Michael Billington 

Laurence Olivier: still the actor’s actor 25 years after his death

He was one of theatre’s most daring stars, whose best films bear witness to a talent many never had the chance to see on stage
  
  

Laurence Olivier
The theatre was Olivier’s natural domain in the same way that a lion belongs rightfully in the jungle. Photograph: David Farrell/Getty Images Photograph: David Farrell/Getty Images

It's a shock to realise that it is 25 years since the death of Laurence Olivier. In so many ways his legend lives on. It is there in the name of the main auditorium of a National Theatre which Olivier did so much to create. The legend also survives in the memory of veteran actors: Michael Gambon told me recently that he and Anthony Hopkins, as junior members of Olivier's first NT company, shamelessly imitated the great man. There's also a slew of books about Olivier, the latest a very good biography by Philip Ziegler.

Yet, seeing as Olivier's last stage appearance was in Trevor Griffiths's The Party in 1973, few people under 60 had the luck to see him perform live. So perhaps one needs to offer a few clues as to why he was the greatest of all actors.

Of course, one can still access his performances on film and TV. Not that I would recommend them all: I'd hate to think Olivier was judged by his Zeus in Clash of the Titans (1981) or by his overblown screen Othello (1965).

But, at their best, his screen performances reveal something of his blowtorch genius. His smouldering Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) turns a look of annihilating hate on Cathy's husband, Edgar, that no other actor could have matched. Of the three Shakespeare films he directed, I've always prized his Richard III (1955) for the way it preserves the demonic humour of a famed stage performance. But, if you really want to know why Olivier was a great actor, seek out Carrie (1952).

Not to be confused with the Brian De Palma shocker, this is a superb version of a Theodore Dreiser novel; and Olivier's performance as a wealthy restaurateur ruined by his love for a young woman is a masterly study of crushed hope and tragic decline.

But the theatre was Olivier's natural domain in the same way that a lion belongs rightfully in the jungle.

So what were the qualities that made every Olivier night an event? It's easy to pick out a chameleon quality that enabled him to switch, in the course of an evening, from Sophocles's tortured Oedipus to Sheridan's exuberant Mr Puff in The Critic.

But, for me, it was Olivier's interpretative originality that made him a great actor. He was no intellectual but he discovered in the great roles some element others had not detected: his Macbeth revealed the character's dark irony, his Coriolanus uncovered a faintly girlish shyness inside the military hero and, as Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Olivier found a sexual vanity that led him to check his appearance in the mirror before explaining deforestation to the captivating Elena.

Allied to this originality was a sense of daring. It showed itself, physically, in such feats as his famous headlong deathfall off a 12-foot-high platform in Coriolanus (Olivier was 52 at the time).

But his daring extended itself to his choice of roles. It's no accident that Olivier was the first actor of his generation to ally himself with the new movement at the Royal Court theatre in the 1950s. That resulted in one of his greatest performances as the deadbeat comic Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer: a feat of acting that combined well-pitched camp with tidal waves of emotion as Archie's private life fell apart.

The performance also had a big effect on both Olivier himself and the British stage: it released a new charge of energy in him as an actor, led to his marriage (his third) to Joan Plowright and encouraged his contemporaries, such as John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, to follow his example by embracing the revolutionary Royal Court.

That was a vital part of the Olivier legacy. Another, obviously, was his readiness, determination even, to take on the directorship of the embryonic National Theatre company at the Old Vic in 1963.

In retrospect, Olivier's 10-year tenure looks somewhat paternalistic; but it was his willingness to lead from the front, and take on board young directors such as William Gaskill and John Dexter as associates, that turned the long-cherished dream of a National Theatre into a practical reality.

Of the man himself, I'm little qualified to speak. I met him only once for a radio interview in 1982. I remember little of the content of our on-air chat. But one thing I've never forgotten is his insatiable curiosity.

We sat together for 10 minutes in the lobby of Broadcasting House waiting to be summoned and Olivier wanted to know about everything. He quizzed me about the source of a minor physical disability in our producer and his eyes fixed, to my alarm, on a slight hole in the toe of a swanky pair of espadrilles I was wearing.

There are myriad other aspects to Olivier but, if he revealed anything to me that day, it was that a microscopic attention to minutiae and a Sherlockian fascination with physical detail are part of the complex weaponry that makes a great actor.

 

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