TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072489/07248900.062

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 9.1 KB | 169 lines

                                                                                SHOW BUSINESS, Page 52

"Absolutely an Actor. Born to It"

Laurence Olivier: 1907-1989


By Richard Corliss


    "I believe in the theater," said the new Baron of Brighton
in his maiden speech to the House of Lords in 1971. "I believe
in it as the first glamourizer of thought." That was the theater
to Laurence Olivier, and that was Olivier to all who fell under
the glamorous spell he wove. More immediately and lastingly than
any other modern actor, Olivier picked words off the playscript
page, flung them passionately into the dark and secured them in
the minds of theatergoers. Brilliance, for once, had its
rewards. As critic Kenneth Tynan proclaimed in 1966, "Laurence
Olivier at his best is what everyone has always meant by the
phrase `a great actor.'" Director, producer, prime mover of
Britain's National Theater, embodier of the most vital
Shakespearean heroes, Olivier at his death last week at 82 held
undisputed claim to yet another title: the 20th century's
definitive man of the theater.

    Like the century he almost spanned, Olivier the actor
displayed turbulent energy, embraced awesome excess; his genius
and his folly fed each other spectacularly. Said Albert Finney,
who in 1959 understudied Olivier as Coriolanus: "He makes the
climaxes higher, and he makes the depths of it lower, than you
feel is possible in the text."

    So too with the text and texture of Olivier's life and
career. He was the son of a fifth-generation Anglican clergyman,
yet he found his soul upon the wicked stage. The foremost
classical actor of his time, he attained his first eminence as
a West End matinee idol, and his second as a Hollywood dreamboat
in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Rebecca (1940). Though he pored
over scripts like a new critical scholar, he was an
irrepressibly physical stage performer, scaling balconies and
executing dizzying falls with Fairbanksian elan. Like many men,
Olivier housed a congeries of contradictions; uniquely, he
transformed them into living art.

    At the apex of his stage career -- in the mid-'40s, when he
and Ralph Richardson led the Old Vic company through triumphal
seasons in London and New York City -- Olivier could spread out
the banquet of those contradictions in a single evening. In
Henry IV, Part I, he was the stuttering, heroic Hotspur; in Part
II, the cagey-senile Justice Shallow. The curtain would fall on
his Oedipus, with its searing scream of self-revelation; after
intermission he would mince on as Mr. Puff, the giddy
paragraphist of Sheridan's The Critic. It was all part of a
70-year striptease in which this consummate quick-change artist
always had one more veil to remove, and proof of what director
Peter Glenville called Olivier's "greed for achievement."

    He first showed that good greed at age nine, on the
auditorium stage of All Saints' School in London. In the
audience was Sybil Thorndike, then an Old Vic leading lady, who
told Larry's father, "But this is an actor. Absolutely an actor.
Born to it." From a list of his acting credits at school (Maria
in Twelfth Night, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew), one imagines
that his teachers had already spotted what director Elia Kazan
would later cite as Olivier's "girlish" quality. Throughout his
career -- as Lord Nelson in That Hamilton Woman, as Richard III,
as the homicidal mystery writer in Sleuth -- Olivier would bat
his eyes at the audience, soliciting its surrender. But belying
those feminine eyes were the cruel, pliant lips, and on them the
smile of a tiger too fastidious to lick his chops in
anticipation of a tasty meal.

    Emlyn Williams once remarked that Olivier had "always
seemed to be at the height of his career." Not quite so. In
1929, his first regular stint of acting in the West End, he was
in and out of half a dozen indifferent plays before Noel Coward
cast him as the "other man" in Private Lives. Four years later,
in Hollywood, he was fired from his first A-picture role as
Greta Garbo's lover in Queen Christina. Once again Coward
rescued Olivier, casting him in Theatre Royal (1934) as a
dashing figure fashioned after John Barrymore, whose lightning
sexuality Olivier had long admired and would often emulate.

    In 1935 John Gielgud, the leading exponent of romantic
classicism, hired Olivier to play Romeo to Gielgud's Mercutio.
Then they swapped roles, and critics hailed the young
boulevardier as a rising tragedian. Years later, when asked to
enumerate his rival's strengths, Gielgud acutely replied,
"Attention to detail; complete assurance in his conception of
character; athleticism; power; and originality."

    By 1943, when Olivier, as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy,
was granted leave to make a film of Henry V, he had synthesized
all his gifts. Here was a Henry true both to Shakespeare and to
movie spectacle -- a Henry with Napoleonic martial wiles and the
careless charm of a Cary Grant. It was the first of Olivier's
three Shakespeare films as producer, director and star. In
Hamlet (1948), which won him Oscars for best picture and best
actor, he turned the melancholy prince into a manic-depressive
swashbuckler and Elsinore into a film-noir castle. Richard III
(1955) was his most masterly and entertaining picture. Looking
eerily Nixonian, Olivier's Richard murdered with a style that
suggested both deformed ambition and a sly sexual perversity.
All three films convinced moviegoers that sentiments expressed
in iambic pentameter could be matters of life and death.

    Except in the Shakespeare films, Olivier in this period
usually appeared with Vivien Leigh, his wife from 1940 to 1960.
They had fallen in love as co-stars of the 1937 film Fire over
England; toured the U.S. in a Romeo and Juliet so poorly
received that they had to refund money to angry ticket holders;
returned to Broadway in 1951 in Antony and Cleopatra and Caesar
and Cleopatra (dubbed by wags "Two on the Nile"). By the
mid-'50s this beautiful actress was tobogganing into mental
illness and Olivier was in desperate need of a new challenge.
Luck smiled from a surprising direction: the angry young Royal
Court Theater. As Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer
(1957, filmed in 1959), a great actor found himself playing a
seedy music-hall comic in a tantalizing blend of parody and
autobiography.

    Yet Olivier always remained a Proteus of the footlights; he
bent, folded, spindled, mutilated himself to fit his dynamic
conception of the roles. In early Shakespearean parts, Olivier
padded his legs so as to look good in tights. In 1945 he went
to a gym to sculpt those legs into felicitous muscularity
before playing Oedipus in a Greek kilt. To deepen his natural
tenor voice into Othello's baritone, he studied with a vocal
coach and was soon speaking a full octave lower. His most
faithful theatrical aid was the makeup kit. Said Coward: "I
cannot think of any other living actor who has used such vast
quantities of spirit gum with such gleeful abandon."

    There was no Method to his masquerades. Graduates of the
Actors Studio might psychoanalyze themselves into their roles;
Olivier worked from the outside in, often finding character in
caricature, refusing only to err on the side of restraint.
Although it was what made him exciting to watch, his outsize
playing occasionally exceeded conventional interpretations.
Olivier's Othello (1964, filmed the following year), with thick
ruby lips and rolling Jamaican cadences, provoked charges of
racism. His Shylock (1970, televised in 1974) was found by
critic Clive James to resemble Disney's stingy zillionaire
Scrooge McDuck.

    Late in his life Olivier might have retired on his laurels:
the knighthood in 1946, the life peerage in 1970, the thanks of
several nations and generations. But in 1974 nature played a
dirty trick on this man for whom strength and agility were two
tools of genius. Olivier was struck with dermatopolymyositis,
a crippling degeneration of skin and muscular tissue. Although
he had been robbed of the energy to seize the stage eight times
a week, Olivier could not stop working; he even "appeared," as
a recorded hologram, in the 1986 West End musical Time. He
guested in British mini-series (Brideshead Revisited, Lost
Empires). And he worked for any movie producer with gall and a
ton of money. Dozens of robust cartoons followed: MacArthurs and
moguls (The Betsy), wily old Jews (The Boys from Brazil) and
scheming Nazis (Marathon Man), all shamelessly strutting their
charisma, all fulfilling critic Alan Brien's dictum that "there
is a kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable."

    Olivier was still capable of greatness. In 1982 he answered
a last call from Shakespeare, playing King Lear for TV, in a
magnificent portrayal that was also a literally death-defying
gift to posterity. The boy of nine, mesmerized by the poetry of
a 16th century playwright, was now a frail old man of 75,
leaving a record of his transcendence for the electronic age and
ages to come. The greatest actor of the century knew how to
leave them begging for more.