Laurence Olivier: 1907-1989: Absolutely An Actor. Born to It

Laurence Olivier: 1907-1989

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Except in the Shakespeare films, Olivier in this period usually appeared with Vivien Leigh, his wife from 1940 to 1960. They had fallen in love as co- stars of the 1937 film Fire over England; toured the U.S. in a Romeo and Juliet so poorly received that they had to refund money to angry ticket holders; returned to Broadway in 1951 in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar and Cleopatra (dubbed by wags "Two on the Nile"). By the mid-'50s this beautiful actress was tobogganing into mental illness and Olivier was in desperate need of a new challenge. Luck smiled from a surprising direction: the angry young Royal Court Theater. As Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer (1957, < filmed in 1959), a great actor found himself playing a seedy music-hall comic in a tantalizing blend of parody and autobiography.

Yet Olivier always remained a Proteus of the footlights; he bent, folded, spindled, mutilated himself to fit his dynamic conception of the roles. In early Shakespearean parts, Olivier padded his legs so as to look good in tights. In 1945 he went to a gym to sculpt those legs into felicitous muscularity before playing Oedipus in a Greek kilt. To deepen his natural tenor voice into Othello's baritone, he studied with a vocal coach and was soon speaking a full octave lower. His most faithful theatrical aid was the makeup kit. Said Coward: "I cannot think of any other living actor who has used such vast quantities of spirit gum with such gleeful abandon."

There was no Method to his masquerades. Graduates of the Actors Studio might psychoanalyze themselves into their roles; Olivier worked from the outside in, often finding character in caricature, refusing only to err on the side of restraint. Although it was what made him exciting to watch, his outsize playing occasionally exceeded conventional interpretations. Olivier's Othello (1964, filmed the following year), with thick ruby lips and rolling Jamaican cadences, provoked charges of racism. His Shylock (1970, televised in 1974) was found by critic Clive James to resemble Disney's stingy zillionaire Scrooge McDuck.

Late in his life Olivier might have retired on his laurels: the knighthood in 1946, the life peerage in 1970, the thanks of several nations and generations. But in 1974 nature played a dirty trick on this man for whom strength and agility were two tools of genius. Olivier was struck with dermatopolymyositis, a crippling degeneration of skin and muscular tissue. Although he had been robbed of the energy to seize the stage eight times a week, Olivier could not stop working; he even "appeared," as a recorded hologram, in the 1986 West End musical Time. He guested in British mini-series (Brideshead Revisited, Lost Empires). And he worked for any movie producer with gall and a ton of money. Dozens of robust cartoons followed: MacArthurs and moguls (The Betsy), wily old Jews (The Boys from Brazil) and scheming Nazis (Marathon Man), all shamelessly strutting their charisma, all fulfilling critic Alan Brien's dictum that "there is a kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable."

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