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Olivier is interested not in theories but in specifics: how a character looks or walks, rather than how he feels. "You must contrive to make an audience believe," Olivier says. "My own childish belief would have them think that what was going on onstage was really happening. When I was 17, I saw John Barrymore's Hamlet in London, and I thought that it was burningly real. I believed he was Hamlet, and I believed in the situations through which he was going. The actor's ambition is to put an audience in the position in which they are lost in you, hi what you are doing."
Awed by Barrymore's wild leaps and bounds, Olivier became the most athletic stage actor of his generation, bringing the excitement of movement, as well as that of sound and expression, to the stage. "I had the voice," Sir John Gielgud once said; "Larry had the legs." Olivier also became the most daring. He would, and still will, lay himself bare, make himself vulnerable as few actors are willing to do. "A great actor has to expose himself," says Producer Derek Granger, who worked with Olivier when he was director of the National Theater, then on several TV plays. "Larry has never been afraid of revealing his nakedness."
On more than one occasion, that willingness to expose himself makes embarrassing but fascinating reading. He writes of the clandestine beginning of his romance with his second wife, Vivien Leigh, in the late '30s. Both were already married, and their public adultery shocked many at the time. Then he describes the horrifying conclusion, largely brought about by her infidelities and emotional problems. But part of the problem, he indicates, may also have been that he failed to satisfy her sexual demands, which finally provoked him to tell her that an athlete onstage cannot always be an athlete in bed.
In conversation, Olivier only hints at such a problem, blaming part of the trouble on Leigh's overidentification with one of her two Academy Award-winning roles, that of the obsessively promiscuous Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. (The other role, of course, was Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind.) "My late wife Vivien was too much affected by the parts she played," he says, "and if she got ill, which she certainly did, dreadfully had a great deal to do with playing Blanche Dubois, being ill in the same way.
"I can't tell you why I stayed with her so many years. I did. I didn't know what else to do, but to stay along and suffer. I couldn't have been in love with her all of the time, possibly. But you develop a very deep feeling if you have the determination to go through a terrible lot to be together in the first instance, as we did, to go through scandal, to receive awful letters from the public, to have people spitting at you in the street. It breeds in you a great determination. And that will outwear a lot of bad weather; it will stand constant in the teeth of the gale and in the drenching of the flooding rain." Olivier seems to feel the force of the gale at that very moment and gloomily, unhappily adds: "Wish you'd talk about something else."