Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) Baron Olivier, OM

with smoldering good looks and a strong athletic presence Laurence Olivier had a reputation as the greatest actor of the 20th century in films like weathering Heights and Rebecca he raised the acting bar to new levels and for years he led a life of high drama off the screen - with the tempestuous marriage to Vivian Leigh making him half of one of Hollywood's original super couples olivia was the youngest actor to every night it and the first to become a life peer but famously insisted on being called not sir not Lord but simply Larry his acting talent and his future destiny were both apparent from an early age which something he talks about in this interview first on location at the Old Vic Theatre and then later from the BBC Studios on the programme great acting with Kenneth Thailand when you were 10 years old Ellen Terry said the boy who plays the part of Brutus is already a great actor can you remember playing Brutus oh yes I do I do indeed my father had a story about Forbes prophets and I never believed it but my father used to tell it so I'll tell it for what it's worth I don't know what it's worth in truth but he said that he met Forbes Robson on that occasion as he put it Forbes orbs and had tears in his eyes when my father said my little boy isn't bad is he or something and he said that Forbes Robinson said my dear man he is Brutus he said well I don't see how can have been a tense till your father was a high Anglican clergy he was a high Anglican clergy did he have a great influence on your life oh yeah oh yes very much very much you see both my brother and I started yeah at least for the great sense of ritual and it was these elaborate rituals that gave you the idea perhaps of acting yes oh yes and my father's great promise and they in the pulpit did your father approve of you of them decaying on the stage well as a matter of fact although my relationship with him had been extremely distant all my youth I was terrified of him he was very frightening father figure Victorian father figure I absolutely worshipped and adored my mother who died when I was 13 years old and I I often think and say that I perhaps I've never got over it anyway my father had to take over not knowing me very much I think to him I was rather an unnecessary child he I don't blame him at all because I was probably very fat and absolutely brainless but finally when my brother went to India as an Indian rubber planter not esteemed yet rather planner but as an English driver planter in India I was filled with the glamour of what my brother was doing and when we'd seen him off on his boat in Tilbury we got back home to Letchworth when my father was rector I said well when can I follow Dickie to India father please about 1 or 2 years I don't want to go to the University and my father said you're talking nonsense you're going to be an actor and this was a complete surprise - yes it was I was amazed that he a that he thought things out for me at all and be that hint thought things out that far and that it had thee I secretly knew that he was right that I ought to be an act have you find it difficult to find bits of yourself in the evil characters you played what you need to make up your make up as an actor is observation intuition you must at its most highfalutin the exam most highfalutin expression of it the actor is as important as the illuminator of the human heart is as important as the psychiatrist of the doctor administrator like that's putting him very high and mightily at the opposite end of that poll you've got to find in the actor a man who will not be too proud to scavenge that tiniest little bit of human circumstance observe it use it find it use it some time or another I frequently observed things and thank God if I haven't got a very good memory for anything else but I got a memory for little details and I've had things in my back of my mind for as long as eighteen years before I've used them and perhaps in those little tiny things maybe the key to a whole characterization we're going to look now at a scene from the film of Richard the third it's the scene after richard has successfully made love to the widow of one of his victims was a woman in this humour wood what's happen in this humour one my dukedom to a widow's chastity I do mistake my personal this way upon my life she finds although I cannot myself to be a mapper net I'd be a charges for a lookingglass and entertain some score or two of tailors to study fashions to adorn my body since I am crept in favor with myself I will maintain it to some little cost shine out till I have bought a glass that I may see my shadow as I pass did you know at the time that that was going one of the key performances of your career no no a lot of things contributed to it I said talking about scavenging just now one thing that may lead an actor to be successful in a part it may not always but may is to try to be unlike somebody else in it at the time Annette took over that part first of all Don Wolfie had made an enormous success in the part only eighteen months previously and I didn't want to play the part at all because either was much too close to this colleague success and I had seen it and when I was learning it I could hear nothing but Donald voice in my mind's ear and see nothing but him in my mind's eye and so I thought this won't do I've just got to think of something else well my first thought I'd always had images pictures had heard imitations of old actors imitating Henry Irving and so I did right away an imitation of these old actors imitating Henry Irving's voice that's why I took that on a sort of narrow kind of focal address then I thought about looks and I thought about the big bad wolf and I thought about director under whom I had suffered in extremis in New York called Jed Harris the physiognomy of the big bad wolf was said to have been founded upon jade handed and so hence the nose which originally was very much bigger than it was finally in the film and so with one or two extraneous externals I began to build up a character a characterization I'm afraid I do work mostly from the outside in I usually collect whether consciously or unconsciously I usually collect a lot of details a lot of characteristics and find a creature swimming about somehow in the middle of them your excursions into contemporary players things like the sleeping Prince by mr. Ratigan John Osborne's the Entertainer I adored the entertain I think it's the most wonderful part that I've ever played let's have a look now at a scene from the entertainer film it's a scene in which the middle-aged and unsuccessful musical comic Archie Rice knowing that his careers coming to an end talks to his daughter on the empty stage of an empty seaside theatre where they're performing you think I'm just a musical actor you know when you're up here when you're up here you think you love all those people around you out there but you don't you don't love them like Oh learn it properly we'll get yourself a technique and smiled on you smile and look the friendliest jolliest thing in the world that you would be justice Dave and used up it's like everybody else see this face this face can split open with warmth and humanity it can sing tell the worst and funniest stories in the world or a great mob of dead drab X and it doesn't matter it doesn't matter it doesn't matter because look look at my eyes I'm dead behind these eyes I'm dead just like the whole gun shot a lot out there Archie Rice was influenced by a negro blues singer is that are there any actors who've influenced you to that degree yes lots of them I've mentioned Fairbanks Barrymore who's Hamlet I first saw when I was 17 years old and Noel Coward in this way influenced me a great deal he lent me a very stern professionalism of all people I've ever watched with the greatest delight I think was in another field in Talib acid' field I wouldn't like anybody to think that I was imitating Syd field when I was doing the Entertainer well there's other things in it little things but Syd field was a great comic in this man is a lousy one but I know when I imitate said field now to this day I still borrow from him freely and unashamedly I watch I had I watch all my colleagues very carefully Madame or four different qualities which they have and it's I think the most interesting thing to see is that an actor is most successful when not only all his virtues but all his disadvantages come into useful play in upon merit Olivia's first love was always the stage which perhaps explains why he's moving two films in the 1930s wasn't easy it had taken two attempts to crack Hollywood before his talents were able to fully flourish in this interview from lineup film night we seemed talking about that journey and how he eventually combined roles of film producer director and actor when you began to make a name for yourself in the West End in the early thirties it was rather surprisingly not in classical roles at all but in light comedy and rather messy idle parts one thinks of the fact that you played opposite male coward in private lives that you played Beau Geste alongside him way down the corridor - but I've done quite some juvenile leading roles I'd suppose you'd call them from about 1928 to 1930 that sort of thing and then I joined up with Noland private lives and saved that terrible part Victor print which I must say he's gonna have the decency to apologize about anything and it was very exciting to be in a hit for the first time in the glamour figures as Getty Loren some know you can imagine how glorious it was and then we went to New York with it then it was in New York why we were playing at that time my wife my first wife Jill was in the play then she and I signed up with Hollywood me we had little not terribly demanding approaches for more studios but why we chose was RKO because they'd episode us by the lady who sold the idea to us because that was the youngest studio and it was better for youngish people have long to a younger studio I don't think it worked out at all I did three pictures in two years and the first of it first which was an extraordinary that I would hate to see it now was called friends and lovers with them Adolphe Manju Adolf as he was called Lili Damita Erich von Stroheim and myself and then I played two other films there in two years that's what I didn't came back home rather in disgust but of course they had the dad that a terrible Wall Street Crash and the film industry had gone through a fearsome time I did start about three or four other pictures but about the second day little men with black coats and spectacles would come down onto the floor and say that's it it's all wrap it up and then when you went back to Hollywood towards the end of the thirties of course you began to make tremendous successes and films like Rebecca and weathering Heights did that change the whole picture of Hollywood for you the man who changed Hollywood for me and the whole idea I thought I was very snobbish about films I did them to make money and said so all over the place much to the disgust of those sand colors of this world but the man who changed me was the man I quarreled with most bitterly of all really and that was William Wyler and you'd be amazed at the scenes between Merle and myself and Willie Wyler that took place beneath that heart-throbbing romance called weathering Heights you'd be amazed at the temperament and the spit of a fury and the passion and it rages with each others we went through and he we were very in archival each other on the floor but it was he who said persuaded me simply with patient talking he wasn't a pleasant director to talk to to work with but he was a very interesting man to talk to he was much more coherent off the floor than honored that EEP he told me that I must understand there wasn't anything that could not be done in that medium if you found a way to do it and it was he who persuaded me that you could even do Shakespeare successfully on a film when I came to make mothering Heights I'm sorry Henry the fifth and he was a major in the army staying Claridge's Hotel which so many majors in the American army seemed able to do and I asked him if he would direct handle affair and he said well it's sweet of you know things that come he said you better do it yourself and so that's where Donna but if it hadn't been for him I'd never have thought of making it and is it true that before him and before watering Heights you had in fact been turned down for the lead opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina yes that's true but she was right I wasn't up to her standards at all and I haven't got I hadn't got the stature necessary to be her leading man anything like she was absolutely right she was very sweet to me years later and it's a sort of affair I had to polish netic messages through George Cukor and people I said please tell us she was absolutely right I wasn't I wasn't couldn't hold a candle to her I was too young for her I was about 2 or 3 years younger I was very light I was only about 25 and she was not like she had immense personality colossal experience tremendous presence and was a great great artist and completely understood every single thing that was to be thought or understood about her medium she was the mistress of it queen of it I didn't know anything but I knew there's no match for her she was quite right to fire me because I owned it he cut my throat was nearly suing myself out of windows afterwards because it was very highly publicized as you could imagine at the time however one gets over these things and when you came in more successful years to make Henry the fifth and Hamlet and Richard the third those three films over which you had control not just as actor but also as director yes they are the three I think which you will be always remembered is that just coincidence or is it always better to have one actor in charge of one film well I think it had not been done very much except by Orson Welles marvelously and masterfully in Citizen Kane and that film in which he really made a landmark in films that really was a landmark and it was a marvelous Herculean task he undertook and fulfilled brilliantly and he was the subject of great admiration and the absolutely unstinted admiration I'm sure the world over except possibly in his own country where people who likened themselves to the character he played were a little bit too offended about everything but in the realm of film I mean Orson's name will go down to posterity I'm sure as being one of the Masters and I suppose in England I suppose that what about the first actor to to produce and direct his own films I I think I was like to swear there but I think I want do you think you'll nod much from him directly in terms of of acting and directing or was it just oh no I think no I didn't mean that no I'm his style he created a style in Citizen Kane but you can save who like I wouldn't mind anybody's saying has sort of copied in Hamlet in that it during that Gregg Toland developed this deep focus work which had never been done before as a matter of fact I was in the very first deep focus shot ever when Gregg Toland was photographing fathering Heights and at the end of a certain take which was merle in the foreground and what we call a three shot yeah and I was full-length in the background and he said did you notice anything about that shot and that said no I knew I could bet my bottom dollar that Miss Oberon was in focus and I wasn't that's all and you said you're wrong about that that's a new sort of shot I mean she'll feel your key light very strong I said well yes I think I don't know yeah you wait little rushes you mean I shall be in focus and miserable be yeah and that was a very first shot he'd ever tried it with and that also was viola and while it was always with always had Greg Tolin burden and Orson very wisely took Greg Tolin now there were a lot of shots in Hamlet this is what is final they're getting to the point there are a lot of shots in Hamlet which had very deep focus indeed very deep focused carriage there was one shot of little gene Simmons who she was then the back of her head showing every hair and focus just right on the foreground and I burst through a mirror a hundred and twentieth hundred twenty feet away as Hamlet and also pinched off and that was the style and I I wouldn't like to say I would have thought of that style if it hadn't been for awesome three years after that interview Olivier took on a role that would become one of his and the public's favorites starring alongside Michael Caine in the classic thriller smooth here's a report from the film set again by interviewer Sheridan Morley while these sleuth team were filming at Ethel hemp's and we went to watch them at work and I had a number of tries at getting a few words with one of the films coaster as Laurence Olivier but he needed some dissuading the other star of sleuth is Michael Caine playing a part which it's fair to say is far above and beyond anything he's previously tried to do in ten years of film stardom together Olivier and Caine form a screen partnership which those who've already seen the film in America say is electric in terms of the sheer length of your part has sleuth been a very difficult film it's been really very long I didn't have time to learn it I was terribly busy at the National I didn't have time to learn it before his time and really that's the only thing to do what I'd love to have had time to do was to have him taking it on a baby road tour or something if it if they would allow me to film and played it for four weeks and they're possibly with Michael on the stage oh yes it'll be Marla's made a little bit of dough we'd have known we'd have known all the thoughts then we'd have known all the different colours would have known the signals along the line we'd have known why we did something because something followed or why to avoid doing something because it would be obvious if we did it in such a way because something else followed you know all sorts of things that concern Annette and all the time and it's it's been a great effort to learn it I don't think I've let the production team down more than once or twice but just frankly not being able to learn it it's very my part is very hard because very clever author of turning Scheffer as he is has written it as an author speaking in the way that an author would like to speak and therefore that's not quite a very colloquial way of speaking it's always rather for the most is always just around the corner and there's a plenty of alliterative occasions which are always probably hard for the author to find in the first place he's got to sort of find it there therefore you've got to where it's not the word it brings to mind however that there those alliterative things are always difficult game it was jolly good I must say I was rather delighted with myself I'd say did you really think your last moment on earth had come yes not cross cross I don't understand that's one of your words as I explained to you when you were playing Doppler I have to test your mettle to see if as I suspected you really were my sort of person the game's playing sort of person exactly and I'm I'm it's no question about compare your experience this weekend my dear Milo with any other moments in your life now if you're honest with yourself we'll have to admit that you live more intensely my company then and anybody else is not even with Marguerite now we know what it is to play a game you and I so they're two people brought together equally matched having the courage and the talents to make of life for continuing sharad breakfast happy to face out it's intimate and its terrors by playing I just Larry was known for many many years of course I've never had the opportunity of working late it remains the dream choice play Andrew Wyke understood the character completely little bits of underwear always reminded Larry and me of people we'd actually known and most most importantly in Larry I have this incredible Comstock Lode of experience and and his absolute total command of every form of human expression and and projection to help keep the constant interplay of these two characters exciting in other words no two scenes could be played on like this childlike grown-up man who was constantly going off into little fantasies playing detectives paying party charwomen Larry with it's a tremendous story of experiences I mean it has everything from registration rake to a 20th century charwoman in the film and does it almost impossible and this is something you can't you can't do Neil really realistically you can't go find someone off the street to do a bloody well it better be as close to the Laurence Olivier as you can get but having Laurence Olivier playing Andrew Wyke must be fair competition for you is there a danger of being overshadowed by him I think there's always a danger of being overshadowed the thing is I suppose you just rely on the lightning man and hope we can like shadows it's not something you worry but especially in a two-man piece there must eventually come a time when you get your own sort of turn and then it's very nice to have someone like Lord Olivier off-camera he was cast first and was asked who he would like to play the part and he said me I mean I suppose presuming that I wouldn't know he had him Laurence Olivier would enjoy other successes in the 70s with the boys from Brazil and Marathon Man his role in both earning him Oscar nominations another landmark was his 80th birthday amongst the celebrations was a pageant hosted by the national theatre and news and television tributes looked back on his life and his world he was to show his genius again when he turned to television yesterday he's here don't let anyone ever deceive you into believing that the world was created in six days the evolution of the horse was the most tortuous process his coffee is frozen like a solid arctic mud shall I make her some fresh tin um well I like it in recent years Lord Olivier battled cancer and heart disease each performance was a triumph over physical hardship but as he approached his 80th birthday at his Sussex home his main concern was of all things the sudden onset of stage fright I've suffered for the first time in my life from stage fright slightly and that that is a worry had so most people get over that when they're about 17 but I never was frightened about anything when I was 17 all the time until now I'm you know whatever the hell I am what I am I 77 80 80 mm I begin to be a little nervous of personal appearances it's not only vanity because I know I'm not very pretty her but it's um it said I don't know what it is I really can't account for that I think it's sim it's just one of those naughty things that nature does two one trips one up just hermas least expecting it staunchly supportive of his wife's acting career and those of their three children who followed them into the profession Lord Olivier once said his aim was to make the audience believe as tributes pour in from the arts world it's clear he succeeded as few actors have not surprisingly Laurence Olivier acted right to the end his final performance was in Derek Jarman's War Requiem a year later aged 82 he died at his home in Ashurst West Sussex with wife Joan Plowright and his family of beloved children by his side his passing prompted tributes from across the globe acting colleagues saying his death marked the closing of a very great book Laurence Olivier left a towering legacy not just in performances but also in the concrete walls of the National Theatre of which he was the first artistic director the announcement that his ashes will be buried in Westminster Abbey was a final powerful indication the high esteem the nation had for him and recognition of his devotion to his art and his enduring status the the greatest actor of his

Channel: George Pollen

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Keywords: Laurence Olivier

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Length: 30min 59sec (1859 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2017