Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier ( ; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989), was an English actor and director. He and his contemporaries Sir John Gielgud, Sir Michael Redgrave and Sir Ralph Richardson made up a quartet of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career he had considerable success in television roles.

Olivier's family had no theatrical connections, but his father, a clergyman, decided that his son should become an actor. After attending a drama school in London, Olivier learned his craft in a succession of acting jobs during the late 1920s. In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Coward's Private Lives, and he appeared in his first film. In 1935 he played in a celebrated production of Romeo and Juliet alongside Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star. In the 1940s, together with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, building it into a highly respected company. There his most celebrated roles included Shakespeare's Richard III and Sophocles's Oedipus.

In the 1950s Olivier was an independent actor-manager, but his stage career had stagnated until he joined the avant-garde English Stage Company in 1957 to play the title role in The Entertainer, a part he later reprised on film. From 1963 to 1973 he was the founding director of Britain's National Theatre, running a resident company that fostered many future stars. His own parts there included the title role in Othello (1965), and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1970). Among Olivier's films are Wuthering Heights (1939), Rebecca (1940) and a trilogy of Shakespeare films as actor/director: Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). His later films included Spartacus (1960), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Sleuth (1972), Marathon Man (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). His television appearances included an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence (1960), Long Day's Journey into Night (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), A Little Romance (1979), Brideshead Revisited (1981) and King Lear (1983).

Olivier's honours included a knighthood (1947), a life peerage (1971) and the Order of Merit (1981). For his on-screen work he received an Academy Award, five British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards in addition to nominations for a Tony Award, two British Academy Television Awards and a Grammy Award. Olivier was awarded with two non-competitive Academy Honorary Awards in 1947 and 1979, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1983 and a BAFTA Fellowship in 1976. The National Theatre's largest auditorium is named in his honour, and he is commemorated in the Laurence Olivier Awards, given annually by the Society of London Theatre. He was married three times: to the actresses Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, Vivien Leigh from 1940 to 1960, and Joan Plowright from 1961 until his death, and had four children.

Life and career

1907–1924: Early life and education

thumb|upright|The house in Wathen Road, [[Dorking, Surrey, where Olivier was born in 1907]]

Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on 22 May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of the three children of the Reverend Gerard Kerr Olivier and Agnes Louise (née Crookenden). He had two older siblings: Sybille and Gerard Dacres "Dickie". His great-great-grandfather was of French Huguenot descent, and Olivier came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. Gerard Olivier had begun a career as a schoolmaster, but in his thirties he discovered a strong religious vocation and was ordained as a priest of the Church of England. He belonged to the high church, ritualist wing of Anglicanism and was known as "Father Olivier". Some Anglican congregations did not like this style, and the only church posts he was offered were temporary, usually deputising for regular incumbents in their absence. This meant a nomadic existence, and for Laurence's first few years, he never lived in one place long enough to make friends.

In 1912, when Olivier was five, his father secured a permanent appointment as assistant rector at St Saviour's, Pimlico. He held the post for six years, and a stable family life was at last possible. Olivier was devoted to his mother, but not to his father, whom he found a cold and remote parent, though he learned a great deal of the art of performing from him. As a young man Gerard Olivier had considered a stage career and was a dramatic and effective preacher. Olivier wrote that his father knew "when to drop the voice, when to bellow about the perils of hellfire, when to slip in a gag, when suddenly to wax sentimental ... The quick changes of mood and manner absorbed me, and I have never forgotten them."

thumb|left|alt=interior of ornate Victorian church|Interior of [[All Saints, Margaret Street]]

In 1916, after attending a series of preparatory schools, Olivier passed the singing examination for admission to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street, in central London. His elder brother was already a pupil and Olivier gradually settled in, though he felt himself to be something of an outsider. The church's style of worship was (and remains) Anglo-Catholic, with emphasis on ritual, vestments and incense. The theatricality of the services appealed to Olivier, and the vicar encouraged the students to develop a taste for secular as well as religious drama. Later he would comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia, a reference to Leigh's affair with the Australian actor Peter Finch, whom the couple met during the tour. Shortly afterwards Finch moved to London, where Olivier auditioned him and put him under a long-term contract with Laurence Olivier Productions. Finch and Leigh's affair continued on and off for several years. In 1973 he provided the narration for a 26-episode documentary, The World at War, which chronicled the events of the Second World War, and won a second Emmy Award for Long Day's Journey into Night (1973). In 1975 he won another Emmy for Love Among the Ruins. In 1976, he appeared in adaptations of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Harold Pinter's The Collection. Olivier portrayed the Pharisee Nicodemus in Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth. In 1978, he appeared in the film The Boys from Brazil, playing the role of Ezra Lieberman, an ageing Nazi hunter; he received his eleventh Academy Award nomination. Although he did not win the Oscar, he was presented with an Honorary Award for his lifetime achievement.

Olivier continued working in film into the 1980s, with roles in The Jazz Singer (1980), Inchon (1981), The Bounty (1984) and Wild Geese II (1985). He continued to work in television; in 1981 he appeared as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, winning another Emmy. In 1982, he received his tenth and last BAFTA nomination in the television adaptation of John Mortimer's stage play A Voyage Round My Father. His cremation was held three days later. A memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey on October 20. His ashes were later buried in Poets' Corner. A life peerage as Baron Olivier, of Brighton in the County of Sussex, followed in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to the theatre. (He had declined a similar offer in 1967.) Olivier was later appointed to the Order of Merit in 1981. He also received honours from foreign governments. In 1949, he was made Commander of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog; France appointed him , Legion of Honour, in 1953; the Italian government created him , Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, in 1953; and in 1971 he was granted the Order of Yugoslav Flag with Golden Wreath. He also won two British Academy Film Awards out of ten nominations, five Emmy Awards out of nine nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards out of six nominations. He was nominated once for a Tony Award but did not win.

In February 1960, for his contribution to the film industry, Olivier was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with a star at 6319 Hollywood Boulevard;

|coronet = Baron's coronet

|crest = A swan, rousant Argent membered Or, gorged with a baron's coronet proper, affixed thereto a chain reflexed over the back, the terminal ring encircling the sinister leg Or and holding in the beak an olive branch leaved fructed Proper.

|motto = Sicut oliva virens laetor in aede dei

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Technique and reputation

Olivier's acting technique was minutely crafted, and he was known for changing his appearance considerably from role to role. By his own admission, he was addicted to extravagant make-up, and unlike Richardson and Gielgud, he excelled at different voices and accents. His own description of his technique was "working from the outside in"; he said, "I can never act as myself, I have to have a pillow up my jumper, a false nose or a moustache or wig... I cannot come on looking like me and be someone else." Rattigan described how at rehearsals Olivier "built his performance slowly and with immense application from a mass of tiny details". This attention to detail had its critics: Agate remarked, "When I look at a watch it is to see the time and not to admire the mechanism. I want an actor to tell me Lear's time of day and Olivier doesn't. He bids me watch the wheels go round."

thumb|alt=head and shoulders semi-profile shot of man in this thirties|Olivier in 1939

Tynan remarked to Olivier, "you aren't really a contemplative or philosophical actor"; During production of The Prince and the Showgirl, he quarreled with Marilyn Monroe, who was trained under Lee Strasberg's method, over her acting process. Similarly, an anecdote casts him as offering Dustin Hoffman, enduring physical travails while playing in Marathon Man, a curt suggestion: "why don't you just try acting?" Hoffman disputes the details of this account, which he claims was distorted by a journalist: he had been up all night at the Studio 54 nightclub for personal rather than professional reasons and Olivier, who understood this, was joking.

Together with Richardson and Gielgud, Olivier was internationally recognised as one of the "great trinity of theatrical knights"

Sources

  • Laurence Olivier: 10 essential films at the British Film Institute
  • Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library