Olivier (21 page)

Richardson, more phlegmatic, not so prone to jealousy, felt the rivalry less keenly, but there was sometimes rancour on his side as well. In his second book,
On Acting
, Olivier describes a bizarre incident when the company was on tour on the continent and had arrived in Paris. Richardson was annoyed that they had opened with “Richard III” and that Olivier’s predictable triumph had stolen the limelight from his own Peer Gynt. A drunken Richardson seized Olivier and held him over the edge of a balcony, sixty feet above the cobbles below. Olivier remained calm and suggested it would be sensible if Richardson pulled him back. “I saw in his eyes that if I’d done anything other than I had, he’d have let me go. For a brief moment he wanted to kill me.” In his official biography Terry Coleman has suggested that this anecdote was fantasy or at least grossly exaggerated. It does indeed sound most improbable. However, when Derek Granger asked Lady Richardson about the incident and suggested that it had never happened, she replied. “Oh, no; it was even worse.” She, of course, was not a witness to the incident but Michael Munn, another of Olivier’s biographers, records that once when he was present, Gielgud asked Richardson: “Why did you try to kill Larry?” “Oh, I was just annoyed with him for being smug.” “You tried to kill Olivier?” put in Munn, incredulously. “Oh, just for a moment or two when I felt like throwing him from a great height.” At least it seems there may have been some kind of
confrontation, proving, perhaps, no more than that when great artists are pitted against each other, passions are likely to run high.
⁹

What should come next? Olivier and Richardson assumed that they would remain with the Old Vic for several years, but though this gave them great professional satisfaction it did not provide enough in the way of income. “Television is taking America by storm and throwing the film industry into panic,” wrote Anthony Bartley, Deborah Kerr’s husband. Would Olivier encourage the actors at the Old Vic to espouse this new medium and, by implication, might he consider gracing it himself? It had taken Olivier long enough to admit that the cinema should be treated as a significant art form; it would be many years before he would do as much for television. He was even cautious when it came to committing himself to making a new film. Terence Rattigan pressed him to do so in the spring of 1946. He saw little chance of undertaking one before 1948, he replied. He would go back to the Old Vic for one more play and then had “other plans, rather vague” in other parts of the world: “As you know I am really in a very tired condition, and when the present is so formidable one has to take the future little bit by little bit.” He was being disingenuous. By the time he told Rattigan that he had no plans to make a film he must already have discussed with del Giudice the possibility of making a film of “Hamlet”. By the end of 1946 the decision had been made. It was to rank with “Henry V” as the most important, if not the most successful film he ever made.
¹⁰

As with “Henry V”, he was determined to be in sole charge. He would produce, direct and star. The financial rewards for this were substantial, if not approaching what he could have earned in Hollywood. He was to be paid £1,000 a month as producer, the same as director, and £2,000 a month as actor, with a cut of the profits if there turned out to be any. But the load he accepted in return for this was overwhelming. “No-one unacquainted with film work can appreciate the burden that a man shoulders in taking on the direction of such a picture as ‘Hamlet’ and acting the Prince himself,” wrote Harcourt Williams, who played the First Gravedigger. “What is matter indeed for the Recording Angel is
the fact that Olivier, working day after day, month after month, maintained a perfect equilibrium and sanity of outlook.” As producer he would be among the first to arrive; as director and actor he would be active throughout the day; as producer, again, he would be among the last to leave. Sometimes he worked a sixteen-, even an eighteen-hour day. No normal human could have endured the strain; Olivier was exhausted, but relished every minute of it.
¹¹

The first task was to cut a play lasting four and a half hours to a film script that would run for something near half as long. Alan Dent was called in to help with this, but, according to Olivier at least, he contributed almost nothing except approving nods. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern vanished; to the subsequent confusion of people like Ronald Harwood who had come to “Hamlet” by way of the film and could not understand what Tom Stoppard’s brilliantly witty comedy “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” was all about. But Olivier was as ruthless with his own part. One of his noblest soliloquies – “How all occasions do inform against me” – was likewise removed. It tore his heart out, Olivier said, “but you have to cut it, because it was just dangerous to get discursive there, from a film put-together point of view”. Whenever in doubt whether a passage would be obscure or over-complex, the “Gertie” test was applied – Gertie being a hypothetical girl in the cheap seats who had barely heard of “Hamlet” and whose powers of concentration were limited. If Gertie would not understand a passage, out it went.
¹²

The film was to be in black and white. “I see it as an engraving rather than an oil painting,” Olivier would answer loftily when asked why he had made this decision. “The fact is,” he admitted later, “I was having a blazing row with Technicolor and wouldn’t do another film with them.” Another reason was that he wished to differentiate between “Henry V” and “Hamlet”. In “Henry V” he had gloried in the opportunities to escape the theatre and luxuriate in wide landscapes and grandiose battle scenes. “Hamlet” was confined, almost claustrophobic; occasional glimpses of the sea beating against the castle walls was
the only relief from the grey rooms and staircases in which the play evolved.
¹³

For his mother Olivier cast Eileen Herlie, eleven years his junior. She managed to age herself convincingly but was still a most attractive woman, reinforcing the Oedipal message which had been conveyed in Olivier’s stage “Hamlet” some ten years before. The situation would have been still more bizarre if, as Vivien Leigh had hoped would happen, she had played Ophelia, thus being five years older than her putative mother-in-law. The possibility cannot have been taken seriously. Probably Olivier realised it would not work, instead the actress he described as “a ravishing sixteen-year-old”, Jean Simmons, was given the part and did it uncommonly well.
¹⁴

His style of direction had become still more autocratic. His courtesy was unfailing, said Harcourt Williams, “but his conviction that his way is the right one is unshakeable. Indeed, argument with anyone who knows so surely what he wants would be a waste of time.” Peter Cushing, who played Osric, noted that early in the filming Olivier was considerate and patient, ready to take into account other people’s points of view. “At first it was ‘Let’s try it this way’ or ‘What do you think about … ?’ But towards the end it was ‘Do it this way and don’t argue, God dammit!’” There was little resentment among the cast: partly because, though Olivier’s way might not be the only, or even the best one, it was never obviously wrong; partly because they realised the strain that he was under and accepted that he did not have the time to debate each point. “Olivier was an autocrat, no doubt about that,” said John Laurie, a humble sentry in this production, but later to win fame as Private Frazer in “Dad’s Army”. “But in his position he had to be.”
¹⁵

His physical energy was as amazing as his mental. Esmond Knight as Bernardo, with Marcellus and Francisco, had the job of trying to hold Hamlet back when he wanted to accost the Ghost. “It was like holding a Bengal tiger,” he remembered. “He was immensely strong.” When duelling with Terence Morgan, who played Laertes, Olivier encouraged his adversary to attack more vigorously. “Just try and punch it into me,”
he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll parry it.” He didn’t, Morgan pierced his shirt and blood spouted. Undisturbed, Olivier paused only to apply a dressing and then was at it hammer and tongs again. But it was the great leap in the final act, when Olivier launched himself from fourteen feet above onto the King below, that proved the most testing feat of all. The stand-in who was to make the jump seemed to Olivier insufficiently dramatic. He brushed him aside and took on the task. He might kill himself, he reckoned; he might damage himself for life; he might hurt himself seriously; he might hurt himself slightly; or he might escape unscathed. He thought that there was an equal chance of any one of these outcomes. In the event he got away with it; it was the unfortunate King who was knocked unconscious. As he left the scene Olivier heard one of the cameramen mutter to another: “Good old Larry! He gets on with it.”
¹⁶

Desmond Dickinson, the director of photography, had his doubts about some of Olivier’s ideas but said that nevertheless he had learned “that Laurence Olivier is quite plainly a genius, and ‘Hamlet’ is his film, every foot of it”. His overriding concept was made clear before a word had been spoken, when the preamble reads: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” He had stolen it from a Hollywood film starring Clark Gable, he admitted. Someone asked Gable what he was reading. “‘Hamlet’.” “What’s that?” “It’s about a man who couldn’t make up his mind.” This approach was one to which Olivier adhered. When a student teacher appealed to him for advice on how to play Hamlet, Olivier advised him not to worry about psychological niceties: “It is simply a play about a man who could not make up his mind … he just can’t and you must just feel that he can’t, that’s all.” It was a reasonable and tenable approach. The trouble was that Olivier patently
could
make up his mind.
¹⁷

Olivier himself admitted that he was better suited to more positive and straightforward character roles, like Hotspur or Henry V, and that he was somewhat at sea in the “lyrical, poetical role of Hamlet”. Guthrie put it more brutally. “The film makes absolute nonsense of its premise,”
he wrote, “for it showed a person … who shouldered aside all opposition with splendid vigour, but paused now and then to say a few reflective words which were completely at odds with the appearance and behaviour of their speaker.” Olivier was far too good an actor to put in a bad performance, but he failed to achieve greatness or even to be convincing. With one or two conspicuous exceptions – “Technically pedantic, aurally elephantine,” Tynan deemed it – the film got deferential, even glowing reviews. Particularly was this the case in the United States, where its reception bordered on the ecstatic. “Hamlet” won four Oscars, including Best Picture and, for Olivier, Best Actor. Not conceivably could it be called a failure. But Olivier was not right in the part and his satisfaction at the popular success was tempered by his private conviction that it did not show him at his best.
¹⁸

J. Arthur Rank, who gained the most financially from the film’s success, had every reason to be delighted. Olivier had treated him pretty roughly while filming was in progress. Rank had been forbidden access to the studios and denied a view of any of the rushes. (It is said that one of his executives managed to see half an hour of it. “What’s it like?” demanded Rank. “Mr Rank, it’s wonderful. You’d never know it was Shakespeare.”) But when it came to the promotion and distribution of the film, he could no longer be kept at arm’s length. Olivier had doubts about Rank’s adequacy. “The picture is being made with the most marvellous enthusiasm and co-operation by all concerned and unusually intensive hard work,” he wrote severely. “It is neither fair nor just if the ultimate exploiters of the film cannot be expected to take the same amount of trouble over their part of it.” The great mogul of British cinema can rarely have been so sharply rebuked. Olivier had no cause to repeat the reprimand. Rank did him proud. It was not merely in Britain and the United States that the film performed sensationally at the box office. It was a hit in Singapore, with Chinese subtitles. In Romania it ran for eighteen weeks from ten in the morning till eleven at night with every seat sold in advance. “Altogether it would seem that the deserved fruits of fourteen months’ blood, toil and sweat are beginning to tumble
from autumn’s branches,” wrote the musical director, Muir Mathieson, with unwonted lyricism.
¹⁹

After this triumph Rank would have let Olivier make any film he wanted. But did he want to? The Old Vic was awaiting his return, but would not another season there merely be repeating what he had done before? He had acted recently on Broadway and felt no immediate wish to return to Hollywood. But south-eastward, look, the land was bright.

O
livier’s decision – and it was almost entirely his own personal decision – to take a company to Australasia in 1948 seemed to everyone surprising and to some inexplicable. The idea had been suggested by the British Council, but without any real expectation that it would be taken up. Australia and New Zealand, if not a theatrical desert, were short of fertile areas. They were also a very long way away – more than four weeks by boat. Olivier says that the main reason for his decision was his belief that it was not enough for the Old Vic just to consolidate its London base: what was needed was a second company, so that one would be permanently on tour. “I think I ought to piss off now,” he told Ralph Richardson. “I’ll go to Australia for the best part of a year and I promise you there’ll be a decent company by the time that I come back.” The distance was a recommendation: the journey out would provide an opportunity for rehearsals while, on the way back, they could prepare for the next Old Vic season.
¹

Another consideration must have been the relief at escaping for the best part of a year from the whirlpool in a goldfish bowl that his life in London had become. Olivier had already had to fight desperately to preserve what little was left of his private life. In spite of the pleading of his publicity team he refused to receive in his home anyone who was not a personal friend: “Were this slender gate broken down it would be quite impossible to conduct our lives in any degree of privacy.” But outside
his home the pressure was almost unendurable. He compounded his problems by his inability – due partly to good manners, partly an inbuilt conscientiousness – to ignore approaches which most people in his position would have consigned immediately to the waste-paper basket. He was bombarded by letters from actual or would-be theatres – youth, repertory, amateur, professional, urban, rural, Polish, Kenyan – asking him to be their President or Patron, to attend their performances, speak at their annual conferences, provide financial support. Usually he declined, but always with apologies. To the Hall Green Little Theatre in Birmingham he agreed to serve as President, but “on the solemn understanding that it is only my name you want, and only my name you will ever get”. Always such promises were made; rarely were they adhered to. Even the cranks and lunatics got replies. One correspondent, a Jane Smith, had “a strange feeling, perhaps you can call it sixth sense,” that Olivier was her stepbrother. She repeatedly told Olivier that this was the case, suggesting a test by which the matter could be proved. Eventually Olivier lost patience. He had written many times, he said: “I say now, quite definitely and for the last time, I am not your stepbrother, nor have I a scar on the back of my right hand.” Mr James Jackson of California addressed his letter to “Mr, Sir, Knight Laurence Olivier, Greatest Actor, London, England”. The Post Office had no trouble delivering the letter; Olivier found more difficulty in allaying Mr Jackson’s concern that the Communist Party, disguised as the First Baptist Church, was poisoning his (presumably Jackson’s rather than Olivier’s) grandmother and had previously disposed of the Duke of Windsor, President Nixon and nine American astronauts. At least Olivier was spared letters of this kind when aboard the S.S.
Corinthic
bound to Perth, Western Australia, from Liverpool.
²