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Laurence Olivier - Greatest English-Speaking Actor of the Twentieth Century 1907-1989

Art is a little hit larger than life — it’s an exhalation of life and I think you probably need a little touch of madness.
— LAURENCE OLIVIER

His career that spanned more than six decades, Laurence Olivier appeared in more than 120 stage roles, almost 60 film roles, and more than 15 ‘IV projects. He lived most of his life in England but was a Hollywood icon, earning eleven Academy Award nominations. He won two Oscars and received two honorary Oscars for special achievements. Olivier, said British playwright Charles Bennett, could speak the lines of Shakespeare’s plays as though he were “actually thinking them.” It is no wonder that he is widely viewed as the greatest English-speaking actor of the twentieth century.
Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, 1907. He
was the third child of Agnes Louise Crookenden and Gerard Kerr Olivier, a
stern prep-school master and Anglican minister. In 1910 Gerard moved his
family to London, where he served at St. James’s Church in Netting Hill.
Laurence was sent to the All Saints Choir School, an exclusive boys’ academy in London’s West End. In 1917 he made his stage debut as Brutus in a school performance of Shakespeare \Julius Caesar. In 1921 he enrolled at St. Edward’s School at Oxford University, and after graduating in ] 924, he attended the Central School of Speech and Drama in London,
At nineteen, Olivier joined the Birmingham Repertory Company. An impatient young man, Olivier was indifferent, even sloppy, when horcd. Dissatisfied with the exaggerated mannerisms that were the norm in acting at the time, he believed that realistic, psychological intensity was more powerful.
When Olivier costarred with Jill Esmond in Bird in Hand 3^ the Royalty Theatre, she suggested he dress more fashionably and take greater pride in his appearance. The two became engaged in 1929, and in 1930—after Olivier appeared in Noel Coward’s Private Lives—they were married. The play went to Broadway, and Esmond joined the cast in 1931.
Despite his initial disdain of filmmaking, Olivier next landed a role in the British-German film The Temporary Widow and the British film Too Many Crooks. Soon after, Olivier was signed with RKO Pictures in Hollywood. But he was dissatisfied with his roles in Friends and Lovers and The Yellow Ticket (both 1931), and he got poor reviews. Discouraged, he returned to London and to relative anonymity on the British stage.
Olivier’s fortunes changed when, in 1935, famed actor John Gielgud chose Olivier to alternate with him in playing both Romeo and Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Olivier received disappointing reviews as Romeo but was highly praised for his portrayal of Mercutio. Newcomer Vivien Leigh costarred with Olivier in Fire Over England’(1936) and played Ophelia to Olivier’s Hamlet at a special performance of’Hamlet in Denmark. Olivier’s performance was fueled by his growing interest in psychology; he had read a collection of psychoanalytic essays and decided to apply the principles ro acting. Olivier delivered his lines in a clipped, anguished sryle suggesting the torment that Hamlet was experiencing. Audiences were thrilled. Laurence Olivier was now a full-fledged star. He was also involved with Vivien Leigh. The year 1939 was a high point for both actors: Olivier’s smoldering performance as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights earned him an Oscar nomination; Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara in the epic Cone With the Wind brought her a Best Actress Oscar.
Olivier next applied his trademark intensity to a string of films: Rebecca (1940); Pride and Prejudice (1940); That Hamilton Woman (1941), and the war movie Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941). After That Hamilton Woman opened, Oliviet and Leigh married one another.
While taking a break from his service in the British military during World War II, Olivier starred in, directed, and produced a film version of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944). It was a landmark in filmmaking: no one had ever made a serious—and successful—movie adaptation of a Shakespeare play. Olivier received both a Best Actor Oscar nomination and a special Oscar in recognition of his outstanding achievement.
After Olivier completed military service in 1944, he joined his friend and colleague Ralph Richardson at the famed Old Vic Theatre in London, where he turned in a stellar performance in Richard III. In 1948 he repeated his Hamlet role in a spectacular film adaptation that won a British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award {the British Oscar) and four American Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor. Olivier became the first in Oscar history to direct himself in an Academy Award-winning performance.
Olivier did not appear in another film until 1951 (The Magic Box). In 1952 he costarred in Carrie, a screen version of Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie, while Leigh starred as Blanche DuBois in a film version of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Leigh’s dramatic performance won her a second Best Actress Academy Award. By the late 1950s Leigh and Olivier’s marriage was failing, in part because of Leigh’s mental illness. They divorced in I960, The following year Olivier married actress Joan Plowright, whom he met while performing in The Entertainer (I960).
From that time until the early 1970s, Olivier performed intermittently on stage and screen, preferring to dedicate himself to administrative work at London’s St. James Theatre and as the first director of the National Theatre at the Old Vic. His screen persona as a romantic leading man shifted; he began playing “character” roles, often disguised under heavy makeup. His first such role was an Oscar-nominated performance as the washed-up vaudeville star Archie Rice in The Entertainer (I960). He also appeared in Spartacus (1960), Khartoum (1966), and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). Olivier delighted audiences with leading roles in Othello (1965) and Sleuth (1972), both of which earned Oscar nominations. Among his more notable character roles was the vile Nazi dentist in Marathon Man (1976). He obtained his final Oscar nomination as Ezra Licberman in The Boys From Brazil (1978).
Suffering from cancer and other health problems, Olivier resigned his post with the National Theatre in 1973. He made no further stage appearances, although he continued to work in films and on television. Some reviewers criticized his choice of roles during the 1970s and 1980s, but critic Richard Schickel saw Olivier’s persistence differently. “To those of us who believe that the best kind of heroism is to be found in the relentless practice of one’s profession , . . [Olivier] became a genuinely heroic figure,” Schickel wrote.
Olivier won five Emmy Awards for his roles in television productions, including Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1973), Brideshead Revisited (1982), and for his last TV performance, King Lear (1984). Despite his failing health, he also published an autobiography that year, Confessions of an Actor. On July 11, 1989, Sir Laurence Olivier died at his home in West Sussex, England.

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