A true dramatic chameleon, Laurence Olivier was arguably the last great Shakespearean lead. A hundred years after his birth, he is still the benchmark by which all modern theatre should be judged, writes Michael Billington.
Laurence Olivier was born 100 years ago next week. But, if there are any public celebrations planned, they are distinctly muted. In part, this is a reflection of the ephemerality of acting. Olivier is also, literally, history. He is seen as the last of a line of dominant first players that stretches back to Richard Burbage, Thomas Betterton, David Garrick, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving; and, since Olivier's last stage role was in Trevor Griffiths's The Party at the Old Vic in 1973, a whole generation has grown up that knows him only through late-night movies. Yet, while Olivier in some ways belongs to another age, I'd argue that, as an actor, he was the first of the moderns and his legacy is still visible today.
I first saw Olivier on stage in 1955 when I was an impressionable teenager. After a period when his career seemed to be marking time, Olivier descended on Stratford-upon-Avon to play Malvolio, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus in a single season. What hit me first of all was his staggering versatility. His Malvolio was a nervous arriviste who, in the words of his director, John Gielgud, resembled "a Jewish hairdresser". His Macbeth was a darkly handsome, guilt-haunted figure prey to terrifying inner demons. Finally came Olivier's astounding Titus: a leathery, lined, weather-beaten old soldier driven to the outer edges of human suffering.
If I stress Olivier's physical range and shape-shifting quality, it is because that is something that today has largely gone out of fashion. We see acting more as a form of self-revelation than of impersonation: aside from Antony Sher, I can think of few actors now who share Olivier's delight in transformation. A mastery of external details was Olivier's map towards a character's inner being. As a result, there was all the difference in the world between the desolate pathos of his Macbeth in its climactic stages and the glittering vengefulness of his crazed Titus.
Olivier's ability to reinvent himself from role to role was part of his glamour and mystery - and those are words we rarely use in connection with acting today. There is a palpable loss in that we know almost too much about our public performers. Olivier kept his secrets so that even the polite fiction of his happy marriage to Vivien Leigh was sedulously maintained: only later did one learn that, during his triumphant season at Stratford, he was frequently driven to sleeping on his dressing-room floor to get a bit of peace.
In some ways, Olivier belongs to a distant age: a time when one actor could be seen as head of the profession and when acting itself was a form of Protean disguise. Olivier also had a strong sense of his place in history. Terry Coleman, in his recent biography, tells a good story of Olivier in the mid-1950s greeting a dinner guest with the news that he had been lying on his bed upstairs thinking about his funeral: "I could see the sun shining through the windows of the Abbey," said Olivier, "and I felt joyous."
But Olivier was infinitely more than a throwback to a lost time. I'd say that he revolutionised the art of acting, and that today's performers are his legatees. In the classics, Olivier showed that acting could be as innovative as any form of literary criticism. His Macbeth, a role in which every actor had historically failed, was revelatory precisely because it banished melodrama, and showed that the thane was haunted by premonitory dreams of Duncan's murder. Likewise, Olivier's 1959 Coriolanus was no inflexible Roman aristocrat, but a flawed soldier painfully aware of his fatal attachment to his mother's apron-strings.
If I had to pick out Olivier's greatest gift, however, I would say it was for finding a vein of subversive irony in classic heroes. We tend to think of irony as the defining quality of super-intelligent modern actors such as Simon Russell Beale or Mark Rylance. But it was Olivier who led the way. When his Othello told the Venetian senators of his encounters with "the anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders", it was with the wicked twinkle of the self-aggrandising con-man.
What separates Olivier from his great contemporaries is his bold alliance with new talent. Gielgud and Ralph Richardson eventually found their way to the Royal Court and the work of the rising generation. But it was Olivier who, in 1957, staked out the route in his famous appearance for John Osborne's The Entertainer. For Olivier, it was a moment of personal renewal, and one that led to his second marriage, to Joan Plowright. But it was also a watershed in postwar British theatre in that it showed Britain's greatest actor throwing in his lot with the young. The result was a phenomenal piece of acting: one that united the pub-entertainer side of Olivier's personality with his gift for excavating the depths of human despair.
Today, we expect our top actors to appear in new work. No eyebrows are raised when Ian McKellen does a Mark Ravenhill play at the Donmar, or Maggie Smith and Judi Dench do a David Hare play at the Haymarket. But, yet again, it was Olivier who led by example. It was wholly typical that he bid farewell to his profession not with some boringly obvious choice like Prospero. Instead, he played a hard-headed Glaswegian Trotskyite in Trevor Griffiths's The Party; I still remember the intellectual sinew he brought to a character as far removed from his experience as one could possibly imagine.
Olivier was always a pathfinder, an explorer of the way ahead, which is why he attached himself to the Court, found new ways of filming Shakespeare, became the director of Britain's largest open stage at Chichester, and ultimately took on the challenge of forming a National Theatre company. Perhaps the real key to the man and the actor is to be found in Michael Blakemore's vivid description of him in his book Arguments with England. Blakemore, who played a minor role in the European tour of Peter Brook's production of Titus Andronicus, gives a graphic account of Olivier's blowtorch energy in performance. He writes: "What distinguished both our star and our director was their curiosity. Nothing that went on at rehearsals, on stage or off, failed to engage them."
Curiosity: that is the defining ingredient of artistic greatness. Knowing Brook moderately well, I've always been fascinated by his hunger for information: in a radio studio, he wants to know how every bit of the system works. In my one prolonged encounter with Olivier in his later years, I detected exactly the same laser-like eye. We met in Broadcasting House to record Olivier's reminiscences about his old friend Richardson. As we sat in the lobby, I noticed Olivier staring fixedly at some rather lightweight shoes I was wearing, through which the stub of my big toe unfortunately protruded; I could actually see him clocking the detail for further use. When our producer, who had a minor physical disability, appeared, Olivier covertly asked me about the exact source of her limp. Nothing escaped his rabid attention or relentless curiosity.
If I learned one thing that day, it was that acting is memory. But, when people later asked me for my outstanding impression of Olivier, I seized on his faint air of theatrical camp. For some reason, we were discussing King John, and I remarked that the last time I had seen the play it had been substantially rewritten by John Barton. "What a saucebox!" cried Olivier, which is not how I'd ever quite thought of Stratford's scholar in residence. Although Olivier's heterosexuality is well attested, I was reminded of the public androgyny that characterised his greatest performances: no soldier could have been more virile than his Coriolanus, yet when he was forced to kiss his wife in the marketplace, Olivier rolled his eyes like a bashful schoolgirl. Like all truly great actors, Olivier seemed to contain within himself both male and female.
As man and actor, Olivier was obviously not without flaws; he was fiercely jealous of his pre-eminent status and, when tired, could lapse into a tenor bark. But, to those who never had the luck to see him on stage, I would warn against the facile temptation of dismissing him as the supreme ham. Acting inevitably changes with each generation. Olivier is still the benchmark for his combination of intuitive intelligence and outrageous physical daring, and his influence is still visible today in myriad ways. Whenever we rejoice in the mercurial inventiveness, mischievous irony or piercing character-insight of a McKellen or a Russell Beale, we are still, I would argue, getting a little touch of Olivier in the night.
Michael Billington
The Guardian, Wednesday May 16 2007
