Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh: The Final Curtain

By David Barry

After decades of theatrical ventures and performing together, 1957 would be the last time Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh would work together, with a European tour and London season of Shakespeare's seldom-performed Titus Andronicus.
Strangely, not much has been written about one of the most prestigious touring theatre productions of all time, which visited six European capitals and became the first British Shakespearean company to perform beyond the Iron Curtain at the height of the Cold War.
Now, David Barry tells the entire inside story of the incredible tour, in which he - at the age of just fourteen - played Olivier's grandson, accompanying the media-power couple of the decade around Europe.
This is theatre history that has never before been told in such detail and will take the reader on the trip of a lifetime to discover what really went on during the crazy, hectic, wild and yet still utterly sensational touring production.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Books
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781789829778

Book preview

Laurence Olivier & Vivien Leigh

The Final Curtain

1: Meeting Scarlett O’Hara

It was 22 April 1957, and I was just over a week away from my fourteenth birthday as I waited to meet the most famous couple in British theatre. I sat with my chaperone, Peggy Williams, in a comforting corner of the vast stage of the London Stoll Theatre. Although I was a little bit on edge, Peggy Williams dispelled my fears by chatting amiably. She was a maternal middle-aged woman, and wore a bright flowery dress, that seemed to match her ebullient mood. She loved the theatre, was very involved in the stage school I attended, and looked forward to meeting the exalted theatrical couple that everyone had read so much about and seen on the silver screen.

Other actors stood around the stage or sat in chairs placed along three edges. Actors who knew one another laughed and joked and made muted conversation. Suddenly we heard a door opening, and then onto the stage came director Peter Brook and the stars of Titus Andronicus, arriving in a flurry of excitement. The avuncular Peter Brook bounded over to our corner and introduced me as Young Lucius, grandson of Titus, played by Sir Laurence, and nephew of Lavinia, played by Vivien Leigh. Apart from Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, there was an imposing entourage, including Anthony Quayle and Maxine Audley, and this retinue seemed scary as it loomed over me that spring afternoon. I was a mere 4’ 8" then and normally quietly confident in most situations, but this was different and I was suddenly overcome with an uncharacteristic attack of shyness. Even at 14 I had become accustomed to mingling and working with famous actors, but this was clearly an onslaught on my senses and arrived with a sense of occasion. They all tried to make me feel at ease and slowly I began to relax and feel like a genuine member of this incredible cast. But however cool I tried to be I couldn’t help but melt under the gaze of Scarlett O’Hara. Her eyes blazed just as I remembered them from the film, but with more warmth than her character in Gone with the Wind. She oozed charisma and femininity and the smell of her expensive perfume lingered and impressed me. But the man next to her was no Rhett Butler. My first impression of Olivier was of a pleasant, ordinary-man in a suit, pretty much like my father wore to the office, but less shiny. Over the coming weeks and months I would get to know these powerful actors as well as any in the cast, particularly as they both kept a caring eye out for me as we travelled.

The reason for my preferential treatment in being the first to be introduced to the stars was because I was the new boy. Most of the cast knew one another from when they played this same production for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1955, when Young Lucius was played by Philip Thomas, whose voice had broken and whose maturity deprived him of participation in one of the most glittering tours of all time. Like many positive things that have happened in my professional life this lucky break was down to timing. Philip’s misfortune meant that I was about to be treated to the experience of a lifetime. And it all came about because I failed the 11-plus, and after a miserable year at Mortlake Secondary Modern School, I enrolled at Corona Academy Stage School, sharing my passion for acting with other pupils, some of whom were already stars of stage and screen.

Corona was a private, fee-paying school, which my parents couldn’t afford, but the school assured them that, as I looked younger than my twelve years, they would find me enough professional acting work to cover the fees. Which is what happened. I got so much work in my early teens that my parents never had to pay a penny towards my private education. I use the term ‘education’ loosely because of the constant disruptions when pupils were whisked away, either to attend auditions or appear in a film or television show. Imagine the frustration of teachers trying to educate students who sometimes dropped out of school at a moment’s notice, returning perhaps a day or even weeks later.

When I first attended Corona at the age of twelve, I can’t recall being nervous. I was probably relieved to escape from the clutches of those sneering bullies at Mortlake school, who picked on me because of my Welsh dialect. And even worse, the teachers, who were both embittered and wished they were somewhere else, without appreciating how mutual that feeling was between them and their pupils. But at Corona I could put all that behind me. This school was radically different and unlike any I had so far experienced. The usual academic subjects were taught every morning, but the afternoons were filled with drama, ballet, tap dancing, play-reading, modern dance, mime and voice production. This was more like it – except for the ballet dancing, when I loathed seeing reflections of my skinny legs in the mirrors behind the barres. I lived for the afternoon subjects.

And these pupils were very different from the Mortlake thugs who did their best to make my life a misery. For a start, many of my new Corona Academy contemporaries were already regular film actors. Richard O’Sullivan, with whom I became close friends a few years later, was in the same class as me, as were Carol White, Frazer Hines, Jeremy Bulloch and Francesca Annis.

Like many stage schools, as opposed to adult drama schools like RADA, Corona had its own theatre agency, run by Hazel Malone, sister of the school principal, Rona Knight, and they worked in collaboration with one another. Miss Knight, as we always called her, was short and dumpy, with carrot-red hair, and could sometimes be quite forbidding, but mainly she was bright and enthusiastic, and fanatical about mime, voice production and Shakespeare. Although we had only moved from North Wales in 1953, she worked me hard to get rid of my strong Welsh dialect, and it wasn’t long before I was speaking like a proper English person, as if I’d been brought up with that silver spoon in my mouth – because in 1955, the year I started at Corona, kitchen sink drama had yet to hit our screens, when regional dialects became acceptable in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Cathy Come Home and television dramas like Up the Junction.

1.jpg

By the time I was cast in Titus Andronicus, I had already chalked up many film and television roles, and because I was chosen by Peter Brook to play the part of a Mexican boy in Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory, starring Paul Scofield, at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End, auditioning for the part of Young Lucius in Titus gave me a distinct advantage. When the news came from Hazel Malone’s agency at Corona that I had got the part, and I would be touring with Sir Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, visiting Paris, Venice, Belgrade, Zagreb, Vienna and Warsaw in a high-profile six-week tour, I should have run around screaming excitedly, punching the air jubilantly. But I don’t ever remember any extravagant or extrovert displays when told the news. I think I may have taken it in my stride. I had, after all, already made a film called Seven Waves Away (US title: Abandon Ship), starring Tyrone Power, Mai Zetterling, Stephen Boyd, Gordon Jackson, James Hayter, Danny Green and a host of other well-known British actors. That is not to say I was blasé, but youngsters do tend to accept major changes of good fortune as if it is their birthright. I do remember an inner glow, a thrill brought about by the thoughts of romantic Paris and Venice. I think I may have had to look up Belgrade and Zagreb, geography not being high on my list of scholastic achievements. In fact, academically I was pretty much a dunderhead. Acting was the only thing I wanted to do.

Although Olivier had already played in Titus at Stratford, as had most of the cast, with a few replacement exceptions, after the rehearsals ended, he had to dash to the Royal Court Theatre where he was appearing as Archie Rice in John Osborne’s The Entertainer which opened on 10 April for a four and a half week run. But Olivier was used to working in several productions at the same time. In 1937 he played the title role in Hamlet at the Old Vic and was filming during the day, except when he appeared in a midweek matinee. Many actors have worked busy schedules such as Olivier did, but I doubt many have played starring film roles then performed the Prince of Denmark every evening, one of the most difficult parts ever written, with Hamlet’s lines running to almost 1,500 and the play’s running time is almost four hours. I admire any actor who can get to grips with Hamlet.

When Olivier prepared for undertaking this great role, he went with director Tyrone Guthrie and Peggy Ashcroft to meet Professor Ernest Jones, the first English-speaking Freudian psychoanalyst, who enlightened the actors about his theories of Hamlet suffering unconsciously from an Oedipus complex, leading to the Prince’s inability to act decisively. These complex stimulations inspired Olivier to give Hamlet a very realistic interpretation.

In the mid-fifties great change was happening in the theatre as Theatre of the Absurd, surrealism and experimental theatre made its entrance onto the artistic scene. It was the era of angry young men as ‘kitchen sink drama’ – as some critics called it – kicked off with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956, starring Kenneth Haigh as Jimmy Porter, opened at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. The Royal Court in Sloane Square, in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea, home of the English Stage Company, was co-founded by Oscar Lewenstein and George Devine. The policy of the new theatre company was as a writer’s theatre, discovering provocative new works, and these were seeds sown mainly by Devine, who became a close friend of Olivier. The English Stage Company’s third production, Look Back In Anger was anti-Establishment and highly controversial, and rattled the cages of many critics and was lambasted by many. Olivier saw a performance and said he hadn’t liked the play but confessed that his rhythm of work had become a bit deadly and felt a change was necessary. He was looking for a challenge and he found it in The Entertainer.

He had undergone a mental strain directing Marilyn Monroe in his film The Prince and The Showgirl, partly because she wanted to be thought of as a serious actor, not a sex symbol, and since 1954 she studied acting under the influence of the cult figure of method acting, Lee Strasberg. On 14 July 1956, Marilyn arrived in London, accompanied by Strasberg, his wife Paula, and her new husband, playwright Arthur Miller. When filming began, there were problems from the start. Marilyn relied on her acting coach Paula Strasberg for direction and Olivier had been warned well in advance to keep the acting guru’s wife well away from the set. Unfortunately it didn’t work out that way. When Olivier started to give Marilyn direction, she walked away to consult with Paula Strasberg. And she was often three or four hours late arriving on set. Dame Sybil Thorndike, who played the Dowager Queen in the picture, said, ‘Marilyn is the only one of us who knows how to act in front of a camera.’ Despite that flattery, Marilyn still kept the elderly actress waiting for two hours on set.

I have heard a story from many other actors, which may of course be apocryphal, that the filming was so painful for Olivier, he added to the pain by literally pulling his hair out. But even he admitted when he saw his co-star on screen, how she seemed to effortlessly steal every scene.

It was during this horrendous experience that fate intervened, guiding Olivier towards one of his greatest performances in modern theatre. Arthur Miller advised him to go and see Look Back in Anger again and reassess Osborne as a talented playwright. Heeding Miller’s advice, Olivier returned to the Royal Court to see another performance, then attended a meeting with John Osborne, to which Arthur Miller went along, who was surprised to hear Olivier, asking a pallid Osborne, who looked as if he’d just got out of bed, ‘Do you suppose you could write something for me?’ As it happened, Osborne was halfway through a script about a washed-up variety artiste called The Entertainer and it wasn’t long before Sir Laurence Olivier was tap dancing, singing and making vaudevillian jokes at the Royal Court in the playwright’s second play. It became one of his most magnificent performances, as he really captured the seedy vaudevillian comedian on his last legs. I didn’t see the play at the Royal Court but I saw his great performance when it was made into a film and released in 1960, directed by Tony Richardson, who also directed the play.

2.jpg

John Osborne greatly admired his performance and became an Olivier convert. He wrote to him after the first night at the Royal Court, saying, ‘Whatever becomes of me in the future, nothing could deprive me of your tremendous, overwhelming performance, nor the experience of working with greatness.’

Olivier delighted in playing Archie Rice, and was quoted as saying, ‘There must have been something of Archie in me all along. It’s what I might so easily have become. I’ve never had the opportunity to make people laugh as much as I would like. I’d like to make them die with laughter.’

And I can quite believe he meant it. In 1955 I had seen him on television performing comedy sketches with John Mills and Danny Kaye, the three of them dressed as Teddy Boys[1] in A Night of a Hundred Stars, a charity show at the London Palladium. Vivien Leigh also appeared, performing a song and dance number in top hat and tails with John Mills and Olivier.

Theatre critic James Agate, having seen his King Lear with the Old Vic company, in which Olivier injected humour into the downfall of the king, made a concise criticism, saying he was ‘a comedian by instinct and a tragedian by art’.

Though he revelled in Archie Rice’s earthy humour, his interpretation wasn’t all about playing for laughs. He sent shivers down your spine when he boasted about being dead behind the eyes. And when he hears about the death of his soldier son, his entire being falls apart. He implodes tragically. If you have never seen the film, I urge you watch it