Olivier (8 page)

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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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, Olivier, 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.”
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Olivier, who always expected the best from the reviewer, was disappointed and discouraged. But though his delivery of the verse still gave rise to complaint it was far more muted than after “Romeo and Juliet”. John Gielgud did not like Olivier’s performance but, talking to Peter Brook, he claimed that he had never been jealous in his life, then added thoughtfully: “But I admit I burst into tears when Larry Olivier got such good notices for his Hamlet.” Whatever Olivier may have believed, the general view was that the performance was something not to miss. It was during the run of “Hamlet” that Olivier first indulged his propensity to make speeches at the end of the performance. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced on 30 January, 1937, “tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has had a daughter.” Considering the age of Vanessa Redgrave at the time, Olivier was being remarkably prescient.
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After Hamlet came Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night”: a part, as Olivier remarked, “designed to demonstrate my staggering versatility”. Henry V came next. By instinct Olivier was patriotic, but he was not immune to the prevailing mood of the times. In 1937 heroism was out of fashion, appeasement had not yet become a dirty word. “I think you will be
very
good as Henry V and I don’t think he’s a shit at all,” Peggy Ashcroft
encouraged him, but he was unconvinced. He appealed to Ralph Richardson for advice. “Henry V?” said Richardson. “He’s a scoutmaster. But he raised scoutmastership to godlike proportions … Of course you must play him.” Olivier concurred, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm. So wan was his performance that Guthrie rounded on him and accused him of betraying the sense of the play and letting down his public. “I was fortunate to have him directing me,” wrote Olivier. “I followed his eye. He knew.”
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He did not have the benefit of Guthrie’s eye for the “Macbeth” that followed. The French director Michel Saint-Denis was imported for that production. He was “a fine director with a wonderful imagination”, considered Olivier, “but he let his imagination run amok”. It was a gimmicky affair, in which the principal characters had their faces swallowed up under grotesquely heavy make-up. Usually Olivier revelled in elaborate disguises, but even he was taken aback by this excess. “Larry’s make-up comes on,” remarked Vivien Leigh, “then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on.” It was “not an unparalleled success”, Olivier wrote in his memoirs, and he felt he had done nothing to redeem it. As was so often the case, he exaggerated his own inadequacy. It was mock-modesty perhaps, designed in part to distinguish himself from the common ruck of actors who over-praised their own performances, but his self-deprecation was on the whole endearing and enhanced the value of his judgment on those occasions when he claimed to have achieved something altogether special. The critics rated his Macbeth higher than he did himself. “He brings off some magnificent vocal effects,” wrote James Agate. “Mr Olivier will probably play this part twice as well when he has twice his present years.” It was shrewd comment: it was in fact eighteen years before Olivier provided what all agreed was a great and some felt must be the definitive Macbeth. In this production he sought to cover up his unease with a display of hectic energy. His shriek on seeing Banquo’s ghost was so loud and protracted that it gave him laryngitis while the duelling became so vigorous that the man who played Macduff once needed to be removed to hospital.

Olivier had to be reminded that he was supposed to lose the fight: “I always fought with too much vigour. That came from a sort of pride.”
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He had intended to follow Macbeth with Richard II, but Gielgud protested that he planned to do them both in his own season at the Queen’s Theatre. Olivier acquiesced: “Richard II” was dropped from the Old Vic repertoire. It was one of the few great Shakespearean roles that Olivier never played; it would not have come naturally to him, but he had shown in “The Green Bay Tree” that he could play weakness and self-pity and it would have been a memorable experience to see him seated on the ground, telling sad stories of the death of kings. Instead, he played Iago to Richardson’s Othello. According to the designer, Roger Furse, both men tried to persuade Guthrie to cast the women of their choice, in Olivier’s case Vivien Leigh, as Desdemona. They failed, Guthrie instead chose Curigwen Lewis. “This is where I saw the generosity of Larry,” wrote Furse. Though he deplored Guthrie’s failure to employ Leigh, “once it was decided he worked in real harmony and generosity with Curigwen. The others didn’t.” No amount of harmony could redeem what proved to be a disaster. “It wasn’t good,” Olivier considered. “I feel a bit churlish saying it, but it wasn’t good simply because Ralph wasn’t good.” The initial reading had gone well but Richardson never improved on it, he “tried to keep within the nice cosy feeling of his reading, and you can’t”. Guthrie was in despair and at one time threatened to call off the production. Olivier, partly because he felt Richardson’s Othello imposed on him the duty to bring some life into the play, partly because it was always his instinct to seek out the comedy in any figure, however malign, played his Iago for laughs. “He was a comedian by instinct, a tragedian by art,” considered James Agate. Olivier would have seen nothing offensive in that judgment. “I maintain,” he wrote, “that a pure tragedian isn’t going to move an audience except by the sheer sound-value of a glorious voice, which, to my mind, is not the true nature of acting … Your studies of humanity are going to be far sharper if you’re a comedian.” Almost any part would be the better for a little humour, though he confessed, “It’s jolly hard to get a
laugh in ‘Lear’.” But though he felt that he had been right to play Iago as he did, he did not think that it had been a success. “What I missed entirely,” he concluded, “was the essential value of the part” – an opaque comment which presumably implied that he had oversimplified Iago and not done justice to the complex emotions which shaped his conduct.
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