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"How about Joan Plowright?" "Yes! She's a very remarkable person, intellectually equipped, attractive, has hosts of friends. People love her so much that they don't notice that I'm not really a very good host. She's one of the three or four best actresses in England, and she's an absolutely fantastic mother." Olivier himself fell in love with her in 1957, when she was playing his daughter in John Osborne's The Entertainer. She was 28, he was 50, and after finally burying the ashes of his marriage to Leigh, he married her in 1961. A sensible woman from the north of England, Plowright has been his anchor ever since, and her judgment, according to Olivier, is almost infallible. Though she interrupted her career when her children were born, Plowright has now put it back on course. Her most recent part was the title role in Keith Baxter's play Cavell, the story of a British nurse shot by the Germans in World War I. The play had a successful run in Chichester last summer, and she hopes to take it to Broadway, with Olivier directing.
All of Plowright's common sense has been necessary in the past dozen or so years, when Olivier suffered one devastating illness after another: phlebitis, cancer of the prostate, appendicitis, pneumonia and, worst of all, in 1974, a rare skin disease called dermatopolymyositis, which destroys the muscles. "I didn't mind the others as long as they didn't stop me from working," he says, "but I was terribly depressed by this thing. My life is almost bounded by that illness. I was very The you see, and I relied inviting for my effects upon what I might call Barrymoresque physical jokes. All of that is now cut off, and one has to think of less obvious methods." Some of these less obvious methods will be seen in King Lear, which Olivier recently completed for Britain's Granada Television. According to those on the set, Olivier turned his obvious weakness from a liability into an asset, a tool to portray the pathos of Shakespeare's mad and ravaged monarch.
Illness seems not to have disrupted his work schedule at all. From 1975 through 1981 he acted in no fewer than 20 films, including Marathon Man, A Bridge Too Far, The Boys from Brazil and the lamentable Inchon. "Any sort of thing that I haven't done before interests me," he says, "and there are any number of American parts I'd love to play. I feel very flattered if I'm acceptable in an American role." Then too there is the inducement of money, always important to the son of an impoverished parson. For any big part Olivier's fee is now at least $1 million.
Since his skin disease was arrested, Olivier has found comfort in the one form of exercise remaining to him, swimming. At his country home in West Sussex, about an hour and a half's drive south of London, he has built an enclosed pool, and he swims there twice a day. "I have a switch in my bedroom that turns on a blower in the pool room," he says, "and by the time I arrive, it's amply warm. I like the water to be 77° or 78°, but my wife won't go in at such a low temperature. So I set the thermostat at 80° and tell her it's 82°."