Olivier

By Terry Coleman

Based on exclusive, unprecedented access, the definitive biography of Sir Laurence Olivier, the dashing, self-invented Englishman who became the greatest actor of the twentieth century

Sir Laurence Olivier met everyone, knew everyone, and played every role in existence. But Olivier was as elusive in life as he was on the stage, a bold and practiced pretender who changed names, altered his identity, and defied characterization.

In this mesmerizing book, acclaimed biographer Terry Coleman draws for the first time on the vast archive of Olivier's private papers and correspondence, and those of his family, finally uncovering the history and the private self that Olivier worked so masterfully all his life to obscure. Beginning with the death of his mother at age eleven, Olivier was defined throughout his life by a passionate devotion to the women closest to him. Acting and sex were for him inseparable: through famous romances with Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright and countless trysts with lesser-known mistresses, these relationships were constantly entangled with his stage work, each feeding the other and driving Olivier to greater heights. And the heights were great: at every step he was surrounded by the foremost celebrities of the time, on both sides of the Atlantic—Richard Burton, Greta Garbo, William Wyler, Katharine Hepburn. The list is as long as it is dazzling.

Here is the first comprehensive account of the man whose autobiography, written late in his life, told only a small part of the story. In Olivier, Coleman uncovers the origins of Olivier's genius and reveals the methods of the century's most fascinating performer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 31, 2006
• ISBN: 9781429900225

Terry Coleman

Terry Coleman is a historian, novelist, and award-winning reporter. His books include biographies of Olivier, Nelson and the history of British and Irish emigration, PASSAGE TO AMERICA. His novel SOUTHERN CROSS, was a worldwide bestseller.

Book preview

For Vivien

and for Eliza and Jack, learned friends

Contents

1. As the Olive Tree Flourishes

2. Sweet Singing, and Whispering

3. An Unanswered Wish to Be Liked

4. Our Particular Pet Devil, or What?

5. The Lick of Luxury of Those Lush Valleys

6. Matinee Idol to Roaring Italian Boy

7. Vivling and Dark Destruction

8. Hamlet and Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Kerr

9. The Making of Wuthering Heights

10. Gone With the Wind

11. Not Sceered, Just Proud

12. Not Ever Having Been an Actor

13. The Walrus and the Sceptered Isle

14. Kean’s Sword, and the Thrill

15. Buckingham Palace, 10:15

16. God and the Angel

17. Living Like Royals

18. Streetcar, Carrie, and the Cleos

19. Great God in Heaven, What Now?

20. Richard III and the Ménage à Trois

21. The Prince and the Showgirl

22. The King Comes to the Court

23. Dropping the Legend

24. New Wife, New National

25. Max Factor 2880, and Love of a Strange Strength

26. The Concrete Never-Never Land

27. Listening to That Man Breathing

28. The College of Cardinals, and Surprise

29. A Bit Worried About Time Running Out

30. A Gesture Somewhere Round Glory

31. Dracula—the Shame of It

32. Jobbing Actor, OM

33. That Damned Book

34. No Longer on an Even Keel

35. Uninsurable as God

36. St. Paul’s or Westminster Abbey

Epilogue: Olivier Remembered

Author’s Note: The Androgynous Actor

A Chronology of Olivier’s Stage Career

A Chronology of Olivier’s Films

A Chronology of Olivier’s Work in Television

The Olivier Family

Acknowledgments

Sources

Notes

Index

Chapter 1

As the Olive Tree Flourishes

To begin at the end. When Laurence Olivier died in 1989, all the trumpets sounded and he was given such a send-off as had previously been given to kings, or to Winston Churchill, or to Admiral Lord Nelson, that greatest of naval heroes, which was very proper since Olivier was, in his way and in his time, as great a legend as either of those men. His memorial service, which was the hottest ticket in town, was produced by that most lavish of theatrical impresarios, the Church of England in full fig, at Westminster Abbey. And to stage Olivier’s positively final engagement, the abbey had been in fierce competition with St. Paul’s Cathedral. After bid and counterbid, the abbey won.

Asked what he did for a living, Olivier would say, I am an actor, sir. This was the truth, though not the whole truth. At the abbey, to celebrate Olivier the actor, were gathered half the acting profession, led by Sir Alec Guinness, Sir John Gielgud, and Dame Peggy Ashcroft. But Olivier was not only an actor. He was a grand impresario, at first with his own and then with the government’s money. To celebrate Olivier as impresario and as founding director of the National Theatre of Great Britain, a silver model of that theater—which he swore half killed him with its endless tribulations and difficulties—was carried in procession down the aisle. To remind the assembled theatrical grandees that he had also made movies, as producer and director, besides playing the principal parts himself, the script of his Hamlet was carried in procession too. To remind them that not all the movies he made had been Shakespearean, and that he had before that been a Hollywood star, it was Douglas Fairbanks Jr., an old American friend from Beverly Hills days going back to 1930, who carried in that same procession, on a cushion, the emblem of Olivier’s highest and most English honor, the Order of Merit, which carries no title but is worth a dozen peerages and is generally given to the more distinguished prime ministers. The American connection had also come close to being commemorated by the singing in the abbey of The Battle Hymn of the Republic; this was planned, and only dropped when the dean pointed out that it was notoriously difficult for a large congregation in a vast church to sing it and keep together. Which was a pity since, even raggedly sung, it would have been a reminder of what Hollywood owed to Olivier and, more to the point, what Olivier owed to Hollywood.

The whole abbey production—which was of course televised in its entirety as coronations and royal weddings are televised—was a shade over the top, but Olivier could famously survive any production and flourish in it. The high religious ceremony of it all would have been congenial and familiar to him. As a boy, he trained for four years as a High Church chorister and never forgot the sweet singing and the merry organ and the feeling of a show. The abbey show was, then, a memorial to a man who was not only the greatest actor of the English-speaking world in the twentieth century, and the greatest man of the theater of that century, but also, as Fairbanks was there to show, a Hollywood star. No man will ever be all those things again, because the nature of the theater and of the film industry has changed.

It was feasible for Olivier to do all he did because he did it at a time when such many-sidedness was still just possible. He was able to do it, which is quite another thing, because of his energy, his devouring will, his magic, and his genius. But genius was a word he deeply disliked and distrusted. He said so again and again. He thought genius was too unreal, and that the theater was for the practical, with no room for flashes of genius or anything like that. Early in his career, in 1933, Greta Garbo rejected him as her leading man. He remembered this and tried to make light of it all his life. In spite of her rejection of him, or perhaps because of it, he retained the greatest respect for her, which he expressed by saying she was a master of her trade. He intended this as the highest compliment. Later on, in 1951, when he was near the height of his powers and directing A Streetcar Named Desire, which his entire instinct told him to cut but which the playwright did not wish to see cut, he told a friend that he wished that real geniuses like Tennessee Williams would listen to practical old craftsmen.¹ Olivier was calling himself the craftsman. This suits his name well. This great man of the English theater and cinema was, by descent, in large part French. Olivier may sound like an exotic name. American audiences of the 1930s were told by studio publicists how to pronounce it: O-live-ee-ay. But in French it means olive tree, or by extension a man who tends olive trees. It is a trade name. The English would be Oliver.

Famous men attract genealogists. The Thomas Arundell Society, which exists to celebrate the lineage of Arundell, an English soldier of fortune who in 1595 was created a count of the Holy Roman Empire for services against the Turks, announced on the web in 1997 that Olivier was descended from Arundell through the barons Baltimore and Charlotte Fitzroy, a natural daughter of Charles II. For Olivier to have had royal blood in his veins would have been good box office, but a necessary link was one Emma Park, who flourished about 1827. The whole chain fell apart when other genealogists showed that she was not Olivier’s grandmother but merely the wife of a great-uncle.²

The Oliviers themselves have traced their descent back to 1520, but this invites caution. Few families, unless they are royal or noble, can convincingly show a line that goes farther back than the eighteenth century. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, and the best genealogists in England put their minds to it, they could not get farther back than 1750. So what we have is the Olivier family tradition, which says that they come from the village of Nay, south of Pau, in the southwesternmost part of France, a few miles from Spain across the Pyrenees, and that they were Huguenots, Protestants in a Catholic country. The earliest surmised Olivier is Laurent, born 1520 at Nay, and the family stayed in that region for three generations until Louis XIV, in 1685, forced the Huguenots to abjure their Protestantism or emigrate. One Huguenot pastor who emigrated, to the Netherlands, was Jerome Olivier. Some of this family tradition is not old at all but seems to date from as late as 1947, when Laurence Olivier was knighted and the interest in genealogy was stirred. It was then that the family motto, though probably an old one, was resurrected. It is Sicut oliva virens laetor in aede Dei (As the olive tree flourishes I rejoice in the house of God). It was then too that the tradition was discovered that the Oliviers or de Oliviers of Nay were of the minor nobility, and that Jerome Olivier came to England from the Netherlands in 1688 as chaplain of William of Orange, who became King William III.³ There is another tradition that the first substantial Olivier in England was clerk to Sir Robert Walpole, when he was paymaster general to the army in 1714, and that the family fortunes were founded through that connection.⁴ This is the Walpole who became in effect the first prime minister of Britain. That his clerk should have become rich has the ring of probability about it.

Whatever the truth, the first undoubted and traceable member of the family is Daniel Josias Olivier, born in 1722, a diamond merchant in the City of London. He married Susannah, believed to be a daughter of Jean-Baptiste Massé, a court painter to Louis XV. Some of Massé’s miniatures were still possessed by one of Laurence Olivier’s uncles until the 1980s. Daniel Josias Olivier had a son, Daniel Stephen Olivier, who became rector of Clifton in Bedfordshire, the first English clergyman in the family. His son, Henry Stephen Olivier, born in 1796, married the daughter of Vice Admiral Sir Richard Dacres, became a lieutenant colonel in the army, a banker, high sheriff of Wiltshire, and raised a cavalry militia known as Olivier’s Horse to put down riots before the 1830 Reform Bill.⁵

Henry Stephen Olivier, this banker and high sheriff, had three sons. All of them became clergymen, and the pattern of the family was established. Laurence Olivier, when he was famous, liked to emphasize the poverty of his early life, but he belonged to a family that was of the solid country gentry. The new money, soon to be old money, came from Daniel Josias the diamond merchant, from Henry Stephen the banker, and perhaps from the corrupt Walpole’s corrupt clerk. They were the grandees of the family. The others mostly went into the army or into the church. But the soldiers rose to command their regiments, and the clergymen were not poor parsons. Henry Arnold Olivier, the banker’s eldest son, born in 1826 and Laurence Olivier’s grandfather, was a man who created no stir in his long life of eighty-six years, but he was at Rugby under the great Dr. Thomas Arnold, then at Balliol College, Oxford, and then married the daughter of the deputy lieutenant of Berkshire, Queen Victoria’s ceremonial representative in that county. He held comfortable livings in Wiltshire and Surrey and spent the winters as chaplain at Nice or at Alassio on the Genoese riviera. He had six daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was Laurence Olivier’s father.⁶

These four sons were a disparate lot. The eldest, Henry Dacres, born in 1850, came of the old solid stock. He passed halfway up the list of cadets into the Royal Engineers, served in the little Victorian wars of the British Empire in Afghanistan and the Sudan, was mentioned in dispatches, and rose to lieutenant colonel. The second, Sydney, born in 1859, had the brilliance of the diamond merchant and the banker, did well at Oxford, came first in the entrance exams for the colonial service, became a socialist and the friend of George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells, and did great and unexpected things; we shall hear much more of him. The third, Herbert Arnould, born in 1861, became an artist but not of the bohemian sort. He toured Kashmir with the Duke of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s third son, had the honor of showing some of his Indian sketches to the queen herself, and became a fashionable portrait painter. The fourth, Gerard Kerr, was born in 1869, eight years after his nearest brother and nineteen years after the eldest. All had gone to good public schools. He went to Winchester, which was academically the best of all, and then on to Merton College, Oxford. Little went right for him thereafter. He was the father of whom Laurence Olivier seldom had a good word to say.

Gerard went to Merton in October 1888 and was soon in trouble. In March 1889 he and two others were warned that the college expected them to be less noisy and disorderly in their rooms and in the quadrangles. He also missed chapel and was warned that his work was unsatisfactory. At the end of his first year he asked to be allowed to remain out of residence for a year, and this request was granted, provided he sat collections, the college examinations, in March 1889. These were formal and undemanding, distinct from the university examinations. Olivier did take them and was adjudged on the whole satisfactory. But he never returned to Merton and thus completed only one of the three years necessary before he could have received his degree. The reasons given in the family for his having come down were that he had driven a coach and four down the High Street, or that he had pelted the warden of Merton with snowballs, or that his reading of Plato caused him to lose his faith and his desire to take Holy Orders. We do not know why, but he had somehow made himself unwelcome at Merton. If he had simply wanted a degree, it would have been easier, if he could, to return to Merton after his year away, do a little work, and complete his second and third years. He did want a degree because in October 1890 he matriculated at Durham University. Durham was a comedown after Oxford, but there a man could earn a bachelor’s degree after only two years’ residence of six months each year. But to complete this two-year course took him five years, until 1895, when he at last graduated with a B.A. in classical and general literature, and then only in the fourth class. Three years later, in 1898, probably without further examination, he received his master’s degree.⁷

It was not a brilliant start. By that time his brother Henry was a lieutenant colonel; Herbert had exhibited his work at the Royal Academy in London and in Boston, Massachusetts; and Sydney was a bright star of the colonial service. Sydney had already been colonial secretary of British Honduras, effectively second in command after the governor, had been auditor general of the Leeward Islands, and in 1898 was in Washington, D.C., to negotiate a trade agreement between the West Indies and the United States. That year he was made a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, one step down from a knighthood, and wrote to his mother saying he had been given this honor some years younger than anyone else he knew of. He was a man of various talents. He was, with George Bernard Shaw, a founder of the socialist Fabian Society and also wrote three plays, one of which was performed by the semiprofessional Stage Society, though only for one night. Shaw described him as extraordinarily attractive, handsome, looking like a Spanish grandee, and strongly sexed. This last quality showed itself in his single performed play, which was called Mrs. Maxwell’s Marriage and had something of the autobiographical in it. The hero was a merchant and planter who, like Sydney, had been awarded the CMG. The heroine was the fast and loose Mrs. Maxwell, who had affairs in a semitropical colony called Mangrovia. Sydney wrote in his stage directions: If you’d ever lived in a country like Mangrovia, where the sun draws passion up out of the earth like a vapour, and sex is the most insistent thing in life, you wouldn’t need to wonder how any particular man comes to fall in love with any particular woman, no matter what their antecedents might be.⁸

As for poor Gerard Olivier, he had little talent of any sort, and the predominant impression is that he also had little common sense. By the age of thirty he had done little but accumulate around himself a few small myths. He was said to have been told, on a tour of Italy when he was sixteen, that his voice was good enough for him to train for the opera; we know he and his brothers and sisters were taken on long holidays to Italy and Switzerland, but that is all. He was also said to have attended the University of Heidelberg, but there is nothing to show he ever did. He was firmly believed to have played county cricket for Hampshire, which would have been a distinction equivalent to playing major-league baseball. Laurence Olivier believed this of his father all his life, but it was not true. First-class cricket is the best documented of games, and the Hampshire records show that two Oliviers played for the county. One was a South African, and the other was Sidney Richard Olivier, a cousin of Gerard’s, who played once, in 1895, and was out without scoring. Gerard was a member of MCC, the oldest cricket club in the country, founded in 1787, which in his lifetime governed cricket in England and still sets the laws of cricket worldwide. But a man did not need to be an exceptional cricketer to be a member. Gerard was a good club cricketer and no more. Very little is known for sure about his early life, except that, like many others with mediocre degrees in classics, he taught at a preparatory school, near Guildford. Indeed he had already been teaching there while he was still trying to graduate at Durham. There he met the sister of the headmaster’s wife, and on 30 April 1898, his twenty-ninth birthday, he married the handsome and brown-eyed Agnes Crookenden. She became the beloved and idolized mother of Laurence Olivier, and she also brought more French blood into the family. She came mostly from Dutch stock but had a French great-grandmother named Villeroi who was said to have fled to England during the French Revolution.⁹

Agnes gave birth to three children. Sybille was born in 1901 and Gerard Dacres (ever after known first as Bobo and then as Dickie) in 1904. Laurence Kerr Olivier was born three years later, christened Laurence, he believed, after the Laurent Olivier of 1520. The middle name Kerr—pronounced, as he later explained, Carr in England, Cairrh in Scotland, and Cur in the rest of the world—was, like Dacres, a favorite in the Olivier family. There had at least been a Dacres, the admiral who as a captain had once served with Nelson and whose daughter had married into the family in 1823, but of a Kerr there is no trace. As a boy, Olivier wore a kilt of the Kerr tartan, and his father was supposed to be related to the clan, though he was not. It was another one of his myths. This did not stop well-meaning correspondents from suggesting Kerr ancestors to Olivier when he became famous, including one Kerr who was transported to Tasmania for forgery. Nor did it later prevent Olivier from assuming the name Andrew Kerr when he wished to check into a hotel with a woman not his wife.¹⁰

But to return to the newly married Gerard and Agnes: Gerard had hoped to succeed to the headmastership of his brother-in-law’s school. When this proved unlikely, he started a school of his own at Dorking. With the help of his wife’s family he managed to live in a large house with a view, support a household with indoor and outdoor servants and, when Sybille was born, a nanny. But the school did not prosper, and Gerard rediscovered the vocation he had lost at Oxford. He took Holy Orders, was ordained a priest in the same year as Dickie was born, and became an assistant priest at St. Martin’s, Dorking. The stipend was small; the family could afford to keep only the nanny and had to move to a much smaller house in the town. There, at 26 Wathen Road, Laurence Olivier was born on 22 May 1907.¹¹

The story goes that Gerard was frying sausages downstairs when the doctor appeared with the new infant in his arms, as yet unwashed and smeared with blood, that he took the child with a sense of slight disgust and after a decent enough pause handed it back and continued with the sausages, and that then, only at the doctor’s suggestion and with hesitation, he visited his exhausted wife upstairs, gave a little tender stroke to her damp forehead, and returned to the sausages. That is Laurence Olivier’s account, written seventy-five years later in his autobiography. He says his father told him.¹² It has the characteristic tone of an Olivier anecdote. Most of what we know about his youth, and about his mother and father, comes from this autobiography, which has naturally been relied on by anyone who has written about Olivier. It is best to say straightaway that it must always be taken with a large pinch of salt. There is not only the great passage of years between the event and the telling, during which his memory must have faded. There is not only the undoubted fact that Olivier wrote when he had been gravely ill for many years, and that his illness colored his recollection. There is also the whole nature of Olivier to be considered. If his father was given to the making of little myths, the son was a magnificent maker of great ones. His life’s work was in the theater and cinema, which encourage and nurture myths. He also, and persistently, called himself a liar, writing that it was a compulsion in him to invent a story and tell it so convincingly that it was believed at first without doubt or suspicion. He would mischievously inquire, What is acting but lying? The probability is that he did not so much consciously lie as instinctively improve the truth. As an acute reporter from the Christian Science Monitor remarked in 1939, when he interviewed him in New York after the triumph of Wuthering Heights, Mr. Olivier’s idea of story telling is to give it everything credulity will bear.¹³ He certainly did—that and more. In his late memoirs he elaborately invented an attempt to murder him. The story of the birth, with its detail of the sausages, is typical Olivier. Such a circumstantial detail, meant to give verisimilitude, comes to be recognized as the sign of pure invention, as appears when such stories can be checked.

As we piece together the story of his childhood, it is best to use first whatever direct evidence there is, for instance occasional letters and reports, and then the account of his sister Sybille. She was six years older and would have seen more of their early years. In early middle age she wrote a long and lively but unpublished memoir. When they were both in old age, they reminisced together. We have fragments of their tape-recorded conversations, in which she would sometimes soften and correct what he said. So when the only evidence of some early event is Olivier’s own account, this is made clear, to put readers on their guard.¹⁴

The young Laurence adored his mother and detested his father. His first memory, as he insisted later to Sybille and others, was an erotic one of his mother’s breasts in a black lace sort of thing, having embrocation rubbed into her shoulders so that it would come out as milk. Sybille remembered nothing of the sort. He remembered vividly that his mother spanked him frequently, which gave her more pain than it did him. Sybille remembered no such thing. The small Olivier was at first called Baby by his mother and nanny, and then, because he roared with rage, Paddy. He disliked this name, and, when he was about three, his mother proposed he should become Larry. His father reluctantly agreed, but every time he pronounced the name did so with an emphasis, so that mummy had to suffer a little. That is Olivier’s account. Sybille went so far as to recall their father’s irritation at Larry’s deliberate way of eating, and how he would glare at the child, who would tumble from his chair and get out of the room as quickly as he could. Olivier went farther, was convinced that his father saw no point in his younger son’s existence, and remembered him principally for his uncertain temper and his parsimony. The first two pages of his autobiography are devoted to his father’s meanness: Gerard’s wafer-thin carving of meat, his thimblefuls of whiskey, and his insistence that his two sons should share their father’s bathwater, one after the other.¹⁵

By 1910 the Reverend Gerard Olivier had decided that his real vocation would best be practiced not in a pleasant country town like Dorking but in the slums of west London. So they moved to Notting Hill. As Olivier remembered it, he gave up a decent, ordered gentleman’s life to go lower socially and higher spiritually. Not that they lived in the slums. Sybille made it clear they never did. Though their father ministered at a tin shack called St. Gabriel’s, they lived about a mile away in a solid Victorian house in Elgin Crescent, in an elegant and spacious district. He adopted High Church, Anglo-Catholic practices, wearing a long cassock, liking to be called Father by his congregation, and using incense in the services. Then in 1912 he became curate at St. Saviour’s, Pimlico. Many of his parishioners may have been poor, but the church was a huge and extravagant Victorian pile at the head of a prosperous square, and the curate’s house, nearly opposite, had six solid stories and was within walking distance of Westminster Abbey and the houses of Parliament. The High Church rituals continued. By this time Laurence was generally known as Kim in the family, not after Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, as has been suggested, but as an abbreviation of Larry-kin. It was a family given to nicknames. Sybille was Baba or Bar, Kim’s elder brother was Dickie or Bobo, and their father was Fahv. Fahv was not flourishing in his profession. His brother Sydney, having been governor of Jamaica since 1907 and received the regulation knighthood conferred on a governor, was about to return to England to become permanent secretary at the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, the most senior civil servant of a department of state. But Fahv was not poor. He was certainly not having to scrape by on the lowest imaginable income that Olivier remembered so tenaciously. It is true that his stipend was less than £100 a year. But when Gerard Olivier’s father died in 1912, he had left a considerable fortune to be shared among his children. Gerard’s share was £4,679, which was placed in trust for him. That was probably worth, in today’s money, about £400,000, of which Gerard had the use and the income. There was also a Crookenden Trust, brought to him by his wife, which would pay for their children’s education. Larry went to three preparatory schools, the last of which was Francis Holland School in Chelsea, a Church of England school for girls which also took very small boys. In 1916, when he was nine, he went to the choir school at All Saints, Margaret Street, near Oxford Circus, where Dickie was already a pupil. This was an extraordinary school, and important in forming the character and career of Laurence Olivier.¹⁶

Chapter 2

Sweet Singing, and Whispering

All Saints may be on a back street, but it is one of the most important Anglo-Catholic churches of the nineteenth century. The foundation stone was laid in 1850 by Edward Pusey, who with John Newman and John Keble led the High Church movement, which held that there was an essential continuity between the Roman Catholic and English churches. The single spire was built to resemble that of the Marienkirche at Lübeck in northern Germany and is higher than any point of Westminster Abbey. The walls, floor, and roof are tiled, marbled, banded, painted, stained, gilded, and otherwise sumptuously decorated, the organ is splendid enough for a cathedral, and the whole is a theatrical High Church demanding chants, vestments, and incense. The choir school was small but as good as any cathedral’s, and its boys had sung at Victoria’s jubilees and at the coronations of Edward VII and George V. There the young Olivier received a magnificent and rigorous musical education in Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Gounod, Dvo ák, Palestrina, and Tallis. He sang masses, evensongs, anthems, and requiems. He firmly believed, later on, that it was the finest choir in England. There is no doubt it was among the finest, and musically more adventurous than most.¹

He was also given a decent academic education in Latin, French, English, history, and mathematics. His first report, when he was nine, showed that his Latin was good, his French fair, his English bad, and his Old Testament knowledge bad, but that he had made a very good start indeed in the choir. By the time he was a month away from his twelfth birthday his Latin, French, and English were all good, and as for his choir work, His voice has improved tremendously…Just wants to use a little more brain. His conduct varied over the years. The report for the Christmas term 1920, when he was thirteen and a half, is typical: Rather careless and unreliable, but well dispositioned. It was then that his voice began to break. He was always a good chorister, of splendid strength, and when he left, the headmaster’s comment on his last report was that he was a nice boy and would be greatly missed.²

The services and the singing were theater in themselves, but All Saints also gave Laurence his first taste of the London stage and then of Shakespeare. The Duke of Newcastle was a churchwarden of All Saints and patron of the choir school, and at Christmas 1916 he took a party of boys to see the Drury Lane pantomime Babes in the Wood. The choirboys also put on plays of their own. The vicar, Father Henry Mackay, had a passion for the theater. Father Geoffrey Heald, himself a talented amateur actor, produced Julius Caesar at Christmas 1917, in Olivier’s second year. Olivier was initially given the part of First Citizen but rehearsed so well that he was promoted to Brutus. The Reverend Gerard Olivier was a friend of Canon A. J. Thorndike, who was the father of the actress Sybil Thorndike, and they brought other theater people to the All Saints performances. One was the celebrated Ellen Terry, who is reputed to have written of the boy Olivier, in her diary, Already a great actor. It may sound apocryphal, but this excerpt from her diary was first published in 1933, when Olivier was no more than very promising. Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the actor-manager, surpassed even Ellen Terry in hyperbole and is reported to have exclaimed to Olivier’s father, "My dear man, your boy does not play Brutus; he is Brutus." Olivier himself never believed that, but he always remembered his performance and recalled it in an American television advertisement he made in 1972, saying it was the first time he had known that there was something wonderful about being on stage.³

In 1918 the Reverend Gerard Olivier became rector of St. Michael’s, Letchworth, just over thirty miles north of London. Letchworth was the first of the new garden cities, built in 1903. It was a big step up for him. The stipend was a comfortable four hundred pounds a year, and the rectory was a handsome Queen Anne house in the old village, near a twelfth-century church. Because of the distance from London, Laurence had to board at All Saints. Then, when he was twelve, came catastrophe. His beloved mother died of a brain tumor at the age of forty-eight. He was told not by his father but by Father Heald, the priest who was closest to him. Sixty years later he described how he took the news. She was my entire world. And I cried just at first, but never again. I felt it appallingly deeply but I bore it. I remember the priest said, ‘Look, do you still want to sing your solo?’ And I said yes, and it was a Benedictus. Of course I thought it was mother doing it with me, you see, so I sang like a bloody angel. Never sang so well, before or since. He sang at the funeral service too, and the beauty of his singing was remembered in the family. In the churchyard after the service Sybille, who was then nineteen, took her place in the slow and dreadful procession taking the coffin to the open grave and was suddenly overcome by the thought of how her mother would have giggled at all the solemnity. She turned around and gave her brother a broad grin. This, she said, was met with the most appalling glare and heavy frown from Larry, whose sense of ceremonial was bitterly upset by this lapse. She also observed of her father that, though he suffered acutely over the loss of his wife, at the same time some part of him enjoyed the drama of it. Fahv had eccentrically insisted that the funeral should take place at Church Crookham, in Hampshire, miles from where they lived or ever went, because it was there, twenty years before, after they had taken early communion together, that his new wife had finally assented to his wish to leave schoolmastering and take Orders. It was typical of him that he wanted to erect a great stone Calvary over her grave but on consideration found he could not afford it, put up a simple wooden cross instead, and then procrastinated and did no more.⁴

When he returned to Letchworth, he sold the old rectory two or three miles outside the new town and moved to a new and smaller one to be near the new and bigger church in the new town. His desire to preach to the masses was sincere, and his sermons were dramatic. Larry mourned his mother and later said, often, that he had been tempted to throw himself off Chelsea Bridge into the Thames. Sybille had taken her place as the woman of the family. As Larry saw it, she had become his mother, and he much admired her complete fearlessness of Fahv. She would oppose him directly, her brilliant, strong eyes straight in his. Her feeble brothers would lend no support—just weakly deprecating ‘O, I say Baba, that’s a bit…’ It was Sybille who was the first member of the family to wish to go on the professional stage, and in 1920 she went to London to study at the Central School of Speech and Drama. By then Dickie had already gone off to his public school, Radley. In August 1921 Fahv rented a houseboat on the Ouse at St. Neots in Cambridgeshire. It was half on shore, half on piles in the river, and was called White Wings. The young Oliviers made friends with a party of cockneys on a neighboring boat, the Water Lily, and envied them their gramophone on which they played the popular fox-trot Whispering half the night. Beastly noise, said Fahv. Another evening one of the Water Lily girls played her cello. The holiday remained in Laurence’s memory. Nearly thirty years later, reminded of it, he wrote to Sybille: In love for the first time—Bertha her name was—I felt her tits in the punt and rode endless merry-go-rounds with her—‘Whispering’ still v. nostalgic for me.⁵

At about this time there was trouble with Sybille. Either when she was still at drama school or when she was making one of her first appearances on the provincial stage, she made a hasty marriage with an actor, at a register office. Though Larry was still just a boy, she confided in him. When the marriage collapsed after only a year, and Fahv found out about it, he was merciless with Larry, making him feel guilty for not having told on his sister. As Olivier later put it: She was drifting, a bit derelict in fashion, from a first disastrous marriage, for which there was no reason; stage folk did plenty of living temporarily together, in those days. None of the family knew anything of that occurrence until she tripped none too daintily from that marriage into the next. It was a story persistently told by Olivier that Fahv then, from his own pulpit, condemned his own daughter for adultery. Larry never forgave him. Neither Sybille’s account nor Larry’s gives exact dates, but Sybille’s first marriage had to have taken place within a year of their mother’s death. It was not a happy family.⁶

Meantime Larry had returned for his last year at All Saints. In his final Christmas play he took the part of Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, earning more praise from Ellen Terry, who said he gave an idea of what the boy players in Shakespeare’s time had been like, and that she had never seen the part played better by any woman except Ada Rehan, a great American actress who was famous for that role. This was gratifying, but the greatest influence on the young Olivier was the ritual and the numinousness of All Saints itself, with the sweet singing and the merry organ and the feeling of a show. And of course he had acquired a Christian faith. It would have been an insensible boy, in that church and that school, who did not.⁷

It was time for him, like any boy of his class, to go to his public school.*1 The Oliviers had been promiscuous in their choice of school. Fahv had been at Winchester, his brother Sydney at Tonbridge, their father at Rugby, and Dickie was at Radley. Larry preferred Harrow and believed his mother had wished that too. But Fahv’s choice fell on St. Edward’s, Oxford, which specialized in educating the sons of gentlemen clergymen. The fees were only £114 a year as against £210 at Radley, but Fahv may have chosen it not only for that reason but because it had been founded, in 1863, by a leader of the same Oxford movement that had built All Saints, Margaret Street, and to which Fahv had devoted the years of his ministry. The High Church was good on incense, slums, and stark schools. St. Edward’s was stark. There were two compulsory services every weekday and four on Sundays, to which the boys wore surplices. Prefects could beat their juniors or give up to two hundred lines as punishment, to be copied from the works of Virgil. Small boys had to fag for big ones, making toast, polishing shoes, running errands. Breakfast was porridge, bread, and margarine. Lunch was dished out in platefuls by servants known collectively as John or Annie, according to their sex. Supper, after evensong, was bread, margarine, and metallic tea from tin urns, though boys could buy eggs and baked beans from the school shop with their own money. The school was divided into forms named after parts of the British Empire: Ceylon, Canada, New Zealand, Natal, and Jamaica, in ascending order of precedence. Olivier never rose higher than New Zealand. There were little privileges. In the first year jackets had to be buttoned with their tails pushed in front of the wearer’s hands. A year later the jackets were still buttoned, but the tails could be behind the hands. In the third year jackets could be worn unbuttoned. It was a normal English education, though the young Olivier had it soft since the warden in his time had abandoned the severer forms of calisthenics and was a keen musician.⁸

There was one loose end from All Saints to be tied up. The choir school had been selected to take part in the 1922 Shakespeare birthday festival in April at Stratford-upon-Avon and had revived its Christmas performance of The Shrew. Olivier was given leave for two days from St. Edward’s and returned to the All Saints company. What followed was his introduction into public life and to the public theater. The Great Western Railway put on a special first-class car to carry the Duke of Newcastle, the All Saints’ clergy, and the choristers from London to Stratford. At Stratford the choristers, in white surplices and rose-colored caps, cassocks, and socks, and wearing patent shoes with silver buckles, walked in procession to the parish church where Shakespeare’s tomb lay. The young Olivier led this procession, carrying a wreath of bays bound with Roman purple, which he knelt and laid beside a wreath sent by King George V himself while the choir sang a dirge, De Profundis. After lunch with fraises Melba, the boys were introduced to James Hackett, the celebrated American actor who was playing Othello at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, and then saw some of his rehearsal that afternoon. The next day, a Friday, the boys presented The Shrew at a matinee at that theater. There Olivier played Katharina again. The boy players were not named in the program, and in those days the theater critics of the Daily Telegraph and the Times were anonymous as well. The Telegraph critic said that the boy who took the part of Kate made a fine, bold, black-eyed hussy, badly in need of taming, and that he could not remember seeing any actress in the part who looked it better. From the Times Olivier received a notice that was as good as any he received in his life. The reviewer wondered at lines so clearly spoken and said one boy’s performance as Katharina had a fire of its own. Then he wrote: You felt that if an apple were thrown to this Katharina she would instinctively try to catch it in her lap, and if apples give her pleasure we hope with all gratitude that someone will make the experiment. A greater compliment to instinct refined by technique, and so early, is difficult to imagine. In the evening the boys were back at the Memorial Theatre as members of the audience at that night’s performance, and when they took their seats in the stalls they received a standing ovation. At the matinee, and in the evening, Olivier had heard the public applause that became his life’s music. Next morning the triumphant adventure continued when the choristers were taken to see the famous novelist Marie Corelli at her house in the town and sang to her in her music room.⁹

Olivier told no one at St. Edward’s about Stratford. That would have invited mockery. He always insisted he was unhappy at the school. At All Saints he had been a star. At St. Edward’s, which he liked to call St. Edward’s the Martyr, he was not even good at cricket, rowing, or rugby. He was of course put in the school choir and was soon the soloist, which did nothing for his popularity. He did moderately well at his work. Exercise books still exist in which he listed British naval bases: in the East, Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta; in the Atlantic, Cape Town, St. John’s, Halifax, Trinidad, Barbados, and Quebec. He recalled that he once had a hand in unjustly beating a smaller boy, Bader, who was uppity, and terribly good at games, and had incidentally bowled Olivier out in a house cricket match. Olivier was jealous of him and had him hauled up before the president of his form room for cheek. And I think I had the luxury, because I had made the complaint, of delivering two of the blows, and I simply loathed myself. The boy was Douglas Bader, who later became nationally famous as an RAF fighter ace in the Battle of Britain. As for a best friend, Olivier did not have one, though his friendship was sought. Nearly sixty years later he remembered one incident in which a letter from another boy fell out of his pocket and a passing master saw it.

What have you got there, Olivier?

Nothing, sir.

I should still like to see it.

Olivier handed it over.

And the master read it: ‘Apollo, how I long to see you more than I am able to. Can you meet me for tea somewhere in Oxford?’ Or something like that. And I only know, his name was—poor darling fellow—his name was Gosling, and he was an awfully nice fellow, but I’m afraid the poor fellow made the mistake of falling for me, and the incredible mistake of writing notes…After that term I never saw him again, so I’m afraid I was responsible for his demise.¹⁰

The school was not markedly homosexual. It was a matter of crushes and did not go farther than the accepted right of prefects and other seniors to have favorites whom they rewarded with small treats.¹¹

Olivier was regarded as a flirt. He called himself one in a school essay that has survived. It was written in his next-to-last term, in March 1924, and was ostensibly on the subject of soap. He pictured a boy lying in a bath washing his hair. As a little boy, he wrote, he had thought soap disgusting stuff, but now he saw it forming swans around him on the surface of the water. Then he described the boy in the bath as an excellently brought up, strong and silent, handsome, upright, not to say strapping, young gentleman. And that particular personage, he continued, is me!!…I am beginning to think that I am a most fickle young man, that I am a flirt!! and that one day the life of many a fair maid will be ruined by the faithlessness of my heart.¹²

This was written soon after he enjoyed his one success at St. Edward’s. He was told, and there was no argument about it, that he was to play Puck in the school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He had dreaded this dismally wretched part but said to himself, right, he would knock their bloody eyes out with it somehow. And so he did. Puck was a success throughout the show, dancing among the audience, darting up and down the aisles making surprise appearances, his face lit from underneath by two torch lamps fixed to a harness round his chest. He learned there and then that Shakespeare could look after himself, and look after the actor who trusted him.¹³ That at any rate is what he said many years later. More likely, what he noticed, at the time, was that his performance had done wonders for his popularity, and that the next day an undreamed-of number of boys wanted to walk around the quad with him, arm in arm.

He was just over seventeen. It had earlier been assumed that he would become a parson. He had toyed with the idea of going into the merchant navy, because of the uniform, or into forestry. St. Edward’s would have fitted him for any of these careers. Of those who entered the school in the same year as he did, four eventually went into the church and nine into the army or navy; four became doctors; ten went into other professions as engineers, surveyors, accountants, and architects; and nine went to farm in or govern the countries of the empire: Canada, Australia, Burma, Southern Rhodesia, Tanganyika, and Ceylon. Olivier, in later life, regretted that he had not attended a university. This is strange, since none of the greatest of his contemporaries—neither John Gielgud, nor Ralph Richardson, nor Alec Guinness—had done so. Nor would many boys of his class and from his school have expected to do so in the 1920s. Of the fifty-five boys in his year at St. Edward’s, only seven went on to university, all to Oxford or Cambridge. It depended on their parents’ means. Most boys went into the world, or began training for their professions, at seventeen or eighteen. The young Olivier had the typical education of a gentleman, and it had changed little since Victorian times. It was thorough. To add to his splendid knowledge of music, he had had eight years of Latin, translating into and out of that dead language until he had at least a competent knowledge. He could hardly have avoided it. He also had eight years of French. This did not necessarily mean he could speak much more than was necessary to order dinner in a restaurant, but he had enough to read a letter or a newspaper in that language, and enough to write risqué little anecdotes in French for his own amusement, which he later did. He also had at least a smattering of German. He could write English correctly and eloquently, though his spelling remained at times eccentric. And he could name the ports of the British Empire. All in all, he was much more literate than most present-day graduates of most English and American universities.¹⁴

This was in 1924, which was a momentous year in the Olivier family. Sybille had already been on the stage for two years, though with no success. In January Dickie had left Radley and set off, with a gift of sixty pounds from the remaining assets of his late mother’s trust fund, for the life of a tea planter in India. That same month Ramsay MacDonald had become prime minister and formed the first Labour government in Britain. Having a cabinet to fill but no one to choose with any experience in government, he appointed Sydney Olivier, who was a known socialist and had at least been governor of Jamaica, to be no less than secretary of state for India, one of the great offices of state. This was at a time when the king of Great Britain was also emperor of India. Since a cabinet minister had to be a member of either the Commons or the Lords, since it was much easier to make a peer than engineer a by-election to get him into the Commons, and since, as George Bernard Shaw put it, Sydney was eminently presentable and much more aristocratic-looking than most of the hereditary nobles, he was created Baron Olivier and a member of the Privy Council. Fahv went off on a church mission to Jamaica, met Isobel Buchanan Ronaldson, and married her on his return to England. The ceremony was not in his own church but at All Souls, Langham Place, London, and among the guests were the new Lord Olivier and his nephew Laurence. It was Olivier’s recollection that Fahv was in trouble with his parish. High Church priests were expected to be celibate. If they were already married, that was overlooked, but for a widower to remarry was not done. That had indeed been the view of Fahv himself. At All Souls, Pimlico, he had condemned a priest for just such a remarriage, and now he was acting hypocritically in doing so himself. That was the story as Olivier later told it. For whatever reason, Fahv left his Letchworth living, was for six months unable to find another, and began his new marriage unhappily. He had no stipend, the funds of the Crookenden Trust had been exhausted by the education of Sybille, Dickie, and Larry, and he had used up half the capital of his inheritance, selling off shares at a loss. He was not poor. He never was. But he had less than he was used to. So what was to become of Larry?¹⁵

The classic story is that, when Fahv and Larry returned from London that January, having seen Dickie off to India, Larry lay in his father’s leftover bathwater and expressed a wish to follow his brother as soon as he left school that summer. Whereupon his father promptly replied, Don’t be a fool. You are going on the stage. This version first appeared in 1953, in a joint biography of Olivier and his second wife, Vivien Leigh, which was written with Olivier’s approval and was faithful to the information he provided, and Olivier repeated it in his autobiography. But the story of how the decision was made had appeared before, in a different form. This was in August 1939, in an American magazine interview with Olivier, at a time when he had become suddenly famous in the United States for Wuthering Heights, was about to film Rebecca, and was giving many uninhibited interviews. The story appeared under the headline He Said No in the Bathroom. It stated that [Olivier] decided early that he did not wish to follow his father’s footsteps up the pulpit. Later [in the bathroom] he said ‘No’ to following his brother’s footsteps on an Indian tea plantation. His father, on learning this, came forth with an alternative. He said, ‘Why not try the stage?’¹⁶

There is a choice here between the two versions. Father and son had never been close or even sympathetic to each other. In the classic version Fahv shows an enthusiasm for Larry that he had previously reserved for the church. In the other, earlier one, he shows the indifference with which he had generally treated his son. The classic version, of course, is the better story.

Chapter 3

An Unanswered Wish to Be Liked

So Olivier went off to the Central School of Speech and Drama at the Albert Hall in London for an audition. The Albert Hall is an amphitheater that can seat five thousand, and when he first looked in he had a moment of terror that he would have to perform on that stage to that vast space. But the school was housed off one of the side porches of the hall, and its auditorium was no more than six rows deep. There he met the principal, Elsie Fogerty, who had acted in London and Paris, produced Greek plays and written manuals of speech-craft, and was then in her late fifties. Her eyes were dark, her voice was a rich baritone, and she commanded respect. She came to feel a sense of adulation for Olivier. For his part, he said that, though she was often kind to him, he never felt drawn to her by any kind of affection.¹

On that first occasion he recited Jacques’s speech on the Seven Ages of Man from As You Like It. She remarked that it was not necessary to make fencing passes when he described the soldier, the man of the fourth age, as being sudden and quick in quarrel, and then offered him a scholarship that paid the fees of fifty pounds for the year. He asked about the bursary as well, which Fahv had told him was necessary if he was to embark on an acting career. Miss Fogerty then acted mystically. This is Olivier’s account. She leaned toward him, placed the tip of her little finger on his forehead against the base of his hairline, slid it down to rest at the top of his nose, and said, "You have a weakness…here. He thought this a penetrating foray into the hazardous area of an actor’s psychological weakness" and was immediately convinced. It was a weakness which, if it existed, thousands in the theater and a million members of cinema audiences never noticed at all, but what matters is that Olivier was ready to believe it. He embarked on decades of false noses, not only and most famously as Richard III but as Romeo and in any other part that gave any such opportunity. What was true was that in 1924, and for some years after, Olivier’s brow line was low and that his bushy eyebrows almost met in the middle. Having made her observation, Miss Fogerty also gave him the bursary of another fifty pounds. His sister, Sybille, had been at the Central School and had been one of her favorites. Miss Fogerty also needed promising male students. That year there were only five, compared with eighty girls. One of the girls was Peggy Ashcroft, in whose mind Olivier left an indelible picture—those eyebrows, the dark hair standing on end, and the eyes even then unlike anyone else’s.²

Olivier as a student was not prosperous, but not that poor either. He had the fifty-pound bursary to live on, fifteen pounds from the remnants of his mother’s trust money, and one pound a month from his father. During the Christmas and Easter holidays he earned some money appearing with a semiprofessional cast at Letchworth, which was a try-out place for modest managements. At the Central School there were classes in movement, voice, diction, and theater history. Miss Fogerty, having herself acted in Paris, persuaded Jacques Copeau, who had produced Shakespeare and Molière in Paris, New York, and London, to come and lecture at the school. He said something that was profoundly congenial to Olivier, and which he always remembered: There is only one way to begin to do a thing, and that is to do it. At seventeen he was already, and above all, practical. He was impatient with his classes and wanted to get on with the acting. He did win the school’s gold medal with Peggy Ashcroft at the end of his year, playing a scene as Shylock to her Portia. The judge was Athene Seyler, already a famous comedienne.³

Then he had to find work. There is some disagreement about his first stage appearance. It was perhaps at Letchworth on 1 January 1925 in a forgotten play called Through the Crack. Olivier’s diary for that year does not survive, but in his 1926 diary he did write Anniversary 1st Night on Stage. But that seems to have been as assistant stage manager. When he was asked by one of his father’s former housekeepers what he did, he is said to have replied that when she heard the bell ringing during intermission to call the audience back to their seats, she would know it was his finger on the bell. The first time he appeared on a stage as an actor, in public, was at the Brighton Hippodrome at a charity gala at the beginning of August 1925, and it was in music hall, and he fell flat on his face. It was an all-star bill: Gertie Gitana, Harry Lauder, George Robey. Olivier was in the one straight act of the evening, a short curtain-raising sketch called The Unfailing Instinct. The sets for this had a high sill, over which an actor had to step to make his entrance. The stage door keeper warned him of this. So did a fellow actor as they made up together. So did the call boy. So did the stage manager. So did a friendly stagehand, whom Olivier waved away, and then he made his entrance, did a shattering trip over the sill, sailed through the air, and landed flat on his face in the footlights. I have flattered myself, he wrote in

Reviews for Olivier

[ukforever · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Famed and acclaimed British actor Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) was an actor to his core, a self-identification which guided him confidently along the path of his life's work. But it also meant that his true personality, underneath his talent for professional deception, was known by only a few. Given unprecedented access to the remnants of Olivier's life (his effects, his letters, and his family) to cut through the miasmus of previous biographies, Terry Coleman has crafted a great and moving opus on the life of an equivocating genius.

[bibliothecarivs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Famed and acclaimed British actor Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) was an actor to his core, a self-identification which guided him confidently along the path of his life's work. But it also meant that his true personality, underneath his talent for professional deception, was known by only a few. Given unprecedented access to the remnants of Olivier's life (his effects, his letters, and his family) to cut through the miasmus of previous biographies, Terry Coleman has crafted a great and moving opus on the life of an equivocating genius.

[alisonm_62 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Coleman manfully weeds out the fact from the fiction in the long & colourful life of one of the English stage's greatest actors. Even handed & fair but factual excellence over-rules entertainment value.