However, she had serious reservations about the iconic image I had chosen. It reflected photographic reference material which did not originate in her own heart and head. It is out of keeping with her own modern thinking. Nonetheless she made a once-in-a-lifetime exception, against the dictates of all her artistic instincts. She indeed remained true to the iconic image of Hamlet, climbing the battlement steps of Elsinore to meet his father’s spirit, sword held high in front of him like a crucifix.
Here it also symbolises his utter belief in the creation of the National Theatre. It is far out of keeping with current fashion, but unlike fashion it is an everlasting classic, known and recog-nised the world over. Many believe it would have been the people’s choice. I very much hope it’s yours. Although it is life size it seems smaller, perhaps because on stage he looked such a giant. We thought that if it were larger it would make his face too far away.
It was on the basis of Angela Conner’s supreme reputation and on this image that I made my appeal. At the outset, everyone I saw in the Lambeth Council expressed their excitement and support, and advised whom I should approach in the National and the South Bank Centre. I would like first to thank the Chairman of the National, Sir Hayden Phillips, and his colleagues the Director Nick Hytner, the Executive Director Nick Starr, and especially the Theatre Manager John Langley and Laura Hough. We all met last February, attended by Lord Attenborough and Angela Conner, whose CV greatly impressed them, and the image of Hamlet they found thrilling.
The site originally selected was where the two enormous Festi-val of Britain ladies, by Dobson, and called London Pride now are. The Appeal would have had to pay for their relocation. Another disadvantage was that that place, between the bookshop and the trees, is not spacious. So after our meeting we measured the ground. They agreed to my suggestion that the statue of Larry should be here, on the north-west corner of Theatre Square, look-ing across it, towards the National’s Main Entrance, and the Olivier Fly Tower above, bang next to the National Film Theatre and in full view of Waterloo Bridge.
The selection of this site made all the difference. It added excitement to the Appeal and it really began to look as if it might succeed. This was unlike anything I had attended to in forty years as a businessman. It would have failed any feasibility study, there was no return for any of us except the hope of fulfilling our shared feelings of love and admiration for Larry, and our determination that his memory should be properly honoured, and the National adorned with this wonderful image of him. I would also like to thank the South Bank Centre’s Director of Partnership and Policy, Mike McCart and his assistant Frances, and the Director of the British Film Institute, Amanda Nevill. This site is actually just on their land.
I would now like to thank our closest associates: Mandip Dhillon the senior planning officer of RPS Planning, Transport and Development, who guided our planning application through its oft amended vicissitudes; Rob Nilsson of the engineering company Price and Myers; and the architects Peter Culley and Owen Jones of Rick Mather who did such beautiful drawings.
Most of all, apart from Angela Conner, I must congratulate her boundlessly skilled Simon Stringer who did all the rubber mould-ing, made the waxes, poured the silicon bronze at eleven hundred degrees Celsius into his casts, and then welded every single hand, foot, limb, the head and the huge cape together into one piece. Thick stainless-steel stanchions from the calves and deep into the stone plinth lock the complete work into place for keeps.
To illustrate the collaborative atmosphere we all developed as individuals with very different tasks, we often emailed each other as ‘Dear All’, with copies everywhere, This was a wonderful indi-cation that England is becoming what I call a ‘Yes’ country. The supportive fellow feeling saved acres of time.
Here I must thank Lisa Burger, the National’s Director of Finance, and Chris Walker, Head of Finance, for being Trustees of the Appeal and for accepting my accountancy and banking submissions, and for their acceptance now of this statue, on behalf of the National Theatre, as a gift from all of us.
In his lifetime he was universally referred to as Larry. This is the finest compliment that can be paid to a great artist. So now with immense pride I hand you over to one of our greatest filmmakers whose support for the Appeal has been stupendous. Ladies and gentlemen: Dickie.
In his speech Lord Attenborough proclaimed how Larry had utterly dominated the theatre and the screen as well, marking him out as unique. As he himself was only associated with the screen, and this was the National Theatre, he had asked members of the original theatre company to assist in the unveiling of the statue, which they did with aplomb, Joan Plowright, Maggie Smith, Anna Carteret and about ten others. Once unveiled there was a heart-warming round of applause. That evening both the Olivier and the Lyttelton Theatres were filled to capacity for an informal show by a couple of dozen actors, interspersed with excerpts from Larry’s films. It was excellent. Then we had a well-presented buffet supper. The day and the statue were a success. I was affected most by the congratulations of Nick Hytner and Peter Hall, Larry’s successor as Artistic Director of the National.
Apart from that I have nothing to show for the efforts of the last few years. I believe some of the films I have written will be made. My chil-dren and grandchildren have grown very fond of Zelfa. Our circle of friends is wider and more interesting. These were magnified by journeys we put together for friends and friends of friends; a dozen or so at a time. This was not commercial, save for the economics she negotiated because we were a group. We just shared the cost between all of us. In various late summers we took them to south-east Turkey along the Syrian border, north-east Turkey including Noah’s Ark and Mount Ararat, Central Turkey for the Hittite civilisation, Edirne, Rumelia, Istanbul several times and a number of boat trips on the Mediterranean Coast, then Libya, Uzbekistan and plans now lapsed for Syria where she had been born.
In her work she represents the Aman Resort Hotel Group, the supremacy of beauty and service, and after quite a number of years of effort the first project, called Amanrüya, came to completion on 15 December 2011, in a fabulous coastal site near Bodrum, with other projects in the pipeline. We have stayed in their exquisite hotels in Bali, Java, Thailand, Rajasthan and Marrakech.
We have lived together and are living to the full. I’m not as old as I’m going to be, and as long as there is hope there is life.
If you enjoyed So Who’s Your Mother, you might also enjoy My Father Laurence Olivier, also by Tarquin Olivier and published by Endeavour Press 2013.
My Father Laurence Olivier
1. England
'He was a funny looking man,' my mother said. She described to me the poor dentistry intended to disguise the gap between his front teeth. 'His smile made him look surprised. He seemed unsure of his ground. But as soon as I saw him I knew: he was the man I was going to marry.'
In March 1928 when they were both twenty-one, she saw him in the dim backstage of a London theatre. He was awkward and bony. His eyebrows met in the middle and extended across his temples leaving the narrowest forehead. Beyond her physical description was a man dedicated to being an actor, to being other than himself, given to mimicry, impersonation, losing himself in roles which had no existence save in him. He was extraordinary.
She was a handsome young actress, a success from a wealthy theatre family, all of which he craved in a wife. He was wild, romantic, and with an impetuousness he never lost he fell in love at once, at first sight, hugged this new emotion round himself and brought it to bear upon her. She wanted more time but knew that she was captivated.
His passion for performing had started while a chorister aged nine, at All Saints, Margaret Street, near Oxford Circus. As I later discovered when a chorister and soloist at school the emotions engendered were more glorious than any thus far, at the dawn chorus of a lifetime. You were your voice, singing to the glory of God; and because the outpourings were linked to prayer in a hallowed place there was a feeling of safety which allo
wed expression without fear of ridicule.
At school his mimicry was more original, but had been less under stood than his singing. For most people it was too much, but Jill loved it. She had been brought up in a theatrical atmosphere. Although she herself was no mimic she told her stories with enthusiasm, a good choice of words but few gestures. She was down-to-earth, but nonetheless lively and imaginative. She had been to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and at the age of fifteen played in a West End production of 'Peter Pan'. Her voice was well-modulated, her attitude professional and her looks enabled her to obtain the best parts early on, including the lead in 'Eliza Comes to Stay', written by her father. Her first big success, after three years, was as Sorel Bliss in Noel Coward's 'Hay Fever'. He gave her a first edition of his play and signed it: 'For Jill, from the Great God Coward!'
Larry, on the other hand, was born into what he described as genteel poverty, although with illustrious antecedents. The Oliviers were originally French Huguenots, one of whom was Louis XV's Court Painter, whose miniatures are still with the family. Many of them had left France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Most descendants became clergy, but there had been soldiers and other professional people; a generation older than Larry a painter, and the first Labour peer, a founder with the Webbs of the Fabian movement - no thespians apart from the acting often endemic in the clergy.
Larry's father, known to the family as 'Farve', had taught at a school where he fell in love with the headmaster's sister, Agnes. They had started married life setting up a school of their own to run, after an engagement of several years saving up the capital required, and she was dismayed at his sudden decision to follow his father's footsteps into the Church. He became a melodramatic preacher in Blakian style: a St George, much to the inconvenience of his family and the surprise of Agnes, who had never wanted to be married to a clergyman.
Larry was born on 22 May 1907 at 26 Wathen Road, Dorking. His father had moved his family down in living standards to assume his first religious post as Curate. The semi-detached house now has a blue plaque commemorating his birth which I unveiled eighty-three years later, after his death the previous summer. It is a friendly dwelling with a manicured garden behind it; the room where he was born is tiny.
He was their third child, after his sister Sybille, and brother Dickie. He felt left out and unwanted by his father. In furtherance of Farve's proselytising quest they moved to the slums of Notting Hill, then to Pimlico, and then again to Letchworth in Hertfordshire. There, when Larry was only twelve and still at choir school, with utter unexpectedness, his mother died.
He found it difficult to speak of her even in old age and during his most relaxed and forthcoming moments, and then only of the void her death left within him. He could never recollect the inner beauty he said she had. Her parents were well-born country people, the Crookendons. She had widely spaced brown eyes, high cheek bones, and a soft mystery. While he delighted in imitating everyone else, he never 'did' her. He couldn't. She was the only one in the world he could never externalise through imitation.
His gift of athletic hell fire was from Farve; his poetic sensitivity was from her. His powers to observe, mix and reproduce, to 'create' a true version of a human being whose country he had never been to, whether a Mexican priest or an Arab prophet were I believe hers, if such gifts came from anyone; as if, like Cathy saying 'I am Heathcliff’, it were true to say of him that he was his mother, whom he had lost.
He would harp upon his father, had nightmares about him and made him sound like a man of ice: the piercing steel blue eyes and marvellous physique, the great cricketer who found fault with everyone else. He referred to him as a sententious old misery who played for effect rather than from conviction, as if religion were a lie that Farve enjoyed shaming others into believing. He impersonated Farve in life, and also, once, in the theatre. He had been afraid of him.
He was sent to St Edward's, Oxford. The boys teased him for his uncoordinated gangly body and his puniness. He longed to score a goal at football or make some runs at cricket. But he did win praise for his acting, even for playing the role of Kate in 'The Taming of the Shrew'. This astonished him: they had been genuinely impressed, even his persecutors, by his playing a girl.
He wanted to be bourgeois and follow his elder brother Dickie by becoming a rubber-planter in India. His father told him not to be silly, he was going to be an actor, and prompted him to win a scholarship and a bursary of £1 a week at Elsie Fogarty's Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art. Peggy Ashcroft was a student there too.
He rented lodgings in an attic near Paddington station and just about starved, agonising over whether taking a bus was cheaper than wearing out his shoes. With persistence, and after many rebuffs and tiny beginnings he managed, through Farve's introduction, to be accepted by the Birmingham Repertory Company: the second time his father had been crucial to his career.
One of the plays brought to London by Barry Jackson's company was 'Bird in Hand' by John Drinkwater. Peggy Ashcroft had been his leading lady in Birmingham. Jill Esmond was engaged instead of her as a star for the London public. That was how he met her.
In the play they had to be very much in love. In life Larry's Puritanism and total inexperience made him awkward. To ease things, if only for the sake of acting on stage, Jill invited him for a weekend at her mother's country house, just beyond Maidenhead in Berkshire.
Apple Porch stood on a hill. Heavy wooden gates led under an archway of wisteria, between the main house and the servants' wing. There were kitchen gardens, greenhouses and a gardener's cottage by the woods, a croquet lawn, grass tennis court and pergolas of roses. Flower beds sloped down to a sun-dial and a wrought-iron gate to Temple Golf Course. The view over the fairway was of the distant glint of the Thames, and the steeple of Marlow church.
Larry had never seen such a place in his life.
Jill was stylish. Her background was literary and theatrical, her father, the late H.V. Esmond, an actor-manager who had written thirty plays. 'Harry' was survived by Eva Moore who, at sixty, still had star quality, and was admired as an actress by Queen Mary.
Jill told me that Eva took to Larry far more readily than to previous young men. She saw beyond his gaucheness, the machine-stitched suit and the cheap shoes. This young man was original: magnetic but lost. He did not know what was expected of him, like a man drunk with life even when sober: earnest and irrepressible, incorrigible. He giggled and impersonated and tried too hard to be helpful. He couldn't help being an actor all the time.
Eva had started her own career as a dancing teacher when she was fifteen. A year later she played small parts kept secret from her Victorian family: acting was for rogues and vagabonds, close to prostitution. Her father found out when she was seventeen and slammed the door in her face. She left home for various touring companies, on her own, surviving in tiny parts. She had known hunger as Larry had.
It is true that he saw what he wanted: an entourage which included Ivor Novello and many other leading theatre people. Eva, as a producer herself, also had wide business contacts. But he was also dying for Jill for her own sake. His autobiographical account of her as not being dazzling but 'would do excellent well as a wife' flies in the face of his young idealism. How often he said to me in my late teens: 'I want to save you from the cretinous romanticism of the Oliviers'. By then he had long come to deplore his puritan youth as a sickening waste of opportunity.
Apple Porch had begun as an eighteenth-century cottage. Larry had a little guest bedroom upstairs, with a porcelain bowl on a washstand, and a copper pitcher of hot water set outside his door every morning and evening. Eva and Harry had had the main house built on around 1900: an oak staircase, heavy with the chimes of a grandfather clock, the drawing-room with Jacobean panelling and an arched ceiling of dull gold. Eva sat at her desk in the morning room which Jill called the Chamber of Horrors because of the illuminations of actors posed in great roles, embellished with tinsel.
Larry, on the other hand, liked them so much that Eva promised to bequeath them to him.
Harry had died when Jill was fifteen. His creativity had waned long before and he had taken to whisky. Eva did not want Jill to see him in an uncontrollable state; she had her own career to lead; many others depended on her for theirs; her son Jacky was thirteen and doing well at Radley ... so she sent Jill away as a boarder at the early age of five to the co-educational school Bedales, in Hampshire. Although liberally enlightened it had no central heating. Jill's first letter home would have horrified Eva the more so for the little mistakes.
Dear Mum
I hope you are quite well.
It is a very cold day.
I have a chilblane on my foot.
I am sorry that Jacky is working so hard. This morning Miss Cross took me into the kitchen and told me to take off my stokins and she got boiling hot worter and told me to put my feet in and she held them in and then she put them inot cold worter and my feet were like lobsters pour me and then she put stuf on them and I was very glad when she had finisht.
Throughout the rest of Eva's life it seems that her immense concern for Jill was an obsessive attempt to make up for an unhappy childhood.
Her marriage to Harry, a leading actor, playwright and manager, had been fulfilled and happy, charged with energy from their work, the successes and failures, and the adrenalin which flowed from their audiences. He was a dreamer and she a disciplinarian, a suffragette committee woman. Their son Jacky thought that she had driven Harry to drink. She interrupted his reverie. Each intrusion became sharper. He lost self-control, something snapped, and he wrote an agonised letter from their London house:
So Who's Your Mother Page 39