Olivier (28 page)

Few things gave Olivier greater pleasure than demonstrating his virtuosity by playing starkly contrasting roles. Oedipus and Mr Puff he had managed in a single evening, it was a year or more before he was able to follow the tragic Hurstwood with the lightweight swashbuckling of the highwayman Macheath, in a film of Gay’s “The Beggar’s Opera”. This involved Olivier in a substantial singing role. His voice was pleasant enough and he took lessons for several months, but he had never sung a significant role on a set or stage before. He and Stanley Holloway were the only singers who were not dubbed by professionals. The result was that, in terms of sound, his performance was manifestly inferior. He suggested that the rest of the cast should also be amateurs, but the director, the young but talented Peter Brook, near the start of his meteoric career, would have none of it. Brook, who had anyway originally wanted Richard Burton to play Macheath, suggested that Olivier too should be dubbed. Olivier in his turn would have none of it. To complicate matters
still further, while Brook conceived Macheath as a ragged proletarian, Olivier saw him as a debonair playboy, exercising his nefarious skills with nonchalant elegance. Brook’s Macheath would have been painted by Hogarth, Olivier’s by Lawrence at his most flamboyant. Brook was the antithesis of Olivier in that he believed a play should evolve during rehearsals, as much because of the input of the actors as of the director. A director still had to direct, however; he could not surrender control to an actor, however eminent. But in “The Beggar’s Opera” the chain of command was confused. As well as acting Macheath Olivier was co-producer, and this put him in a position where he could usurp much of the power that should have been Brook’s alone. “The position of a director who has less authority than his leading man is a rotten one,” Olivier admitted, “and poor Peter had an utterly miserable experience.”
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Brook would have echoed those words. He had deluded himself that, when it came to the point, Olivier would be as flexible as he himself was prepared to be. “But I did not know Olivier. He was a strangely hidden man. On stage and on screen he could give an impression of openness, brilliance, lightness and speed. In fact, he was the opposite. His great strength was that of the ox. He always reminded me of a countryman, of a shrewd, suspicious peasant taking his time … What I never realised was that, once a conception had taken root in him, no power could change the direction in which the ox would pull the cart.” According to Brook, Olivier at one point tried to get him removed and to take over as director himself. “Somehow I resisted, but between us we spoiled much of the picture.” With this judgment at least Olivier would have concurred. “I just hope and pray,” he wrote, “that my personal flop in ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ will be the worst that I shall ever disenjoy.”
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cratch an actor and you find an actor, Olivier was accustomed to remark. “I don’t know who I am,” he confessed to his son, Richard. “I’ve played two hundred characters in my life and know them all better than I know myself.” If even he did not know himself, what hope could there be for anyone else? Michael Meyer was talking about Olivier to Richardson and Gielgud. “I’ve known him as well as I’ve known you, Johnnie,” Richardson said to Gielgud. “Marvellous actor. Love the fellow. But I’ve no idea what the real man’s like.” “It’s extraordinary,” Gielgud agreed. “I’ve known him all these years and I admire him as you do. He’s always been most generous to me … And he’s such wonderful company, such a marvellous mimic and raconteur. I always adore seeing him, but I’ve no idea what he’s really like.” He’s not really like anything, was Kenneth Tynan’s view. “He’s like a blank page and he’ll be whatever you want him to be. He’ll wait for you to give him a cue, and then he’ll try to be that sort of person.”
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Olivier did have an almost magical capacity to blend in with whatever company he was keeping. Put him at the bar of a golf-club, a synod of the Church of England, an agricultural fair in Durham and he would be within minutes a golfer, a clergyman, a farmer. It might take him a little time to master the jargon, but so good was his ear and so quick his wits that within a few minutes he would be able to convince anyone that he was in his natural element. He might even convince himself. He would have made a wonderful bishop or ambassador, or rather, though
he would not necessarily have been very good at the job, he would have seemed far more episcopal or ambassadorial than any real incumbent of those offices would presume to be. Partly this was unconscious: it was his instinct to play the appropriate role. He was like a stick of Brighton rock, said Oscar Lewenstein, moving spirit of the Royal Court, “but with the word ‘Actor’ going right through”. Partly it was conscious. At one level he convinced himself that he was a bishop or ambassador, at another he was secretly aware that it was a sustained and enjoyable hoax. He spared no pains to prepare for and sustain the current role. When he was preparing himself for a filmed interview with Melvyn Bragg he procured a fawn, leather-buttoned cardigan, of a style affected by Simenon and other writers, and a pipe – an accoutrement to which he was obviously unaccustomed. “A good prop, you see,” he explained. “All authors smoke pipes, don’t they?”
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With the urge to conform went the ability to render himself inconspicuous. The actress Billie Whitelaw – Samuel Beckett’s “perfect actress” – said that the first thing she noticed about Olivier was that “in the street I wouldn’t have noticed him at all. Offstage, Olivier looked as if he might have worked in a bank.” He was capable of leaving a theatre, outside which a dense crowd was waiting to cheer him, and disappear round the corner without anyone realising he had been and gone. He gloried in his ordinariness. Interviewers, he complained, “always want to give me eccentricities, they want me to be quaint and Dickensian and full of character, very romantic”. He was none of those things. He was an ordinary man of extraordinary talents. Where he was extraordinary as a human being was in his lack of humanity, his failure to connect with others on anything except a superficial level. Up to a point he could love but he could not feel deep and lasting affection; he could represent characters to perfection on stage, but he could not truly understand them outside the theatre. Wyndham Lewis in 1936 painted a canvas called “Players upon a Stage”, in which a group of actors, composed of an assembly of props and bits of costume, perform to an audience of their own reflections. It was a scene in which Olivier might have felt himself at home.
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Early in 1952 Olivier was invited to take a company to Canada in the following year. He refused. “It is not easy to visualise what sort of a company we shall be having around us so far in the future, or what nature of repertoire we shall have to offer (should we in fact have any such).”
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He felt unusually uncertain about the future. L.O.P. needed something substantial, to do in Coronation year what the two Cleopatras had done during the Festival of Britain, but what that something should be he had no idea. Orson Welles offered readings from
MobyDick
, but even had this been aesthetically desirable the Board of L.O.P. – in effect Olivier himself – decided that it would not be “a good economic undertaking”. Terence Rattigan came to the rescue. At his best Rattigan was a playwright capable of work which was both well constructed and socially challenging. “The Sleeping Prince” was not in this category. It was a frothy romance about the Crown Prince of Carpathia, who fell in love with a chorus girl. Olivier claims that Rattigan thought this would suit the Oliviers very well; Rattigan says he thought it all wrong for them: “my little ‘occasional fairy tale’ couldn’t contain
one
of those two gigantic talents, let alone both.”
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Olivier had taken on the play largely because he thought it contained an excellent part for his wife. In this he was wrong. As Rattigan himself observed, she was “one of nature’s Grand-Duchesses”, unsuited for her chorus-girl role. When Rattigan went backstage in the interval on the first night Olivier asked him: “Tell me, Terry, how are they liking Puss?” “Very much indeed,” said Rattigan. “I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all. I don’t think she’s going over as well as she should be.” Rattigan thought Olivier’s performance was “magic … I would watch, in rehearsal, utterly spellbound as, over the weeks, he built his performance slowly and with immense application from a mass of tiny details, some discarded, some retained.” But, confronted by his wife’s difficulties in the part – compounded by the fact that she had by no means recovered from her breakdown – Olivier reined in his performance. It was not a disaster, commercially indeed it was a tolerable success, but the critics
for the most part thought little of it. “Once upon a time,” wrote Kenneth Tynan, “there was an actor called gruff Laurence Olivier, whose wife was an actress called pert Vivien Leigh, and a playwright called clever Terence Rattigan wrote a play for them with a gruff part for him and a pert part for her, and to nobody’s surprise it ran happily ever after, with twice weekly matinées.” It was, he said, “a quilted cushion of a play”.
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With some gallantry Olivier, on behalf of his wife and of himself, as both actor and director, apologised formally for mucking up the play. “Darlings,” Rattigan replied, “please accept my apologies for having written such a mucky, trivial, little play.” Noël Coward, who witnessed this orgy of humility, then contributed: “Children, may I say that as an author, producer and actor I have frequently managed to muck up my own acting, plays and productions and still survive.” After that, everyone felt better.
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“It is so wonderful to see him relaxed and relieved and happy about ‘Sleeping Prince’,” Vivien Leigh told Mu Richardson in an undated letter, presumably written when rehearsals were still in progress. “We have only seen ‘The Country Wife’ since we got back. It is a huge success but I can’t honestly say we cared for it much except for Miss Plowright who is very engaging.” Too engaging by half, she would no doubt have thought a few years later.
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It was a bad season otherwise – “the worst anyone can remember”, in the opinion of the
Daily Sketch
. The Royal Court, where the engaging Miss Plowright was enjoying such success, was one of the few beacons of hope in the London theatre. Olivier looked to Stratford. Before then, however, he made his third great Shakespearean film: “Richard III”. Vivien Leigh, according to Angela Baddeley, opposed the project – in part, at least because she had been denied the chance to play Princess Anne. Olivier was too old, she said; he would make himself ridiculous. Anyway, she needed him to be with her that summer: “Larry was betraying her by putting his career first.” In fact he was still prepared to make great sacrifices to sustain his wife, but when it came to the point, as always
throughout his life, he would put his acting first. He had hoped to produce the film with Mike Todd, believing that that would ensure he would get Richard Burton as Richmond and Orson Welles as Buckingham. Todd was killed in a flying accident and, instead, he settled for Korda. His relationship with that charismatic yet evasive figure remained equivocal. Olivier found Korda “very amusing, very witty, fantastically well self-educated”, but “there was something about him I didn’t like and didn’t trust”. On this occasion he did Olivier proud: neither Burton nor Welles but Gielgud, Richardson and Cedric Hard-wicke – making an unprecedented quartet of theatrical knights – and Claire Bloom as Lady Anne. Claire Bloom was not merely seduced by Richard III on the screen but by Olivier off it. Neither party seems to have attached great importance to the affair.
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This plethora of stars caused some jostling for position. Gielgud and Richardson insisted on equal billing with Olivier in all the advertising. Olivier agreed. But they were still suspicious. What about the line: “Laurence Olivier presents”? Would that be of the same size too? Again Olivier promised it would. “But I had it in copperplate writing, so it looked a bit different,” he remembered with satisfaction. The rivalry continued in the filming. Gielgud’s “false, fleeting, perjur’d Clarence” was much praised but it was noticed that his scenes were poorly lit. “Was this the director’s jealous hand at work?” speculated Gielgud’s biographer. Probably it wasn’t; but it could have been. As for Richardson, he matched Olivier in his reluctance to take direction. Olivier wanted Buckingham to be an out-and-out villain, almost as nefarious as Richard III himself; Richardson, either through perverseness or a genuine inability to summon up the necessary nastiness, played the part for sympathy; thus, in Olivier’s eyes, upsetting the balance of the production.
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“Olivier was superb, really superb … Oh my word, what a film!” was Harold Nicolson’s breathless verdict. It was, indeed, a memorable performance in what, on the whole, was a successful film. And yet the rabid fury of Olivier’s stage performance failed to translate to the
screen. He seemed, curiously, to be in a different production to the rest of the cast. “I felt a lack of reality about Larry,” wrote Kenneth Williams in his diary. “It was indeed a theatrical Richard, with funny walk, crook back, unformed hands and a plasticine nose. This, surrounded by so many realistic performance, looked somewhat bogus.” Olivier himself was dissatisfied but undiscomfited: “I call it a waggish performance,” he said. “I mean, it was pretty clever.” It was quite successful enough to whet his appetite to produce, direct and play the lead in at least one more of the great Shakespearean dramas. If it was humanly possible, that play would be “Macbeth”. In the end it turned out not to be humanly possible, but at least in 1955 he was able to play the part at Stratford in a season that was also to include some of the finest Shakespearean performances of his life.
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Olivier was then at the summit of his powers. There was much still to come and a whole new world yet to open in the running of the National Theatre, but his total mastery of the Stratford stage produced one of the great glories, perhaps the greatest glory, of the twentieth-century theatre. This was the more astonishing given that his private life was in tatters and that he insisted on playing all the major roles with, as his partner, a wife who was not merely unfaithful when off the stage but teetering on the edge of breakdown when on it.