Olivier Read online

  But the choir school made a still more significant contribution to Olivier’s future. The vicar of All Saints, Father Henry Mackay, was an energetic theatregoer and he had recruited as a master Father Geoffrey Heald. Heald was an amateur actor of distinction, both he and Mackay had friends in the theatre world, and the result was that All Saints enjoyed a reputation for its acting far beyond that of most comparable schools. Heald identified Olivier as being a boy with both potential as an actor and an eagerness to perform, and Olivier responded to his encouragement with rapturous enthusiasm. “I had complete faith in this man,” Olivier said many years later. “I was devoted to him, and I think he was very fond of me.” Too fond, in the opinion of one of Olivier’s biographers, Michael Munn, who suggested that Heald had physically molested his young pupil and left a permanent psychological scar. There is no evidence to support this and Olivier’s words suggest the contrary. Far from pursuing small boys it seems that Heald’s tastes were robustly heterosexual. He made something of a fool of himself a few years later when he fell in love with the actress Edna Best, star of the successful “The Constant Nymph”, and pursued her with conspicuous but unrequited zest.9

  Heald gave Olivier his first chance to shine on the stage when he produced “Julius Caesar” at the end of 1917. Olivier, who was only in his second year, was originally assigned the humble part of First Citizen but, in a general shuffle, was recast in the more important role of Brutus. Few twelve-year-old boys can have been more acclaimed on their debut. As usual, the school had drawn a distinguished audience. The Duke of Newcastle, a prominent benefactor of All Saints, presented Olivier with a copy of “Julius Caesar” taken from his own library and inscribed “As a souvenir of the splendid performance”. Johnston Forbes-Robertson, renowned actor-manager and the foremost Hamlet of his generation, wrote to Heald praising Olivier’s “pathetic air of fatalism which was poignantly suggestive – remarkable in one so young”. Most striking of all, Ellen Terry – in most people’s view the leading actress of the age – noted in her diary that the boy who had played Brutus was “already a great actor”. A year later she was still remembering his “wonderful” performance.10

  More successful still was Olivier’s last appearance at All Saints, as Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew”. The role of the heroine in this detestable play is one of the most difficult in the Shakespearean repertoire. Olivier handled it with astonishing aplomb. Ellen Terry was there again and wrote that she had “never seen the part played as well by any woman”, while the enormously influential Russian director Theodore Komisarjevsky – surely a most improbable spectator at a schoolboy performance in London? – praised “the sincerity, the seriousness and the simplicity of the acting” and in particular acclaimed the “especially impressive Katherina”. He was “wonderful – a bad-tempered little bitch,” remembered Sybil Thorndike, who was then in the early stages of her resplendent theatrical career, “and he looked just like his mother in the part – gypsy-like”. Sybille too remarked how closely he modelled Katherina on their mother – not in personality, because there had been nothing shrewish about Agnes Olivier, but in her manner of speech and her movements. Their father came to one of the performances, “and he had to get up and leave, so shaken was he to see Larry re-creating Mother down to the last detail”.11

  It was re-creation because, after a brief illness, Agnes Olivier had died in 1920. For any twelve-year-old boy the death of a mother must be a fearful blow; for Olivier, frightened and remote from his father and, as a result, cherished with particular determination by the warm-hearted and affectionate Agnes, it seemed that his world had been obliterated. He was given the news by Father Heald, wept briefly, then remained dry-eyed. Throughout his life he was given to extravagant displays of grief or joy; this was one of the few occasions in which he did not externalise his emotions. “I’ve been looking for her ever since,” he remembered many years later. “I can’t think I’ve ever loved anybody quite as much … My mother was my life really, she was my entire world.” Olivier believed that, dreadful though it was, the experience fortified him for the future; others might feel that it extinguished in him the capacity for unequivocal love, the lack of which impoverished his emotional existence. The biographer is well advised to avoid glib psychological pronouncements, but it is difficult not to feel that the loss of his mother when he was at his most vulnerable did do him lasting damage. His personal loss may, of course, have been the world’s gain. The deprivation which he endured may in itself have been an important factor in shaping the personality of that most complete of actors.12

  He was sustained by the support of his brother and sister. Fifty years later he was to reproach his own children for their perpetual bickering. “It’s so hard for me to understand you three,” he said. “My family was the happiest family ever in the world. We all absolutely adored and worshipped each other.” Things can hardly have been as rapturous as that, but Sybille and Dickie stood by their younger brother and restored to him some of the sense of intimacy and belonging of which his mother’s death had deprived him. Sybille in particular assumed many of the responsibilities of a mother. Agnes Olivier’s last words had been “Be kind to Larry”. Her husband paid them scant attention; Sybille took them to heart and did her best to obey them.13

  *

  By now Olivier’s time at All Saints was almost finished. “His work has improved and he is taking more pains,” the report for the Lent term 1921 noted approvingly. He had been made a monitor, “which will, I hope, help to develop a stronger sense of responsibility”. Evidently it did. “A most satisfactory term,” recorded his final report. “He has proved quite efficient as a monitor and has developed considerably. He is a very nice boy and we shall miss him greatly.” The boys were not all as enthusiastic. “He was not altogether a nice boy …” one contemporary remembered, “a bit of a bully.” “No-one could trust him to be constant,” another complained. “He would be your great pal one day, and then turn round and try to humiliate you the next.” Physically, he had a long way to go. “He was thin and bony with knobbly matchsticks for legs,” remembered one boy of his generation. His hair grew low out of his forehead which, combined with his thick eyebrows, “gave him a decidedly mole-like appearance”. Such photographs of him as survive are less unflattering: he seems an obviously good-looking child. But he was naturally ungainly: when he played games he was “as awkward as a cow trying to balance on a wire”, the future actor Laurence Naismith remembered. Olivier himself was dissatisfied by his appearance and uneasy about his standing with the other boys. He was inclined to slink furtively around the edge of groups, reluctant to draw attention to himself yet wishing to be close to the heart of things.14

  On the whole, though, he had enjoyed his time at All Saints. His elder brother had moved on to Rugby and it had been his mother’s hope that Larry would follow him. Perhaps, if she had lived, he would have done so – her small private income made a substantial contribution to the family’s financial situation – but left to himself the Revd Gerard concluded that he could not afford it. Instead he settled for St Edward’s, Oxford, a school which admitted clergymen’s sons at a preferential rate of £60 a year and, as a result, boasted a disproportionate number of clerical offspring among its 230 pupils. The high moral tone which one might have hoped this would produce was sadly lacking: all minor public schools have their ups and downs and St Edward’s in 1921 was badly down. Kenneth Grahame, author of The Wind in the Willows, was one of the few old boys of distinction. No dispassionate observer surveying the school at that period would have been likely to predict that many of the current vintage would join him in the halls of fame. In fact, as well as Olivier, the school boasted the future fighter-pilot hero Douglas Bader. Bader, who was two years younger, was imprudent enough to push Olivier under the water in the school swimming pool. Olivier complained to the President of his form room that Bader had been “intolerably saucy”. Bader was beaten and Olivier was allowed to administer two of the strokes. �
��I simply loathed myself,” he remembered. “I didn’t hurt him at all, of course; he just got up, grinned and left.” Bader bore no grudge but soon afterwards got his own back by bowling Olivier for a duck in a match where four runs were needed for victory and the last man was in. It was an incident typical of an undistinguished athletic career. Olivier longed to be good at cricket, but never rose above the Fifth XI. In his last year he took to rowing, but had left it too late to make any real mark. “I wish to God that I’d been a wet bob. I adored it,” he maintained, but though his eldest son was one day to be successful as an oarsman it does not seem likely that Olivier’s own failure to take it up deprived British rowing of any significant talent.15

  Under an incompetent headmaster, discipline at St Edward’s had been neglected and the boys, in effect, were left to their own devices. Those devices were often mischievous. “It was a terrible school,” recalled a contemporary of Olivier’s whose father had been a master there. “The boys ran the school and it was quite horrific.” The Rugby of Tom Brown’s School Days may have been a little turbulent, but, at least in Olivier’s view, it was a proper public school. At St Edward’s: “I felt unhappy and awkward and misplaced … I hated it all the time.” He convinced himself that he was disliked by the other boys and, by behaving as if he were, succeeded at least in part in making it true. Probably he exaggerated his misery. In Bader’s view he was not in the least un-popular: “He was perhaps introspective, lived within himself, and he had the sort of artistic make-up that might have made him think he was unpopular.” In his own eyes, however, his period at St Edward’s was both unpleasant and a waste of time. The sooner he could escape from it the better.16

  In fact the schooling cannot have been as bad as all that. It was at St Edward’s that Olivier learned the value and satisfaction of hard work. “A man’s prime interest in life must be his work,” he told his first wife many years later. He did not find the work at St Edward’s congenial, nor was he well suited to it, but he buckled down. He was not a notably clever boy but was endowed by nature with an extraordinarily retentive memory which, for a schoolboy faced with examinations, is quite as valuable as intellectual powers. To his mild surprise he won the Senior History Prize and was rewarded with a handsome copy of Kipling’s Kim; nothing sensational as academic achievements go but proving that he could more than hold his own.17

  It was curious that he tried to avoid featuring in the one field in which he felt confident he could excel. When it was suggested that he might act in the school play, he refused. He believed it would make him still more unpopular; already, he complained, he was known as “that sidey little shit Olivier”; if he seized the limelight on the stage his reputation would be still worse. This may not have been the whole story: the master in charge of the school plays had taken against him and it seems that the antipathy was mutual. Whatever the explanation, his resistance was overcome. He agreed that he would act in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and was assigned the role of Puck. It was typical of him that, having finally accepted that he must play, he at once began to deplore the inadequacy of his role. “This dismally wretched part, this utterly hopeless, so-called opportunity,” he stormed. It was as typical that he resolved to make something special of it. He flung himself into the role and, in a way that was going to become maddeningly familiar to fellow performers over the next sixty years, attracted attention far greater than his part would have been expected to command. “By far the most notable performance,” judged the school magazine. “He seemed to put more ‘go’ into it than the others.” “He was the only one in the cast who was really exciting – a born actor,” a fellow schoolboy recalled. Contrary to his fears his success earned him popularity; his last months at St Edward’s were relatively happy.18

  They had need to be, for his life at home, such as it was, was fast disintegrating. His sister Sybille had gone on the stage. It soon became clear that her talents were limited and that she would never make a successful actress. Her father deplored her failure and was still more disapproving when, without his blessing, she married a man whom he felt unsuitable. Laurence Olivier became involved in her disgrace; his father discovered that he had known of the affair, but had failed to report it. Dickie was not there to share the blame since he had left home to plant tea in India. To cap it all, the Revd Gerard remarried. “I didn’t feel sore on my mother’s behalf,” Olivier recalled many years later, “because I knew my mother was saint enough to wish him to be happy. He was very miserable and dreadfully lonely.” It seems that at the time Olivier was rather less accepting. Sybille wrote that her brother resented the affection that their father lavished on his new wife. “Really, the old man is impossible,” Olivier would grumble. “Why can’t he think of our feelings sometimes?” Fortunately his new stepmother, Isabel or “Ibo” as she was generally known, was a woman of generosity and perception who understood Olivier’s feelings and sympathised with them. Thanks to her, the atmosphere at home was not insufferable, but Olivier was still anxious to escape from it as soon as possible. He was now seventeen. It was time to decide the pattern of his future life.19

  Up till then he had assumed, without thinking very much about it, that he would follow his father into the church. He was still a firm believer and attached great importance to regular attendance, but he had by now concluded that he did not have a sufficiently strong vocation to take the plunge. In one account of his feelings at the time he says that he contemplated following his brother to India; elsewhere, he says that he considered the possibility of an Asian exile but rejected it. Whichever may have been true, it seems to have come as a complete surprise to him when one evening the question of his future life came up and he mentioned the possibility of a career abroad. “Don’t be such a fool,” said his father: “You’re going on the stage!” “Am I?” stammered Olivier. “Well, of course you are.”20

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  His father had decided not only on Olivier’s career, but also on how he was to equip himself for it. Olivier was to go to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, an institution where his sister Sybille had studied some years before and which was run by a formidable lady called Elsie Fogerty. There was a snag, however. No money was available to cover the cost of his tuition. Olivier would have to secure not only a scholarship but an additional bursary as well, so as to pay for his upkeep. He trailed off to the Albert Hall where Miss Fogerty was selecting her future scholars. In the innumerable auditions that he was to endure through his acting life Olivier almost always chose Mark Antony’s speech over the corpse of Julius Caesar, but for this first effort he offered Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” from “As You Like It”. He rendered this with immense fervour and much gesticulation – too much so in Miss Fogerty’s view. It was not necessary, she observed, to make fencing passes when delivering the words “sudden and quick in quarrel”. Nevertheless she liked what she heard: the scholarship was Olivier’s and, after some debate, an additional bursary was thrown in as well.21

  The emphasis in the Central School was much more on Speech Training than Dramatic Art. Peggy Ashcroft, who joined the same term as Olivier (rarely can any drama school have welcomed two such talented recruits at the same time), went so far as to say that the teaching of acting was virtually non-existent. So far as speech went, however, Miss Fogerty’s training proved invaluable. It provided the foundation for a lifetime’s achievement. Olivier throughout his career was famed for his breath control. “Larry has a longer breath than anybody I know,” said Sybil Thorndike. “He could do the Matins exhortation ‘Dearly Beloved Brethren’ twice through in one breath. Lewis [her husband, Sir Lewis Casson] could do it in one and a half.” To be able fully to control one’s voice is not necessarily the most important element in acting, but without it all the other elements will be irreparably diminished. Olivier’s powers were phenomenal. His ability was innate, but it was Miss Fogerty’s early training which developed it.22

  Not everyone was as perceptive as Miss Fogerty. On
e teacher is said to have written to Olivier’s father urging him to withdraw his son: “He’s no good. He looks like a farm boy.” His appearance, indeed, still verged on the uncouth. His hair grew down to his brow, he had buck teeth. Miss Fogerty disconcerted him by putting the tip of her finger at the base of his hairline and running it down to the top of his nose. “You have a weakness here,” she pronounced. Olivier attributes to this gnomic utterance his passion for disguise: for many years at least, he was ill at ease with his own appearance and sought to conceal it with false noses or other such devices.23

  Uncouth or not, his talent was obvious. Together with Peggy Ashcroft he won the gold medal for best actor of the year. They performed a scene from “The Merchant of Venice” for the benefit of Athene Seyler, the celebrity imported for the occasion to award the prizes. According to Olivier, Ashcroft played Portia. Miss Seyler remembered it rather differently. Olivier was growing a beard for the part of Shylock “and Peggy, who was also playing a man, put on a false beard – so these two young people both looked idiotic. I couldn’t tell, of course, how good they were.” At all events, Olivier graduated with a First Class Dramatic Certificate adorned by a star. It was a satisfactory end to his education. Now it remained to put that education to good use. He had no doubts or inhibitions. Whether or not he had been taken by surprise by his father’s announcement that he was to go on the stage, he had, he told Peter Hall many years later, wanted to be an actor from the age of nine. Now the dream had become reality. From that moment his ambitions were boundless. “Don’t you realise?” he blurted out to a friend. “I want to be the greatest actor in the world.”24