Olivier
Authors: Philip Ziegler
Philip Ziegler
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Editions Ltd
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7th Floor, South Block
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Copyright © Philip Ziegler 2013
The moral right of Philip Ziegler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 119 6
ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85705 120 2
ISBN (Ebook) 978 0 85738 597 0
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Also by Philip Ziegler
The Duchess of Dino
(1962)
Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth
(1965)
The Black Death
(1969)
King William IV
(1971)
Omdurman
(1973)
Melbourne: A Biography of William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
(1976)
Crown and People
(1978)
Diana Cooper
(1981)
Mountbatten: The Official Biography
(1985)
Elizabeth’s Britain 1926 to 1986
(1986)
The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920–1922: Tours with the
Prince of Wales
(1987) (ed.)
Personal Diary of Admiral the Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied
Commander South-East Asia, 1943–1946
(1988) (ed.)
The Sixth Great Power: Barings 1762–1929
(1988)
From Shore to Shore – The Final Years: The Diaries of Earl Mountbatten
of Burma, 1953–1979
(1989) (ed.)
King Edward VIII: The Official Biography
(1990)
Brooks’s: A Social History
(1991) (ed. with Desmond Seward)
Wilson: The Authorised Life of Lord Wilson of Rievaulx
(1993)
London at War 1939–1945
(1995)
Osbert Sitwell
(1998)
Britain Then and Now: The Francis Frith Collection
(1999)
Soldiers: Fighting Men’s Lives, 1901–2001
(2001)
Man Of Letters: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Literary Impresario
Rupert Hart-Davis
(2005)
Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography
(2010)
To Sophie, Colin and Toby with love
and to Clare with love and gratitude
“I can add colours to the chameleon;
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages;
And set the murderous Machiavel to school”
“Henry VI, Part Three”
“Rot them for a couple of rogues.
They have everyone’s face but their own”
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
on David Garrick and Samuel Foote
12. Disintegration of a Marriage
24. Olivier’s Occupation Gone?
SECTION ONE
1. Olivier in 1914
2. Olivier’s mother, Agnes
3. Gerard Olivier, his father
4. As Katherina in “The Taming of the Shrew”
5. Olivier at eighteen
6. As Uncle Vanya in 1927
7. With Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence and Adrianne Allen in “Private Lives”
8. Working out in 1931
9. Arriving in New York in 1933 with Jill Esmond
10. With John Gielgud and Edith Evans in “Romeo and Juliet”
11. And with Peggy Ashcroft in the same production
12. With Tarquin Olivier, his son by Jill Esmond
13. With Cherry Cottrell in “Hamlet”
14. As Sir Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night”
15. As Henry V at the Old Vic
16. As Macbeth, conceived by Michel Saint-Denis
17. With Vivien Leigh in “Fire Over England”
18. With Sybil Thorndike in “Coriolanus”
19. As Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights”
20. With Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice”
21. Planning “Rebecca” with Alfred Hitchcock and Joan Fontaine
22. Making-up for “Lady Hamilton”
23. Taking a break during the filming of “Henry V”
24. The famous Saint Crispin’s Day speech from “Henry V”
25. With Ralph Richardson in Hamburg
26. In Vivien Leigh’s dressing room in Sydney, Australia
27. With his first and second wives, Jill Esmond and Vivien Leigh
28. On the set of “Hamlet” with Jean Simmons
29. With the skull of poor Yorick
SECTION TWO
30. With Alec Guinness in “King Lear”
31. With Vivien Leigh in “Caesar and Cleopatra”
32. On horseback in “The Beggar’s Opera”
33. Vivien Leigh and Peter Finch, her soon-to-be-lover, in 1953
34. With Vivien Leigh in “Twelfth Night”
35. With Vivien Leigh in “Macbeth”
36. With Claire Bloom in “Richard III”
37. Sitting for Salvador Dalí
38. The Oliviers with Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe
39. With Marilyn Monroe on the set of “The Sleeping Prince”
40. With Maggie Smith in “Rhinoceros”
41. With Joan Plowright in the film of “The Entertainer”
42. Peter O’Toole as Hamlet in the National Theatre’s first production
43. With Maggie Smith in “Othello”
44. In full make-up as Othello
45. With Denys Lasdun, the architect who designed the National Theatre
46. As James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”
47. With Kenneth Tynan, as imagined by cartoonist Mark Boxer
48. With Lord Cottesloe at the National Theatre’s topping-out ceremony
49. With Peter Hall on the Southbank site
50. As John Tagg in “The Party”
51. With Michael Caine in “Sleuth”
52. With Sarah Miles in “Term of Trial”
53. With Dustin Hoffman in “Marathon Man”
54. With Gielgud and Richardson in a T.V. biopic of Wagner
55. With Diana Quick in “Brideshead Revisited”
56. With Joan Plowright
57. On his eightieth birthday
58. Olivier in 1982
OLIVIER
Beginnings
T
he London theatre in the late spring of 1907 was not at its most refulgent. The dramatic big guns were conspicuously silent: there was no play by Shaw, no Ibsen, no Chekhov; not even a Pinero or a Maugham. The nearest approach to a modern play of serious import was Galsworthy’s respectable but uninspiring “The Silver Box”. Even “The Mikado” had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain, who feared it might offend the visiting Japanese Crown Prince. Among the leading actors and actresses: Irving had died two years before, Ellen Terry was in New York, Viola Tree in Germany, Gerald du Maurier was to be seen, but in a play which
The Times
dismissed as “noisy, rackety, rubbishy tomfoolery”. Marie Tempest was the only superstar doing work which enhanced her reputation.
But it was not just the paucity of great plays and players which menaced the London scene. There was a remoter but, viewed in the longer term, more ominous threat to the future of the theatre. By 1907 Chaplin had already made his first short silent film; D. W. Griffith had started work in Hollywood. Several London theatres were interspersing plays with films; even the Old Vic showed every Saturday night “moving landscapes and seascapes” to enraptured audiences. The first theatre entirely devoted to films, the Balham Empire, opened in the summer of 1907. Many more were planned: by 1914 there would be more than one hundred cinemas in Manchester alone. Could the traditional theatre resist this competition? Some thought not. Within twenty-five,
at the most thirty years, prophesied one pessimist, there would be no live acting on the stage in London.
Ralph Richardson had been born in 1902; John Gielgud in 1904; Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on 22 May, 1907.
*
There was nothing in his ancestry to suggest he would take to the stage. The Oliviers were French Huguenots who had settled in Britain early in the eighteenth century. They fitted comfortably into the minor gentry or professional classes; soldiers and clergymen predominating. Laurence Olivier’s uncles were a talented lot, among them a colonial governor, who became a lord, and a successful society portrait painter. Laurence saw little of them, however; his father, Gerard – “Fahv”, as he was usually known in the family – was far the youngest of the siblings and also the least successful. He was sent down from Oxford, got a dismally bad degree at Durham, became a preparatory schoolmaster, opened his own school, failed to make a success of it, then switched course, was ordained and in 1904 became curate at St Martin’s, Dorking. Some years before, he had married the sister-in-law of his headmaster, Agnes Crookenden, who had hoped for a life of modest comfort as a schoolmaster’s wife and instead found herself living in penury on the exiguous stipend earned by a run-of-the-mill Anglican priest.
She accepted her fate bravely. Where her husband was strident, bad-tempered and somewhat stupid, Agnes was quiet, resolute and long-suffering. She bore without complaint the burdens that life and the Revd Mr Olivier imposed on her and settled down to give her family as comfortable and secure a life as possible. Her eldest daughter, Sybille, was born in 1901 and a son, christened Gerard after his father but for most of his life known as Dickie, followed in 1904. Laurence was therefore much younger than his siblings, unplanned and, by his father at least, unwanted. Gerard, in the opinion of his younger son at any rate, considered Laurence a bothersome addition to a family that was satisfactorily complete without him. Sybille, whose recollections of
their childhood are generally somewhat rosier than those of her younger brother, confirmed that Gerard seemed resentful of Laurence’s existence. There was something about the child’s seeming stolidity and baby plumpness that drove him almost to frenzy, she remembered. If Laurence was eating too slowly or too much his father would erupt: “Baby or not, he bores me and I’ve had enough!” He would turn on the terrified child and shout: “You! Have you finished at last? Get out!”
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It is only fair to the Revd Mr Olivier to say that Laurence, or Paddy, as he came to be called because of his explosive temper, does not seem to have been a prepossessing child. He realised that his mother would be on his side in any confrontation with his father and, according to one family friend, “learned deliberately to provoke his father’s wrath in order to produce more love and attention from his mother”. Perhaps in response to his father’s hostility he felt an urgent need to ingratiate himself with all around him. Everyone likes to be liked, but Olivier’s craving for popularity was both exaggerated and enduring. “He’s coy, he’s vain, he has tantrums, he needs to be wooed,” said his friend and admirer Elia Kazan many years later. Still more, he needed to woo. “I had by nature a very unfortunate gift of flirtatiousness,” he told Mark Amory, whose many hours of taped interviews with Olivier provide an important element of this book. He cited this as proof that he was a born actor: so he was, but it is equally possible to see it as a defence mechanism, strengthened if not created by the realisation that he was being rejected by the one man from whom he had the right to expect support.
2