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  CHAPTER TWO

  Apprentice Days

  In 1977 Olivier received a letter from an American admirer asking for advice on how to become an actor. Before going any further, he replied, “please enquire the employment rate against total membership of Equity in your country. In my country it is about 2 per cent, or 800 out of 25,000.” With gloomy relish he passed on the same message to any of his children who contemplated taking to the stage: going on to say that even of those who got a job only a handful could make a decent living from their activities.1

  His own career was very different, but even he had some tough years at the start. He had been lucky enough to find employment of a sort during the holidays from the Central School at a playhouse in Letch-worth Garden City. Most of his work was behind the scenes as second assistant stage manager – when you hear the bell ring at the end of the interval, he proudly told the family’s old cook, “you will know, my finger will be on it!” In his second spell at Letchworth he did manage to sneak onto the stage in the inconsiderable role of Lennox in “Macbeth”, but though he extolled the significance of this experience when he began to haunt the offices of theatrical agents, it did not seem unduly to impress potential employers. Olivier recalled those first two years with horror, blended with profound relief that they were well behind him: “They were awful, awful, awful,” he remembered, and he was “hungry, hungry, hungry, a glass of milk for lunch, sandwich at a coffee stall for dinner”. His father rather grudgingly allowed him a few pounds a week, so starvation was averted, but at times even his ebullient self-confidence burned low. His first job as a fully-fledged professional was at the Brighton Hippodrome in the summer of 1925. Suffused by the excitement of the occasion he ignored the warnings of stage hands and fellow actors that he should take great care when emerging from the wings, strode onto the stage, tripped over the concealed sill and fell flat on his face. He prided himself on being able to exploit any situation for as much humour as it could contain, but never, he recorded, “have I heard a sound so explosively loud as the joyous clamour made by that audience”.2

  A few months later Olivier secured a job playing small parts in a touring company called the Lena Ashwell Players. They tended to end up in dismal venues around the outer London suburbs, sometimes performing in boarded-over swimming pools and changing in the lavatories, but Miss Ashwell took her work with great seriousness. Unfortunately Olivier did not or rather, though he pursued his career with dedication, he had a strong inclination to clown. Throughout his life he found almost irresistible the impulse to raise a laugh. With experience he learned to indulge this weakness only when no mischief would thereby be done; in his early days on the stage he felt no such inhibitions. After all, he told himself, Edmund Kean when young had been notorious for his delight in tripping up his fellow actors; what was good enough for Kean was good enough for Olivier. Alan Webb, a fellow sufferer in the company, remembered saying to him one night: “Larry, if you don’t take your work more seriously, you’ll never get on.” He never took his work lightly, but it was fun to play the fool. He cut a hole in the back-cloth so as to expose the naked bottoms of the female members of the cast changing behind the scenes; helpless with laughter, he abandoned one of his colleagues on the stage when the actor’s underpants fell down beneath his toga. Twenty years later, his wrath would have been terrible if some small-part actor at the Old Vic had behaved so irresponsibly; in 1925 he felt aggrieved when Miss Ashwell expelled him from her company.3

  Once again he was looking for a job. He was offered the chance of joining a Shakespearean company touring the provinces, run by a “well-known queer”. Though in later life he was considered by some to be first and foremost a Shakespearean actor, at the time he felt no particular calling in that direction: “I just wanted to get on and I didn’t care what in.” He had no objection to the idea, however, and the sexual proclivities of the director mattered nothing to him. He had no urge to indulge in homosexuality himself, but he never saw anything reprehensible in the practice and was always ready to work with those who had other tastes. He consulted Lewis Casson about the proposition. Whether it was Shakespeare, the provinces or the queerness which displeased him, Casson dismissed the idea out of hand. “I think you’d better come to us,” he said.4

  “Us” was a company run by Casson and Sybil Thorndike which the previous year had enjoyed a triumph with Thorndike’s rendering of Shaw’s “Saint Joan”. It was a splendid opportunity, and Olivier seized it with gratitude and alacrity. He played no role of any importance while he was with the company, indeed, he was involved as much in stage management as in acting, but he was associating with actors of the first rank and learning all the time. One of his two roles was that of a serving man in “Henry VIII”. Together with Carol Reed, the future film director, he had to hold up the train of Queen Katharine, played by Sybil Thorndike. Both men were in love with the already successful actress Angela Baddeley and their devotion sometimes interfered with their performance. “Calf love,” wrote Thorndike dismissively. “They used to quarrel like mad. I used to say: ‘You shut up, you two, and attend to what you’re doing.’ ” But she was struck by Olivier’s abilities and was convinced that he had a considerable future. It was the quality and range of his voice that most impressed her: “Larry didn’t have any formal musical education, but his family background was musical, and that must have helped.”5

  The Cassons knew that there was not much opportunity for Olivier to forward his career within their company and they encouraged him to look elsewhere. In particular they urged him to try his luck with the Birmingham Repertory Company. This was the leading provincial theatre of the country. It was run by Barry Jackson, a rich man, devoted to the theatre, adventurous in his tastes, ready to put on plays by Pirandello and Ibsen at a time when such dramatists were viewed nervously by London managements. Jackson had fostered the careers of Cedric Hardwicke, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Felix Aylmer, Leslie Banks; it was, said Bernard Shaw, “a place where all genuine artists have found themselves happily at home”. Olivier knew that to secure a job there would be an important step forward in his career. On 8 March, 1926, shortly after the closing of “Henry VIII”, he secured an interview with Jackson. It went well. He was not immediately offered a permanent place at Birmingham but was invited to play a small but significant role in a play by the fashionable French dramatist, Henri Ghéon. His foot was in the door.6

  *

  The two years or so that Olivier spent with the Birmingham Rep. changed the whole course of his career and, more immediately evident, his physical appearance. Olivier had gone to Birmingham as a gangling young man, almost uncouth, with too much hair in the wrong place and spindly, inadequate legs. “My mouth is like a tortoise’s arse,” he once complained. “It’s an absolute slit. I have a very, very mean mouth.” He exaggerated his physical deficiencies, if only to point up the improvement that he had later brought about, but in 1926 he had a long way to go. One of his closest friends was Denys Blakelock, whose mother once referred to the young Olivier as “very plain”. She was right, commented Blakelock, “he had teeth that were set too far apart and eyebrows that grew thickly and without shape across his nose. He had a thatch of unmanageable hair that came far forward in a kind of widow’s peak, and his nose was a broad one.” Not much could be done about the shape of the nose and the mouth but the hair was refashioned and, at some expense and with a lot of pain, the teeth were fixed. No longer would a director say that his hair made him look “bad-tempered, almost Neanderthal”; by the time he left Birmingham it had been groomed into the glossy splendour that was to be the delight of several generations of worshippers. More significantly, and with far greater effort, he recreated his body. By a gruelling programme of exercises, much long-distance running and rigid dieting, he built up his strength and acquired the muscular arms and legs for which he was striving. He never wholly satisfied himself. “He always said his legs were a problem,” remarked his dresser many years later. “I thought they we
re very good legs, a bit on the thin side but well shaped.” Olivier would have accepted that they were better than they used to be, but that was not enough. William Gaskill, the director, said he had never met an actor so concerned about his physical appearance. No man so obsessed with his own appearance can be acquitted on a charge of vanity, but Olivier was not seeking beauty just for beauty’s sake. If he was going to be the greatest actor in the world then everything must be subordinated to that quest: perfection was the aim and the perfecting of his appearance was an essential element in the crusade.7

  It was while he was at Birmingham that any last doubts about his destined career were put to rest. He suspected already that it was only in acting that he would find complete fulfilment, but the fact remained that he had been offered few opportunities to show off his talents and that such success as he had achieved had been in the role of stage manager. He enjoyed that work and took pride in doing it well. Was it possible, he wondered, that this was to be his destiny? “It staggers me a little,” he wrote in his autobiography, “that I could ever have nursed such thoughts.” They were soon put behind him. It took only a handful of performances with the Birmingham Rep. to convince him that there could be no second best; he must be an actor, nothing else would be acceptable. Quite why he felt so certain he never knew. Something irresistible was driving him forward. “I’ve got an awful feeling,” he confessed, “that that thing is a little voice saying ‘Look at me! Look at me! Don’t look at anybody else, look at me!’ ”8

  It was a perceptive and revealing comment. A craving to be at the centre of attention was indeed a prominent element in Olivier’s personality. But this was not the whole story. He wanted to be admired in the part he was playing, not for being Laurence Olivier. Some actors, whatever their role, remain always themselves. Olivier longed never to be himself. “I had a silly little ambition when I was at the Birmingham Rep. not to be recognisable from one part to another, either in looks, voice, walk, behaviour, anything.” He wanted people to say: “That can’t be the young man we saw last night.” He would not admit that there was any part he could not play yet did not want there to be any one part for which he was obviously destined. He disliked being compared with other actors, however flattering the analogy. When he was young he had kept a photograph of Henry Irving in his bedroom: admiring not so much Irving’s acting as the way that he had become the figurehead of his profession and had enhanced the standing of the theatre in British life. But he did not wish to be compared with Irving. He was irritated when he heard a fellow actor’s rendering of Lear praised by a gushing admirer, “You were just like the Old Man” – as Irving was known to his fans. “I came to a decision. I vowed to eradicate all knowledge of the Old Man from the public’s memory for ever. I was determined to become the Old Man myself.” But he did not suppose that this would come easily. Work, more work, and yet more work, would be essential. He compared himself with Margaret Leighton. “She does everything quite naturally. It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh on stage – and I had to learn everything. What to do with my hands, how to cry …” By the time he went to Birmingham he had already learned a lot; into the next two years he crowded what, for most people, would have been the experience of a lifetime.9

  *

  It was an indication of the Birmingham Rep.’s importance to the British theatre that both Peggy Ashcroft and Ralph Richardson were there at the same time as Olivier. Richardson was some five years older than Olivier and felt himself immeasurably superior; he considered Olivier gauche, cocky and inclined to overrate his talents. Olivier for his part thought Richardson ponderous and smug. For several months they coexisted frostily, then came the thaw. It was mainly Olivier’s doing. Once he had decided that he wanted to be friendly with somebody he was difficult to resist. He was most excellent company; an accomplished raconteur, a brilliant mimic, not a sophisticated wit like Noël Coward but bursting with exuberant vitality. He was the greatest fun to be with. He was at his happiest when holding the floor but was wise enough to realise that, if one wanted to retain an audience, one had to be prepared to listen too. The fact that he was absorbed by his own activities did not prevent him being fascinated by other people and their preoccupations. He wanted to know how the men and women he met in his daily life had got where they were and in what direction they were hoping to progress. In a way they were all raw material on which he would draw for his own performances, but he was curious about them for their own sake too. Once he spent more than twenty minutes in the cloakroom of the Savoy. His surprised companion asked what he had been doing. He had, said Olivier, discovered that the attendant was a Hungarian refugee and had been talking to him about the problems involved in a life of exile.

  Once the ice was broken between Olivier and Richardson they became the closest of friends. Richardson, said his biographer, found Olivier “warm and affectionate, a wonderful companion, blessed with a gaiety of heart”. “I have never ceased to laugh my head off with him,” Richardson himself remarked. Their mutual affection endured: “It was heart-warming to see Ralph so content in your company,” wrote Richardson’s wife, Meriel Forbes, after the two men had spent an evening together some time in the late 1970s. Olivier, who searched always for an affectionate diminutive, called Richardson “Ralphie”; Richardson, who deplored informality, was one of the few people to address Olivier as “Laurence”; the two men were admirably matched. There was mutual admiration, too. “Larry had a lot of time for Ralphie,” wrote Olivier’s occasional mistress, Sarah Miles. “I had the impression he respected him more than any other actor.” It was said that Olivier begrudged giving praise to anyone whom he deemed a serious rival. There are many instances to the contrary. Of Richardson in particular Olivier said that he was “marvellous … . He was a thoroughly excellent actor, exemplary to other actors. We all used to worship at his shrine.” Of “Henry IV” Olivier wrote that he was thrilled by “Ralphie’s really heavenly and superb performance. This is the Falstaff that I have always dreamed about.” Over the years there were plenty of less laudatory comments as well, but that Olivier rated Richardson high in the pantheon of twentieth-century acting cannot be questioned.10

  Richardson was not the only member of the Birmingham Rep. to take immediate exception to Olivier. Eileen Beldon, six years older than Olivier and reasonably well established, found him “obnoxious. He was slovenly and high falutin’. Of course I realise now,” she added forgivingly, “that he was just a young boy trying to prove himself.” Most of the other women in the company seem to have found his failings endearing rather than repulsive. Another actress, Jane Welsh, concluded that he was “an astonishing mix of boy and man. Many of us wanted to both love him and mother him.” He was brash, he was noisy, he was patently ambitious, he could be alarmingly insensitive, but there was no malice in him and his eagerness to please and to make friends with all the world was disarmingly evident to all except the most embittered.11

  However great his ambitions, he was still insignificant. In the programme for the first production in which he appeared under the flag of the Birmingham Rep. “Olivier” is spelt incorrectly – a bit better than in his first appearance in Brighton, where he featured as “Lawrence Oliver”, but still not suggesting he was a household name. The play was “The Marvellous History of Saint Bernard”. He somewhat euphemistically described his role in it as “small but fairly telling”. It was certainly small. Nor did the play’s course run smooth. His diary entry for 3 May, 1926, read “STRIKE ??!” The General Strike closed the theatres. Olivier put on his most country-gentleman plus-fours and sallied out to do his bit. “The luck of it!” he observed. “The show shuts with a bang and I have a gorgeous time helping run Underground trains … and the loveliest debs in all London giving you food at the canteens. Then, just when I’ve had everything possible out of banging doors on trains … the strike ends, the show goes on again, and back I go fresh as a daisy!” On the whole those in the
theatrical world tend to be at least mildly left-wing in their political views. In his autobiography Olivier mentioned that he was frequently told he had backed the wrong side in the General Strike; he should have been supporting the workers, not helping to break their strike. No doubt he listened with courtesy to such comments and may even have given the impression that he accepted the opinion of his critics: he took little interest in politics and was always anxious to fit in with whatever company he was keeping. But by nature he was conservative. In a letter addressed to “Comrade Laurenski”, Ralph Richardson’s wife told Olivier: “Nothing that you can say can convince Ralphie that you are other than A TRUE BLUE CAPITALIST who will fight with him to the last Bentley.” Ralphie was right. Olivier voted Tory in 1945, the one election when many committed Conservatives strayed to the Left. In 1926 it never occurred to him not to identify himself with the traditional ruling classes and do what he could to keep the country running.12