Olivier Read online

  Philip Ziegler

  OLIVIER

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © Philip Ziegler 2013

  The moral right of Philip Ziegler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 119 6

  ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85705 120 2

  ISBN (Ebook) 978 0 85738 597 0

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  www.maclehosepress.com

  Also by Philip Ziegler

  The Duchess of Dino (1962)

  Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (1965)

  The Black Death (1969)

  King William IV (1971)

  Omdurman (1973)

  Melbourne: A Biography of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne (1976)

  Crown and People (1978)

  Diana Cooper (1981)

  Mountbatten: The Official Biography (1985)

  Elizabeth’s Britain 1926 to 1986 (1986)

  The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920–1922: Tours with the

  Prince of Wales (1987) (ed.)

  Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied

  Commander South-East Asia, 1943–1946 (1988) (ed.)

  The Sixth Great Power: Barings 1762–1929 (1988)

  From Shore to Shore – The Final Years: The Diaries of Earl Mountbatten

  of Burma, 1953–1979 (1989) (ed.)

  King Edward VIII: The Official Biography (1990)

  Brooks’s: A Social History (1991) (ed. with Desmond Seward)

  Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx (1993)

  London at War 1939–1945 (1995)

  Osbert Sitwell (1998)

  Britain Then and Now: The Francis Frith Collection (1999)

  Soldiers: Fighting Men’s Lives, 1901–2001 (2001)

  Man Of Letters: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Literary Impresario

  Rupert Hart-Davis (2005)

  Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography (2010)

  To Sophie, Colin and Toby with love

  and to Clare with love and gratitude

  “I can add colours to the chameleon;

  Change shapes with Proteus for advantages;

  And set the murderous Machiavel to school”

  “Henry VI, Part Three”

  “Rot them for a couple of rogues.

  They have everyone’s face but their own”

  THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

  on David Garrick and Samuel Foote

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  1. Beginnings

  2. Apprentice Days

  3. Breakthrough

  4. Birth of a Classical Actor

  5. Film Star

  6. War

  7. Naval Officer

  8. The Old Vic

  Illustrations Section One

  9. “Hamlet”

  10. Australasia

  11. Life Without the Old Vic

  12. Disintegration of a Marriage

  13. Stratford

  14. L.O.P.

  15. Marking Time

  16. Chichester

  17. The National: Act One

  18. The National: Act Two

  19. The National: Act Three

  Illustrations Section Two

  20. Problems

  21. Challenges

  22. Who Will Take Over?

  23. The Coming of Hall

  24. Olivier’s Occupation Gone?

  25. Old Age

  26. Death

  Biographer’s Afterword

  Note on Sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Picture Credits

  List of Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  1. Olivier in 1914

  2. Olivier’s mother, Agnes

  3. Gerard Olivier, his father

  4. As Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew”

  5. Olivier at eighteen

  6. As Uncle Vanya in 1927

  7. With Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence and Adrianne Allen in “Private Lives”

  8. Working out in 1931

  9. Arriving in New York in 1933 with Jill Esmond

  10. With John Gielgud and Edith Evans in “Romeo and Juliet”

  11. And with Peggy Ashcroft in the same production

  12. With Tarquin Olivier, his son by Jill Esmond

  13. With Cherry Cottrell in “Hamlet”

  14. As Sir Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night”

  15. As Henry V at the Old Vic

  16. As Macbeth, conceived by Michel Saint-Denis

  17. With Vivien Leigh in “Fire Over England”

  18. With Sybil Thorndike in “Coriolanus”

  19. As Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”

  20. With Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice”

  21. Planning “Rebecca” with Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Fontaine

  22. Making-up for “Lady Hamilton”

  23. Taking a break during the filming of “Henry V”

  24. The famous Saint Crispin’s Day speech from “Henry V”

  25. With Ralph Richardson in Hamburg

  26. In Vivien Leigh’s dressing room in Sydney, Australia

  27. With his first and second wives, Jill Esmond and Vivien Leigh

  28. On the set of “Hamlet” with Jean Simmons

  29. With the skull of poor Yorick

  SECTION TWO

  30. With Alec Guinness in “King Lear”

  31. With Vivien Leigh in “Caesar and Cleopatra”

  32. On horseback in “The Beggar’s Opera”

  33. Vivien Leigh and Peter Finch, her soon-to-be-lover, in 1953

  34. With Vivien Leigh in “Twelfth Night”

  35. With Vivien Leigh in “Macbeth”

  36. With Claire Bloom in “Richard III”

  37. Sitting for Salvador Dalí

  38. The Oliviers with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

  39. With Marilyn Monroe on the set of “The Sleeping Prince”

  40. With Maggie Smith in “Rhinoceros”

  41. With Joan Plowright in the film of “The Entertainer”

  42. Peter O’Toole as Hamlet in the National Theatre’s first production

  43. With Maggie Smith in “Othello”

  44. In full make-up as Othello

  45. With Denys Lasdun, the architect who designed the National Theatre

  46. As James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”

  47. With Kenneth Tynan, as imagined by cartoonist Mark Boxer

  48. With Lord Cottesloe at the National Theatre’s topping-out ceremony

  49. With Peter Hall on the Southbank site

  50. As John Tagg in “The Party”

  51. With Michael Caine in “Sleuth”

  52. With Sarah Miles in “Term of Trial”

  53. With Dustin Hoffman in “Marathon Man”

  54. With Gielgud and Richardson in a T.V. biopic of Wagner

  55. With Diana Quick in “Brideshead Revisited”

  56. With Joan Plowright

  57. On his eightieth birthday
>
  58. Olivier in 1982

  OLIVIER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beginnings

  The London theatre in the late spring of 1907 was not at its most refulgent. The dramatic big guns were conspicuously silent: there was no play by Shaw, no Ibsen, no Chekhov; not even a Pinero or a Maugham. The nearest approach to a modern play of serious import was Galsworthy’s respectable but uninspiring “The Silver Box”. Even “The Mikado” had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, who feared it might offend the visiting Japanese Crown Prince. Among the leading actors and actresses: Irving had died two years before, Ellen Terry was in New York, Viola Tree in Germany, Gerald du Maurier was to be seen, but in a play which The Times dismissed as “noisy, rackety, rubbishy tomfoolery”. Marie Tempest was the only superstar doing work which enhanced her reputation.

  But it was not just the paucity of great plays and players which menaced the London scene. There was a remoter but, viewed in the longer term, more ominous threat to the future of the theatre. By 1907 Chaplin had already made his first short silent film; D. W. Griffith had started work in Hollywood. Several London theatres were interspersing plays with films; even the Old Vic showed every Saturday night “moving landscapes and seascapes” to enraptured audiences. The first theatre entirely devoted to films, the Balham Empire, opened in the summer of 1907. Many more were planned: by 1914 there would be more than one hundred cinemas in Manchester alone. Could the traditional theatre resist this competition? Some thought not. Within twenty-five, at the most thirty years, prophesied one pessimist, there would be no live acting on the stage in London.

  Ralph Richardson had been born in 1902; John Gielgud in 1904; Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on 22 May, 1907.

  *

  There was nothing in his ancestry to suggest he would take to the stage. The Oliviers were French Huguenots who had settled in Britain early in the eighteenth century. They fitted comfortably into the minor gentry or professional classes; soldiers and clergymen predominating. Laurence Olivier’s uncles were a talented lot, among them a colonial governor, who became a lord, and a successful society portrait painter. Laurence saw little of them, however; his father, Gerard – “Fahv”, as he was usually known in the family – was far the youngest of the siblings and also the least successful. He was sent down from Oxford, got a dismally bad degree at Durham, became a preparatory schoolmaster, opened his own school, failed to make a success of it, then switched course, was ordained and in 1904 became curate at St Martin’s, Dorking. Some years before, he had married the sister-in-law of his headmaster, Agnes Crookenden, who had hoped for a life of modest comfort as a schoolmaster’s wife and instead found herself living in penury on the exiguous stipend earned by a run-of-the-mill Anglican priest.

  She accepted her fate bravely. Where her husband was strident, bad-tempered and somewhat stupid, Agnes was quiet, resolute and long-suffering. She bore without complaint the burdens that life and the Revd Mr Olivier imposed on her and settled down to give her family as comfortable and secure a life as possible. Her eldest daughter, Sybille, was born in 1901 and a son, christened Gerard after his father but for most of his life known as Dickie, followed in 1904. Laurence was therefore much younger than his siblings, unplanned and, by his father at least, unwanted. Gerard, in the opinion of his younger son at any rate, considered Laurence a bothersome addition to a family that was satisfactorily complete without him. Sybille, whose recollections of their childhood are generally somewhat rosier than those of her younger brother, confirmed that Gerard seemed resentful of Laurence’s existence. There was something about the child’s seeming stolidity and baby plumpness that drove him almost to frenzy, she remembered. If Laurence was eating too slowly or too much his father would erupt: “Baby or not, he bores me and I’ve had enough!” He would turn on the terrified child and shout: “You! Have you finished at last? Get out!”1

  It is only fair to the Revd Mr Olivier to say that Laurence, or Paddy, as he came to be called because of his explosive temper, does not seem to have been a prepossessing child. He realised that his mother would be on his side in any confrontation with his father and, according to one family friend, “learned deliberately to provoke his father’s wrath in order to produce more love and attention from his mother”. Perhaps in response to his father’s hostility he felt an urgent need to ingratiate himself with all around him. Everyone likes to be liked, but Olivier’s craving for popularity was both exaggerated and enduring. “He’s coy, he’s vain, he has tantrums, he needs to be wooed,” said his friend and admirer Elia Kazan many years later. Still more, he needed to woo. “I had by nature a very unfortunate gift of flirtatiousness,” he told Mark Amory, whose many hours of taped interviews with Olivier provide an important element of this book. He cited this as proof that he was a born actor: so he was, but it is equally possible to see it as a defence mechanism, strengthened if not created by the realisation that he was being rejected by the one man from whom he had the right to expect support.2

  He had other traits which gave his father reason to disapprove of if not dislike him, as he admitted in his autobiography. As a child, he was a compulsive liar. To conceal the truth was almost an automatic reflex. Once he touched the scorchingly hot handle of the bread-making machine, causing the dough to sink and burning himself severely. He must have known that, if he had explained what had happened, he would have received sympathy for the pain he was suffering rather than a scolding; nevertheless he clung to his story that he had never touched the machine and tried to conceal his burn. He never hesitated to lie if he thought it would bring him some advantage and showed considerable skill in practising his mendacity. He found it easy to convince his nursery schoolmistress that his presence was needed at home and that therefore he must leave early.3

  The habit of lying he shed quickly, though throughout his life he allowed himself to embroider the truth with picturesque but invented detail. The temper which had earned him his nickname, however, stayed with him all his life. His roar, “reminiscent of a Bull of Bashan”, which his sister remembered from his infancy, was to reverberate for seventy years or more. His explosions were all the more terrifying for being unpredictable. Once, dining with the actor Laurence Harvey, he had been notably dulcet throughout the evening. Then Harvey ridiculed in turn Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Paul Scofield. Olivier erupted, “How dare you! Call yourself an actor? You’re not even a bad actor. You can’t act at all, you fucking, stupid, hopeless, snivelling little cunt-faced arsehole!” He then stormed out: it was as true to his character that next day he repented and sent Harvey a bouquet of twenty-four red roses.4

  There were other, more estimable traits that were evident in his infancy. If he started on some enterprise he would not stop, he would plug away at a childish puzzle until he had resolved it – even though it was in theory intended for someone of twice his age. Nothing would deter him. It was said that Edmund Kean, opening in the first night of “The Merchant of Venice” in the early nineteenth century, found himself the wrong side of the Thames without the money for the toll and swam the river so as to get to the theatre in time. “Even if he didn’t do it I’m sure, if it had been necessary, he would have done,” wrote Olivier approvingly. “As, indeed, I would. Determination.” “He was the most disciplined man I’ve ever met,” said the director Franco Zeffirelli. “His discipline is the first secret of his success … Steel discipline, and merciless with himself and others – no excuses, no weakness.” Translate this to life in the nursery, allow for a few childish tantrums, and the picture emerges of an alarmingly resolute child, one who might take some time to decide upon his course of action but who, once committed, could only with the greatest difficulty be diverted. Looked at another way, of course, tenacity became obstinacy. He could be infuriating, his sister remembered: “he had a habit of saying ‘No’ slowly and loudly and, however much one might coax or threaten, he remained unshakeable.” The Olivier “No”, final and unchallengeable, would break the nerve of many an actor o
r director before his career was done.5

  *

  His mother, who seems to have been in charge of his early education, was determined that he should go to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street. All Saints was an Anglican church so high as to seem to its more austere neighbours dangerously tainted with the odour of Rome. It had one of the best, if not the best choir in London and this, coupled with the excellent reputation of the schooling, meant that there was stiff competition for places. Olivier’s brother was already there, and for two years Mrs Olivier battled to secure a place for her younger son. In the meantime the boy was subjected to a series of indifferent preparatory schools – an experience which he much disliked. The first was a boarding school in Blackheath, predominantly for girls, to which Olivier was despatched at the age of six. He was so miserable that a kindly aunt who lived nearby had to be persuaded by the school to take him in “in case my perpetual crying should do me an injury”. The tears were certainly genuine: no doubt, too, they were enhanced by that instinct towards the histrionic which so often led Olivier to turn into a performance something which otherwise might have been un-excitingly run of the mill.6

  Finally, in 1916, at the age of nine, he was admitted to the All Saints choir school. It was soon evident that he was not going to shine as a scholar: “Handwriting poor. Spelling careless. Composition slovenly. Arithmetic disgraceful,” was the harsh judgment at the end of one of his earlier terms. Things improved, but not to any great extent; the fact was that the work did not interest him and he was therefore not disposed to take much trouble over it. The same was not true of games, where he longed to excel but lacked the talent. He was “totally inept”, wrote his brother with some brutality: “Even at the tender age of twelve I had protective qualms about him coming to the school. Not only qualms on his behalf, but on my own, since I didn’t fancy being embarrassed by a younger brother who didn’t fit in.”7

  Where he did fit in was in the choir. Not everyone agreed. “Larry hath an ugly voice,” lisped the organist. “Enormouth, yeth, my goodness yeth. But Dickie ith the really muthical one.” Others were less censorious. “He has a fine voice and much ability,” was the more usual verdict, and though he rarely featured as a soloist he was one of the elite who were regularly considered for the role. He had become used to ceremony in his father’s church and relished the smells, bells and rich flummery at All Saints. At home, he and his brother had used to drape eiderdowns around themselves and indulge in orgies of bowing and intoning; he would have liked to do the same things at All Saints but made do with watching others perform the rituals. The music, too, he found fulfilling. The musical education was as ambitious and as rigorous as any in the country and Olivier acquired a knowledge of religious music which enriched his life. The aura of sanctity hung over All Saints. If Olivier, at this point of his life, had been asked what he proposed to do when his education was behind him he would almost certainly have replied that he intended to become a priest. He would have taken it for granted that his father held the same view. If anything this would have been a disincentive, but Olivier was not so perverse that he would have gone against his own strong inclinations just for the satisfaction of frustrating his father.8