Olivier (15 page)

From the start, Olivier was determined to lead by example. They would be asked to do things that were difficult and sometimes even dangerous, he told the seven hundred assembled extras, but never would they have to do anything which he would not be prepared to do himself. They took him at his word. At one point an extra was required to drop some twenty feet from the bough of a tree onto a horse cantering below and drag the rider from its back. “I’d like to see you do it first, Mr Olivier,” said the destined victim. Olivier climbed the tree, performed the leap, landed heavily on his ankle and tottered to his feet in agonising pain. “There, you see,” he gasped through clenched teeth. “Quite easy, really.” This was not the only injury he suffered. He was behind a camera which was filming a galloping horse. The results seemed disappointingly dull. He urged the rider to aim for the camera, only swerving to avoid it at the last moment. The horse misunderstood the instructions and ploughed straight into the camera, driving the finder into Olivier’s upper lip. The scar remained with him for the rest of his life. It did not mar his looks, indeed Jill Esmond said it actually improved his appearance. His mouth had used to be soft and sensitive, after the accident it was stronger and narrower. At least his various contretemps won him sympathy where he most wanted it. “Oh my darling are you alright,” cabled Vivien Leigh from Gibraltar. “Desperately worried your back
arm shoulder knee lip and what o what else cable immediately baba do stop I worship you dying to see you.”
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The Irish extras loved him. At the end of the filming they clubbed together and presented him with a handsome bog-oak walking stick inscribed to “Mr L. O’livier”. This showed, thought Roger Furse, that they had accepted him as a real Irishman, “and it showed something more … It was, as the Navy say, a happy ship, and that is always due to the Captain.” For a man who was by nature short-tempered, Olivier showed miraculous patience when people blundered or things went wrong. By an unaccountable and exceptional lapse Furse provided armour for all the other actors but failed to produce anything for the King himself. When he admitted that this was the case, Olivier looked quizzically at him and then roared with laughter. “What was so lovely about it was the way he took it,” said Furse. “I know of no, repeat NO, actor, let alone starring director, who would have taken it in quite that way.” Furse was, of course, an old and valued friend, but when a cameraman made a disastrous mistake and failed to record one of the most dramatic battle scenes, all Olivier said was: “We can’t afford to let this happen again!”
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It was very different if he thought there had been laziness or deliberate ill-will. On one occasion he was leading a group of technicians around the battlefield, planting flags and quantities of red tape to show where the shots were going to be. After a while the camera crew announced that they did not think that this was the sort of work they should be undertaking: “So I sent word back that if they would rather do nothing and watch me working, that was alright with me, as they weren’t much help anyway.” Later the same day a member of the crew showed himself “temperamental, sulky and awkward”. “I hope things will be alright,” Olivier told Vivien Leigh, “but if not I shall get rid of him, and anybody who doesn’t pull his weight. The Irish are being so marvellous that it’s just not good enough to take any nonsense from our own people.” Stephen Greif, who was later to work with Olivier at the National Theatre, compared him to the boxer, Muhammad Ali. “There
was no fucking around. He did it. He never hid. And that’s what makes him great.” Greif wished that the actor and the boxer could have met: “They were fearless and courageous and they had a master plan. They were birds of a feather.”
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Olivier took immense and justified pride in his achievement. “It doesn’t date at all,” he said more than thirty years later. “It has a sense of permanence about it. People refer back to it as one of the great films. The Americans have always put it somewhere in the top ten, if not five. They’re mad about it in America … I just bloody well thank God I knew what I was doing.” The film ran for eleven months in London and the same in New York, even though it did not make a profit for nearly twenty years. The profession, said Olivier, were worried that, when the Oscars were awarded in 1945, he would make a clean sweep by winning the categories of best actor, best director and best producer. The judges dodged the issue by giving him a special award. “It was a complete fob-off,” he said indignantly. The announcement was greeted with “the greatest applause that has ever been heard at any Academy Awards”. It was not, Olivier surmised, inspired by admiration for his work so much as relief that the three categories were still open for somebody else to win.
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It was a spectacular conclusion to what turned out to be a distinct stage in his career. Olivier was not to make another film until 1948. By then he would not merely have re-established himself on the stage but have played a leading part in what many still believe to have been the golden age of British theatre.

W
hen does a good actor become great? Good actors are, if not two-a-penny, at least relatively common; two or three hundred of them, perhaps, in the British Isles at any given moment. Greatness is something different. “If theatre is to affect life, it must be stronger, more intense than ordinary life,” wrote Kafka. Similarly, if acting is to achieve greatness, it must be stronger, more intense than ordinary acting. No actor can show his greatness in every part: Richardson was a sublime Falstaff yet barely competent as Othello. Nor, when the greatness is there, need it necessarily manifest itself on every occasion; even the greatest actor will have the occasional off-night. Yet where it exists it can always be recognised and its presence can suffuse a theatre so that an audience will be almost literally intoxicated by what it is watching and hearing.
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It is something quite distinct from mere celebrity. “You can’t make yourself a star,” Olivier once said. “You can make yourself very, very good; other people make you a star.” The concept of “a star”, with its connotations of worldwide recognition and mass acclaim, may sometimes coincide with true greatness but is by no means the same. Olivier was a great actor as well as being a star, but he would still have been a great actor even had he not been a star. “Make up your mind, dear heart,” he said to Richard Burton, “do you want to be a household word or a great actor?” Burton wanted to be both and the world was thereby robbed of his potential to be truly great. Olivier was acclaimed as a
star and enjoyed it but in his scale of priorities he would never have put specious celebrity before the quality of his performances.
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“Between good and great acting,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, the most brilliant if also, at times, the most erratic dramatic critic to have illuminated the London stage in the twentieth century, “is fixed an inexorable gulf, which may be crossed only by the elect … Gielgud seizes a parasol, crosses by tight-rope; Redgrave, with lunatic obstinacy, plunges into the torrent, usually sinking within yards of the opposite shore; Laurence Olivier pole-vaults over, hair-raisingly in a single animal leap. Great acting comes more naturally to him than to any of his colleagues.” Tynan listed the qualifications that he believed necessary if an actor was truly to be great. First came the capacity for complete relaxation, then powerful physical magnetism. He must have commanding eyes that are visible at the back of the gallery and a commanding voice that is audible, without effort, at the back of the gallery. His timing must be superb and he must possess chutzpah, “the untranslatable Jewish word that means cool nerve and outrageous effrontery combined”. Last and rarest was the ability to communicate a sense of danger: “Watching Olivier, you feel that at any moment he may do something utterly unpredictable; something explosive; possibly apocalyptic.” Asked in what way his acting differed from Olivier’s, Richardson replied: “I haven’t got Laurence’s splendid fury.” It was this sense that, when he was on the stage, an eruption was imminent, the improbable likely, the impossible conceivable, that set Olivier aside from the other great actors of his generation. “It was the danger that produced the excitement of his performances,” wrote John Mortimer. “You had to watch him closely, every second, because you simply had no idea what on earth he was going to do next.”
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The commanding voice which Tynan stressed was essential for the great actor was something which Olivier cultivated sedulously and in which he took great pride. Doing a turn at the birthday party of a mutual friend, Chico Marx took up a microphone. Olivier berated him: “One thing we’ve got in the theatre is the human voice.” His own had more the
quality of brass than strings, Tyrone Guthrie considered. “I have never been able to understand those critics who are not aware of the intense musicality which infuses all his performances – a rare sensitivity to rhythm, colour, phrasing, pace and pitch.” The brass and strings analogy is revealing. Gielgud was strings; more exquisite, more melodious than Olivier but unable to match the power and forcefulness of the latter. So magnificent an instrument was Olivier’s voice that it could sometimes transcend the bounds of his dramatic vision. Comparing him to Charles Laughton, Simon Callow remarked that his “physical command of both the text and his own instrument resulted in performances which far exceeded the limitations of his interpretations. The part instilled itself in his chords and limbs, and took on a life of its own.”
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It was not only his voice which he trained with such disciplined intensity. His body was as much an instrument of his genius. He exercised ferociously; subjected his limbs to the most arduous tests and strains; took physical risks that most actors would have sought to avoid. Some people thought that he carried his physicality too far. He “got caught up in this mystique of his physical power and neglected other vital aspects of his craft,” said Jack Hawkins. True, he had ended up a great actor, but “he might have been greater yet”. He could so dominate a stage that he would distort the balance of the drama. There were occasions on which his pyrotechnics seemed, to the rest of the cast, to be extravagant and unwelcome. These were rare, however. Olivier did not often forget that he was a member of a team and that, if a team is to operate successfully, no single member must so stand out as to disturb its rhythm. He could command his body as he could command his voice and turn both into instruments in a greater harmony. When he thought it necessary, indeed, he could efface himself to the point of near invisibility.
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Samuel Butler’s observation that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains is only half true; taking pains has been responsible for creating mountains of dross which have added little to the cultural or intellectual treasures of the world. When added to a creative
imagination, however, it is indeed a formidable instrument. Olivier must have been among the hardest-working and most thorough of all great actors. He was always the first person to know his lines, he would wrestle with a part, battering it into submission, never relenting until in his own mind he had created a complete and detailed vision of its every nuance. When with his family or friends, he would without warning withdraw into an inner world, working out in his own mind the exact speed or intonation with which certain lines should be delivered; oblivious to those around him he would spend hours moving a chair, picking up a glass, until he had satisfied himself that he had got the movement right. Nothing was left to chance, the extemporaneous was anathema to him. “Week after week, day after day, hour after hour, practice makes perfect, practice makes perfect,” wrote Peter Brook. “It is a drudge, a grind, a discipline … Laurence Olivier repeats lines of dialogue to himself again and again until he conditions his tongue to a point of absolute obedience – and so gains absolute freedom.” For Ronald Pickup, one of the best of the talented young actors whom Olivier gathered around him at the National Theatre, it was the precision of Olivier’s acting that was the most impressive. “What I’ve learned from him is always to deal in specific very concrete intentions, never in generalisations. You have to know exactly why you’re doing and saying anything at any moment.” In one of the plays that Pickup acted in at the National, he marvelled at the pains Olivier was at to find a watch strap which it seemed to him would have suited the character he was playing. Nobody in the audience would know it was there, but Olivier knew. Having chosen the suit that he thought appropriate for the role, he wore it for several days before the dress rehearsal. It would take time before he had got used to the suit and the suit to him.
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Olivier needed to know what he looked like before he knew who he was. It was sometimes said of him that he started with the shoes, more often it was the nose. William Gaskill, one of the most talented of National Theatre directors, was a great believer in masks, which he used in several productions and as a teaching tool. Olivier scorned such
fanciful devices, but, as Gaskill pointed out, he was “the great mask actor of our time, working inwards from the externals of make-up and costume”. Once, before rehearsals for a new production had even started, Gaskill found Olivier sitting in front of a mirror with his false nose already moulded, trying on wigs. “I understood that he couldn’t start work until he knew what he was to look like.” When he was playing a historical figure he would go to great pains to ensure he looked as much like his subject as was possible. For Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra” he procured a copy of what was believed to be the only contemporary likeness of Caesar and wrote a letter to the man responsible for his appearance with five paragraphs on the appropriate style of wig along with anxious enquiries about the nose: “Could you not take a cast of Caesar’s nose from the bust and a cast of my nose from mine, and get the material between the two of them?” John Dover Wilson, the great Shakespeare scholar, unkindly pointed out that new research made it seem almost certain that the bust was in fact not of Caesar. But at least, he went on more comfortingly, it was what Shaw had in mind when he wrote the play.
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