Laurence Olivier

The Conqueror

For a good deal of the 20th century Laurence Olivier—who midway through his career was made Sir Laurence Olivier and then even Lord Olivier—was considered by many to be the greatest actor of that century, or the greatest British actor, or the greatest British classical theater actor. Those claims started to fade somewhat in the 21st century. Actors of similar high rank like Anthony Hopkins and Daniel Day-Lewis started to question Olivier’s work in interviews, and it didn’t help that many of his most acclaimed theater performances were not recorded in any way and many of the performances he did do for the screen are of poor or very questionable quality, partly because he never quite stopped looking down on the cinema as an inferior medium.

I once visited the film critic Stanley Kauffmann; he was in his late nineties and still writing reviews. Like many writers of his generation, Kauffmann was just as avid about the theater and literature as he was about film, and when I asked him about his favorite theater experience he became quiet and reverent when he said, “I saw Laurence Olivier play Oedipus Rex and The Critic on a double bill, and that was the greatest experience I ever had. I would love to go back somehow and see it again.”

Much was made at the time of a famous cry that Olivier did when his Oedipus realized that he had married his mother, a high sound of agony on an “Er” rather than an “Oh” that was based on the idea he had of an animal caught in a trap; with his taste for the morbid, Olivier had the image in his mind of a fox caught by the tongue by a trap in freezing weather. This was not the only time Olivier used animal behavior as an inspiration. The death spasms of his Richard III, which were captured for a 1955 film he directed, were based on the accidental death of a kitten that he witnessed in which he saw the kitten claw and jerk itself in all directions.

Even in his time, Olivier was sometimes criticized as too technical, someone who worked from the outside in with a characterization and sometimes neglected to have anything going on inside the special make-up he devised, or the walk of the character, or the gestures he had worked out. The critic James Agate compared him to a watch that was open so that you could see its workings, whereas Agate felt that an actor should simply present the time to us, and Olivier, with his taste for self-flagellation, said that there was some merit in this criticism.

The famous story about Olivier on the set of Marathon Man (1976) telling Dustin Hoffman, “Why not try acting, dear boy?” after Hoffman stayed up all night to be really exhausted for a torture scene is belied by the fact that Olivier himself was willing to go without food for a bit to do the last scenes in Carrie (1952). That adaptation of a Theodore Dreiser novel directed by William Wyler contains his finest and most deeply felt film performance as a man who slowly gets destroyed because he falls in love with a pretty young girl.

Elia Kazan, probably the most noted practitioner of Method acting for the stage and screen in this era, witnessed Olivier tirelessly trying out a physical gesture for his restaurateur character George Hurstwood in Carrie in order to get it just right, and Olivier did an expert American accent for this role, but only an English actor could have conveyed the ever-deepening sense of mortification that finally turns Hurstwood into a barely-alive ghost of himself. Everything important about this performance feels like it comes from within.

As a man of the theater, Olivier was concerned with holding the attention of his audience, sometimes to a fault. When directing his wife Vivien Leigh on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire in London, he wrote a letter to Tennessee Williams asking to cut some lines from the last confrontation between Blanche DuBois and her suitor Mitch because he felt the audience would lose interest in her and never get it back for the final scenes. During his tenure as head of the National Theatre in Britain in the 1960s, he would sometimes tell young actors that if they wanted to hold the stage that they should randomly shout a word from a line of dialogue to keep the audience off balance, and that kind of trickery might have worked live, but it can be off-putting on camera.

Olivier lost his beloved mother when he was young, and he emphasized the stinginess of his preacher father in his autobiography Confessions of an Actor (1982), which is written in a pompous and obsequious style but with a rather crass tone. Olivier wrote this book himself, and he refused to cut certain passages that his editor felt were in poor taste, or unnecessary. This problem was amplified in the authorized biography Olivier (2005), where Olivier’s horny love letters to Vivien Leigh were offered up when they certainly should have remained private.

Olivier’s record on stage and screen in the 1920s and the early 1930s was undistinguished; he was very thin in those days and inclined to squirm when he felt uncomfortable, which was often. Hired to be Garbo’s leading man in Queen Christina (1933), he could do nothing to please her and was eventually fired, but a turning point came when he was asked by John Gielgud to play in a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1935 where they were to alternate the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. Olivier was criticized for his impetuous speaking of the verse, but Peggy Ashcroft, who played Juliet, preferred Olivier so much that she had an affair with him (his first marriage to Jill Esmond had proved disappointing). Olivier boasted in old age that Gielgud’s boyfriend John Perry made it known that even he preferred Olivier’s Romeo.

Olivier was shooting a film of As You Like It (1936) as Orlando at this time and playing in Romeo and Juliet at night, and that movie lets us see what he was like in this crucial period; it feels like a breakthrough. He is everything Orlando needs to be in that play: dashing, physically bold yet vulnerable, and gorgeous in his sexy costumes, and his voice finally has its full hushed beauty as he speaks Shakespeare for the camera.

He did his first Hamlet on stage and tackled Macbeth and Coriolanus and began to make his first impression as a Shakespearian actor, and at the same time he finally conquered Hollywood in a series of matinee idol parts starting with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939), a cold Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940), and an ideal Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1940), where he has all the qualities necessary and is aided by expert editing. This series was topped off by his Lord Nelson in the very romantic That Hamilton Woman (1941), which is dominated by Vivien Leigh, his second wife and the tragic love of his life.

There is a sense in all of those movies that Olivier is presenting a surface to the camera and he is somewhere else, his eyes looking impatient, empty, or disdainful, but this was not the case in The Demi-Paradise (1943), a propaganda film in which the task of putting together a characterization of a Russian man complete with heavy accent stimulated his imagination, which had not been fully activated for a movie before. There are times in this picture when Olivier achieves a feat that later became a specialty for Meryl Streep: he disappears, and his character is there on screen, seemingly totally unconnected from Olivier himself.

The war years saw him triumph with two Shakespeare films, Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), and he also did his famous season with the Old Vic where he performed the Oedipus Rex/The Critic double bill that so impressed those who saw it, even if Olivier said later that it had been “vulgar,” or a vulgar display of virtuosity. He has a dangerous handsomeness in Henry V but also a theatrical dependence on voice alone. His face is ungiving here; it was so rarely a film face, too guarded, whereas Vivien Leigh at her best had a face that responded vividly to the camera. Sometimes it seems like there is nothing going on in his face and sometimes it looks like he is shuffling through schemes that might work or might not. The camera was like an adversary to Olivier, like a spoiler ready to expose him as a magician with an insecure hold on his effects.

He looks too old at age 40 for Hamlet, but it is an effective technical performance as a weak man, and still exciting whenever Olivier strikes a vein of quick-witted bitchery, which was one of his trump cards as a performer. He is a witty trickster with flashing eyes that could also sometimes appear hooded, and there is even an Oedipus-like shot of him in this Hamlet where it looks like he has no eyes, a nightmare image that reveals something of the way he thought about life.

His Richard III on screen was far less impressive than his George Hurstwood in Carrie, all false nose and wig and surface, and difficult to take seriously as a force of evil or vengeance. But his Archie Rice in The Entertainer (1960) was a tour-de-force with some teeth where he played a third-rate performer always “on” and always cutely looking for love, with plenty of contempt for humanity buried deep down where it could not be seen. This was a role tailor-made for Olivier to triumph in, and it is still impressive, especially in the big scene where Archie says he is “dead behind these eyes.” And Olivier could not be more expert in the 1963 film of his production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, where he somehow manages to dominate as Astrov even though Michael Redgrave has the much showier title part; he steals scenes with just his silent, sharp-witted reactions to Redgrave.

Olivier’s key mistake after that was putting so many of his National Theatre performances on film so that we could see the coarsening of his style, his increasingly outrageous hamminess and scenery chewing, his customary resorts to surfaces only, and his tendency to favor fellow actors who would be no competition to him at all. In the films of his Othello (1965) and The Merchant of Venice (1973), Olivier uninhibitedly fools around with racial and ethnic stereotypes that would be offensive if they weren’t so absurdly over-scaled. In a 1969 film of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death, Olivier keeps the clockwork of his performance going even though there seems to be nothing at all underneath it, and in Sleuth (1972) his mugging and carrying on is of the utmost vulgarity, like Rex Harrison at his worst.

There was one mercy in this period, Love Among the Ruins (1975), a sophisticated and heartfelt high romantic comedy where he restrained himself in the company of his leading lady Katharine Hepburn and his director George Cukor, who trusts his two leading players to sustain the very long takes he favored. This is a movie about love delayed and romantic hopes kept alive in old age, and Olivier must have known something about these things, for he puts them on the screen in the same anguished and precise way that had distinguished his George Hurstwood in Carrie.

After a serious illness Olivier had to retire from the stage he had conquered and preferred and emerged to take on far too much work in all manner of ludicrously trashy movies and TV that tarnished his reputation even further, but even in this period he offered two touching reflections on mortality: as Lord Marchmain, still a dandy as he dies over a long episode of Brideshead Revisited (1981), and a movingly frail King Lear (1983) for TV, where he looked up to God for guidance or relief and emphasized the way Lear becomes a kind of unreflective animal out in the wild.

So much of Olivier’s reputation is based, alas, on performances we can no longer see, not just his Oedipus Rex/The Critic double bill but what sounds like a definitive Macbeth opposite Vivien Leigh, and a physically daring Coriolanus where he made a leap off a platform to be caught by the legs in death by four nervous fellow actors. Then again, it was not wise of him to commit his Othello and his Shylock to film when the contemporary reactions to them would be far better for his reputation than the evidence we can look at today on screen.

Olivier was a giggler on stage in his youth, and prone to extreme stage fright on stage towards the end, and so acting was always an effort for him, sometimes an ordeal, an athletic event he had to stay the course for; he did often take pleasure in acting, which is part of what his theater audience enjoyed, but that pleasure is too little evident on film. Olivier rarely cared about being loved by his audience but wanted to command or dominate them, because he didn’t trust them or like them.

His tortured love affair with Vivien Leigh will always be of enduring interest when it comes to discussing his legend, and that counts for a lot when an actor is wanting to be remembered. What remains certain is that Olivier will always be a point of discussion for any serious consideration of what acting is and can be, even if in his case his legend is based on that now old-fashioned “you had to be there” for theater work that has disappeared without a trace.