Olivier Read online

  The contrast between the two men was indeed striking. Olivier was power, passion, animal magnetism; Gielgud precise, exquisite, melodious. It was the difference between Nature and Art, Kenneth Tynan suggested; between burgundy and claret, Alan Dent more prosaically suggested. Gielgud, three years older, was better established on the London stage and was shortly to try his hand as an actor-manager; Olivier had stolen a march by venturing into film. Apart from Richardson there were not many other giants in their age group. Frederick Valk and Ronald Colman belonged to an earlier generation, Emlyn Williams possessed a considerable talent, but he was somehow never in the mainstream, Alec Guinness was still barely visible. Donald Wolfit and perhaps Charles Laughton were the only figures considerable enough to challenge the big three. Wolfit could produce performances of real majesty – most notably as Lear – but surrounded himself with a team who were too often not even second rate. Olivier’s Othello was a tour de force, went Hermione Gingold’s unkindly quip, Wolfit’s a forced-to-tour. Olivier disliked him: “He had extraordinary guts,” he admitted, “and at the height of his career he had a tremendously gutsy voice,” but he was selfish, arrogant and bad mannered: “We all thought he was awful.” When Wolfit was put up for the Garrick Club during the war, Olivier stopped short of blackballing him, but he did his best to thwart his entry; “standards had slipped”, however, and Wolfit was elected.19

  Olivier himself became a member of the Garrick early in 1936. He was, he thought, the youngest member at the time and he was very conscious of the distinction: “I was thrilled to bits.” He deplored the prejudice of those members who blackballed Noël Coward – “stupid clots, hidebound, absolutely immovable anti-homosexuals” – but did not contemplate resignation in protest. To be a member of the Garrick was a necessary part of belonging to the theatrical establishment. Being a member of the establishment – theatrical or not – mattered to Olivier. He was not clubbable by nature, but at times he belonged also to The Players in New York, Boodle’s, Buck’s, the Beefsteak and the R.A.C. Membership was a visible sign of his eminence in his profession. He would have been inordinately grateful if he had known that James Agate, perhaps the leading critic of the day, when asked who were the contemporary equivalents of the Irvings and Ellen Terry, had answered that they were John Gielgud and Edith Evans, “with a reservation in favour of Laurence Olivier as the most promising young actor”.20

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Birth of a Classical Actor

  It was Gielgud who now propelled his rival into the next stage of his career. He conceived the idea of producing “Romeo and Juliet”, alternating the roles of Romeo and Mercutio between himself and some other actor. His first choice for a partner had been Robert Donat, who was unwilling or unavailable. He then tried Olivier, who at first said he planned to put on the play himself with Jill Esmond as Juliet but changed his mind when he heard that Gielgud had signed up Peggy Ashcroft for the part with Edith Evans as the Nurse. It was generous of Gielgud to offer this opportunity to someone he considered a dangerous rival; part at least of his calculations may have been that he would be taking on Olivier on what he felt to be his own ground, on which he was confident he could outshine the young pretender.

  Up to a point he was proved right. Olivier was the first to play Romeo and he was savaged by many of the critics for what they saw as his inability to speak the poetry: “His blank verse is the blankest I ever heard,” wrote the reviewer for the Evening Standard, while James Agate in the Sunday Times accused him of an “inexpertness which approached virtuosity”. Olivier was appalled. His intention was, and always would be, to speak the verse “as if that is the way you speak naturally”. If that was unacceptable then he had better give up the part altogether. His offer to resign was refused. Not all the critics condemned his approach: St John Ervine in the Observer said he had “seen few sights so moving as the spectacle of Mr Olivier’s Romeo, stunned with Juliet’s beauty, fumbling for words with which to say his love”. “Larry was the definitive Romeo,” thought Peggy Ashcroft, “a real, vigorous, impulsive youth.”1

  When Gielgud took over as Romeo the contrasting approaches became more obvious. Gielgud was concerned most of all with the beauty of the words, Olivier with the reality of the action. “Larry had the advantage over me in his vitality, looks, humour and directness,” wrote Gielgud, “I had an advantage over him in my familiarity with the verse and in the fact that the production was of my own devising.” Alec Guinness, a relatively junior member of the cast, was less generous. “We all admired John greatly,” he said, “but we were not so keen on Larry. He seemed a bit cheap and vulgar, striving after effects and making nonsense of the verse.” But Olivier’s was the way of the future. Over the years he much improved his delivery of Shakespearean verse, but he never yielded in his belief that it was the sense that came first. Gielgud, he said, sang Shakespeare. “I’ve always despised Shakespeare sung. I don’t think it’s opera; I think it’s speech.” After his Romeo everything changed; ten years later the Gielgud school of declamation would have seemed almost absurdly old-fashioned. Gielgud himself was to modify his style. As to which was the better in 1935, Gielgud himself summed it up with concision. “I spoke the poetry much better,” he told Patrick Garland, “but Larry got the girl.”2

  When it came to Mercutio, the critics treated Olivier more kindly. He had appealed to Ralph Richardson for advice on how to play the part. Richardson denied that he could help: “You should be much better than me – don’t forget you could colour Bothwell which drove me right out of the stage door.” He did offer two useful tips: Olivier was not to take Mercutio’s great “Queen Mab” speech too fast, and on no account was he to get drunk during the one hour and twenty minutes in which he was offstage: “This takes years of skill and cannot be overestimated.” Oddly enough, Gielgud was more put out by Olivier’s rendering of Mercutio than he had been by his Romeo. He complained about the “loudness and extravagant tricks” of Olivier’s performance and speculated that the critics would treat it with even greater harshness. Possibly he feared a too conspicuous Mercutio might distract the audience from his Romeo. The public did not seem to have seen any problem: “Romeo and Juliet” ran for six months and was still playing to full houses when the show had to close.3

  *

  Any ill feeling between Olivier and Richardson had faded. They decided to produce and star in a play together, joining forces with the prolific and, usually, most successful dramatist, J. B. Priestley. Unfortunately, Priestley was having an off day; there was nothing much wrong with “Bees on the Boat Deck” but its sour tone lacked popular appeal and though ten years later the names of Olivier and Richardson would have been enough to carry an unappealing play, in 1936 more was needed. It soon closed. The failure did no damage to Olivier’s reputation, but it did to his bank balance. He lost some £700, say £30,000 at current values. By the standards of the day Olivier was paid well for his labours, and he had money left from his American film-making, but he never knew how to save. Money was there to spend: he lived well, was extravagantly generous and gave no thought for the morrow. Jill Esmond was little better. When Sofka Zinovieff came round seeking to get a job as secretary she suggested that she should be paid £16 a week. “Give her £25,” Jill called from the next room. Olivier was happy to oblige.4

  Something that in the end was to cost him far more, in money, time and emotional strain, was in the offing. In the middle of July 1936 filming started on Alexander Korda’s new patriotic epic, “Fire Over England”. In this Olivier played a heroic sailor who almost single-handed defeated a dastardly Spanish plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. “It was an excellent part,” he recalled. “I just wasn’t very good in it.” He exaggerated both the excellence of the part and the inadequacy of his acting. Michael Ingolby was the sort of energetic young hero whom Olivier could have played in his sleep. Possibly, indeed, he would have been more successful if he had played it in his sleep: if anything, he tried too hard. He could do “the hysterical type
of young romantic with ease”, remarked Graham Greene with mild contempt. The reviews were not ecstatic, but his performance brought him no discredit. It had, however, other, more lasting consequences. The hysteria which Greene noted was not induced just by the excesses of the plot. Opposite him, playing the object of his passionate devotion, was a young actress called Vivien Leigh.5

  *

  They had not met for the first time on the set. Vivien Leigh had first seen him in “Theatre Royal”. “That’s the man I’m going to marry,” she is said to have announced. Her companion pointed out that she was already married. “That doesn’t matter. I’ll still marry him one day.” Jean-Pierre Aumont, the French actor, claims to have seen them at separate tables in a restaurant, exchanging glances across the room. “That couple are madly in love,” he announced. His companion, who knew them both, laughed dismissively and said they’d never even met. “Whether they had met or not didn’t really matter,” concluded Aumont. “Their love shone across the restaurant.”6

  Vivien Leigh was a young actress. She had made her name the previous year in “The Mask of Virtue” and was now at least as celebrated as Olivier in the world of cinema. The word “beauty” is one that should be used with exceeding caution, but Vivien Leigh was unequivocally, triumphantly beautiful. She was clever, funny and, when she wanted to be, exceptionally charming. She was no more an intellectual than Olivier and not much better read but she had quick wits and a retentive mind and could give the impression of deep culture; her taste was excellent and she furnished a series of houses with pictures and furniture of real quality. She was also manipulative, cunning and determined. What she wanted she almost always got. She wanted Laurence Olivier. Her nice, intelligent barrister husband, Leigh Holman, was irrelevant to this pursuit: she had married him for the sake of security, she would abandon him without a qualm.

  The couple had grown to know each other well before they met in “Fire Over England”. The progress of their relationship can be charted through Olivier’s diaries. On 27 June, 1936, he took her out to lunch (a fortnight later he was giving lunch to the beautiful actress Ann Todd, so his interest at that time was by no means exclusive). They met again five days later. From then on they met at intervals, both separately and as families. Olivier was an obsessive keeper of statistics. In his pocket diary he noted his watch number, season ticket number, pass book number, his size in boots (8–9), in collars (15½), in hats (6 ⅞), his height (5ft 10¼ inches), his weight (10 stone 7 pounds). At the beginning of each year he put in certain significant anniversaries: “Anniversary 1st night on stage”, “Anniversary 100th Perf. Henry VIII”. The list included the birthdays of his intimates: his father, his brother, his sister, Jill. On 5 November, 1936, Vivien’s birthday was added.7

  It has been suggested that Korda knew of the relationship and set them to play against each other in “Fire Over England” for that reason, either to make mischief or because he felt that their growing love would make for some lively filming. Olivier dismissed the idea: Korda made the casting “for no purpose beyond the fact that we were two of his contract players and we looked right for those parts”. Korda would indeed have been prescient if he had known what was going to happen; Olivier himself was not aware how deeply he was becoming entangled. When they first met on the set Vivien Leigh remarked politely how glad she was that they were going to act together. “We shall probably end up by fighting,” prophesied Olivier. “People always get sick of each other when making a film.” His words were soon proved spectacularly untrue. Alexander Knox, who had a minor part in the film, said that it was almost immediately obvious to everyone that the pair were in love and that “the intensity of their affair is noticeable in all their scenes together”. By the time the film was finished Olivier’s marriage was, to all intents and purposes, at an end.8

  But it was to be a long time before that became evident to all the world. In the meantime Olivier had a career to advance. Swashbuckling roles in silly films might serve well to earn some money, but his performance in “Romeo and Juliet” had convinced him that he wanted most of all to make his future in classical plays on the London stage. The classical theatre meant, above all, Shakespeare and Shakespeare meant the Old Vic. Under the leadership of the formidable Lilian Baylis this scruffy, shabby theatre unfashionably south of the Thames had become the Shakespearean centre for the country, indeed the world. “I was always determined to be a sort of top actor,” Olivier much later said. “I knew that if you continued to not quite bring off the classics, you were never going to make it … I had to go on … and after about a year the press referred to me as ‘that Shakespearean actor’. Then I knew it had been done.” To reassure himself that he was doing the right thing he rang up Richardson, who was acting in New York. “Shall I go to the Old Vic?” he asked. “Think it’s a very good idea,” was the terse reply. It was done.9

  Olivier was confident that he would be welcomed with enthusiasm. “I was a snip,” he explained. “They had to have a so-called star … I’d done these films, you see, and I had a fantastic name for them.” In a few years the name would indeed be fantastic, in 1937 the adjective was still a touch vainglorious. He was right, however, in thinking that Lilian Baylis would be delighted by his advent, particularly since she knew he could easily have earned ten times as much by pursuing his career in Hollywood. Tyrone Guthrie, director at the Old Vic and one of the few figures of such stature whom Olivier both liked and respected, made it clear that, within reason, he could pick whatever parts he chose from the repertoire, the more of them the better. The more the better for Olivier, too. Always gluttonous for hard work, he wanted not only to play a full house of major roles but to play roles that were as different to each other as could be managed. His ambition always was to be the character that he was portraying and the more those characters differed, the happier he would be. “I wanted to be completely different in every performance,” he wrote, “I like to appear as the chameleon.” He deplored the kind of actor who regularly won a round of applause on his first entrance: his ambition was to take people by surprise; to be perpetually unexpected.10

  Superficially, Olivier’s wish to be the character he was playing seemed reminiscent of the fashionable doctrine of Konstantin Stanislavsky. In fact it was very different, almost its antithesis. Stanislavsky, to reduce a complex and sophisticated argument to a sentence, believed that to act characters properly it was necessary first to conduct an exhaustive study of their background and psychology. Olivier claimed that he could tell when young actors had first read Stanislavsky by observing their arriving at the theatre an hour earlier than would have been the case before and “wandering thoughtfully about the set, touching the furnishings affectionately and familiarly”. Stanislavsky believed that the actor must penetrate to the very heart of the character and then work outwards; Olivier preferred to build up the outward appearance of the character and then work in. He thought that “The Method”, as the philosophy of Stanislavsky developed in New York in the 1930s and 1940s came to be called, was a futility: “I’d rather work through a scene eight times than waste time chattering about abstractions. An actor gets a thing right by doing it over and over.” Acting for him required a peripheral approach, it was naturalism or truthfulness that came first. The difference between the two approaches was often more philosophical than real; what happened on the stage was little affected by the theoretical debate that preceded it. The conflict was a real one, though, and sometimes impinged sharply on the actors. There were moments in Olivier’s career when he had cause to curse Stanislavsky and his Method.11

  *

  In his first eighteen months at the Old Vic Olivier played six major Shakespearean roles. He began with Hamlet. For a man who claimed to deplore theorising, his approach was unexpected. Professor Ernest Jones, the influential psychoanalyst and biographer of Freud, had propounded the theory that Hamlet had been a victim of the Oedipus complex, passionately in love with his mother. Probably at the initiative of Guthrie, Olivi
er, Guthrie and Peggy Ashcroft went to see Jones and were converted. Olivier’s performance was marked by his lustful fondling of the Queen – or that at least was the idea; most of the critics failed to notice this interpretation. What they did remark was the energy, the fury, the athletic vigour of his performance. Not all of them were sure that they liked it. James Agate remarked that Olivier, while playing Hamlet, had offered the best performance of Hotspur that his generation had ever seen; he “does not speak poetry badly. He does not speak it at all.” His fellow actors too were critical. Michael Redgrave, who played Laertes, thought he was “a bad Hamlet. Too assertive and too resolute,” while Alec Guinness, Olivier’s understudy, was outraged by “the gymnastic leaps and falls” in which he was expected to indulge if called upon to replace his principal. No-one questioned, though, the power and excitement of his performance. After a few weeks, too, his playing evolved. “He has been visited by another spirit,” wrote George Buchanan in the News Chronicle. “Feeling has been released in him that was unsuspected … His Hamlet is not anymore the good chap in a tight corner.”12