera”. Brook arrived determined to impose his will from the outset to find that he was beating at an open door; Olivier was resolved “to show himself a model of acceptance and flexibility … Not only could I understand and admire his amazing talent, but the way he played the central role gave the whole production an intensity and reality that no other actor at the time could have brought.” Brook admitted that he never felt close to Olivier – “He was most polite and attentive, but behind the gesture there was always a sense of strain; even his laughter was acted, as though he never ceased remaking and polishing his mask” – but on this occasion at least their professional relationship could not be faulted. Olivier praised Brook as a “master interpreter”, who had “not only the genius for the job but also the generosity to make me a partner in his thinking”; Brook wrote Olivier gushing thanks for “being such an extraordinary, great, true, breathtaking actor on one hand and for being so endlessly sweet, understanding, helpful and encouraging on the other”.18
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