(2 of 4)
He first showed that good greed at age nine, on the auditorium stage of All Saints' School in London. In the audience was Sybil Thorndike, then an Old Vic leading lady, who told Larry's father, "But this is an actor. Absolutely an actor. Born to it." From a list of his acting credits at school (Maria in Twelfth Night, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew), one imagines that his teachers had already spotted what director Elia Kazan would later cite as Olivier's "girlish" quality. Throughout his career -- as Lord Nelson in That Hamilton Woman, as Richard III, as the homicidal mystery writer in Sleuth -- Olivier would bat his eyes at the audience, soliciting its surrender. But belying those feminine eyes were the cruel, pliant lips, and on them the smile of a tiger too fastidious to lick his chops in anticipation of a tasty meal.
Emlyn Williams once remarked that Olivier had "always seemed to be at the height of his career." Not quite so. In 1929, his first regular stint of acting in the West End, he was in and out of half a dozen indifferent plays before Noel Coward cast him as the "other man" in Private Lives. Four years later, in Hollywood, he was fired from his first A-picture role as Greta Garbo's lover in Queen Christina. Once again Coward rescued Olivier, casting him in Theatre Royal (1934) as a dashing figure fashioned after John Barrymore, whose lightning sexuality Olivier had long admired and would often emulate.
In 1935 John Gielgud, the leading exponent of romantic classicism, hired Olivier to play Romeo to Gielgud's Mercutio. Then they swapped roles, and critics hailed the young boulevardier as a rising tragedian. Years later, when asked to enumerate his rival's strengths, Gielgud acutely replied, "Attention to detail; complete assurance in his conception of character; athleticism; power; and originality."
By 1943, when Olivier, as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was granted leave to make a film of Henry V, he had synthesized all his gifts. Here was a Henry true both to Shakespeare and to movie spectacle -- a Henry with Napoleonic martial wiles and the careless charm of a Cary Grant. It was the first of Olivier's three Shakespeare films as producer, director and star. In Hamlet (1948), which won him Oscars for best picture and best actor, he turned the melancholy prince into a manic-depressive swashbuckler and Elsinore into a film-noir castle. Richard III (1955) was his most masterly and entertaining picture. Looking eerily Nixonian, Olivier's Richard murdered with a style that suggested both deformed ambition and a sly sexual perversity. All three films convinced moviegoers that sentiments expressed in iambic pentameter could be matters of life and death.