Olivier (4 page)

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.
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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 were 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.
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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!’ ”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He won his permanent place in the Birmingham Rep. by securing a part in a tour of Eden Phillpotts’s successful rustic comedy “The Farmer’s Wife”. It was “a sheer revel of wholesome laughter”, judged a local paper: Olivier was not mentioned in the review, but the accompanying photograph showed him in a clinch with the leading lady. He anyway did well enough to earn Barry Jackson’s approval. In the course of the next twelve months he appeared in fifteen plays: a gruelling but enormously valuable experience. His parts became steadily more important. “I was terribly promising,” said Olivier. “I was considered the most promising actor they’d had for years and so they risked things on me.” One of the most remarkable risks was to entrust him with the title role in “Uncle Vanya”, giving a nineteen-year-old boy a part specified in the text as being for a man of forty-seven. A “brave and
compelling” performance, judged the
Birmingham Post
. It marked the start of a lifelong devotion to Chekhov, curious in a man who in his character seemed the polar opposite to the typical male of Chekhovian drama. “Once one has experienced the gift of his marvellously poetic realism,” he wrote to a Russian correspondent, “it must of course exist to a certain extent in almost all one’s dramatic deliberation.” His status as a director was to be a matter of controversy, but when Chekhov was in question no-one doubted Olivier’s masterly touch.
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In 1928 Barry Jackson moved for a season to the Royal Court in London. The next few months established Olivier as an important player on the London stage. “Most people from the Rep. took advantage of being in London to have a good time,” wrote Jackson. “Not Larry! While other performers were out carousing in London pubs he would be back in the empty dressing rooms reading aloud from this, that or the next play. He became monkish about it.” His reward was to be offered by far his most substantial part to date, that of the Saxon King in Tennyson’s monumental, and monumentally dull epic “Harold”. John Gielgud had hoped to be given the part and, being far better established than Olivier, seemed the clear favourite, but Olivier had the effrontery to insert a three-minute speech from “Harold” into the previous play in the repertoire, Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah”. Jackson, it seems, must have been both amused by Olivier’s cheek and impressed by his delivery. The part was his.
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