Laurence olivier actor biography

After being ill for the last twenty-two years of his life, Olivier died of kidney failure on 11 July This table contains Olivier's known professional theatrical roles. It also contains the occasions when he both acted and directed. It does not contain those productions where he was a director but did not appear on stage. It also omits the amateur productions in which he performed at school, mostly Shakespeare, playing, among other roles, Brutus , Puck and also female roles, including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew.

This table contains Olivier's stage work as a director. It does not include the 15 productions in which he also appeared, which are shown in the table above. All the productions shown were for BBC radio. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Wikidata item. Overview of the actor's professional life. This article is part of a series about. Credits Accolades Gallery Quotes. The Olivier Awards On Acting. Theatre [ edit ]. As actor [ edit ]. As director [ edit ]. Filmography [ edit ]. Selected radio broadcasts [ edit ]. Television [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Notes and references [ edit ].

Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Academy Awards Database. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 2 April Retrieved 8 January British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 25 February Retrieved 10 January Archived from the original on 21 March Archived from the original on 24 September The Times.

Archived from the original on 11 July Retrieved 10 September Archived from the original on 2 August Retrieved 2 December Archived from the original on 4 August Archived from the original on 12 July Archived from the original on 13 July Archived from the original on 30 June Archived from the original on 21 October Archived from the original on 5 August The son of a clergyman, he was well educated and introduced to the arts at an early age.

He made his acting debut at the age of fifteen at the all-boys, All Saints Choir School. He continued playing Shakespearean and other classical roles while in training. He had also acted on Broadway and was recognized by the American film industry. In he starred in an acclaimed television staging of King Lear. Olivier was repeatedly stricken by debilitating illnesses in the s and s.

He published his memoirs in , followed by On Acting Olivier was knighted in , and in he was elevated to a life peerage, the first of his profession to be so honoured. As a final tribute from the nation, it was announced that Olivier would be the fifth actor in history to be buried in Westminster Abbey. From the Britannica Book of the Year Laurence Olivier did his best as Beau, but he deserves and will get better parts.

Olivier is going to make a big name for himself". Billington ascribes this failure rate to poor choices by Olivier rather than mere bad luck. In , with his impending marriage in mind, Olivier earned some extra money with small roles in two films. Olivier and Esmond married on 25 July at All Saints, Margaret Street, [ 44 ] although within weeks both realised they had erred.

Olivier later recorded that the marriage was "a pretty crass mistake. I insisted on getting married from a pathetic mixture of religious and animal promptings. She had admitted to me that she was in love elsewhere and could never love me as completely as I would wish. Victor is a secondary character, along with Sybil Chase; the author called them "extra puppets, lightly wooden ninepins, only to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again".

In the late s Olivier told Sheridan Morley :. He gave me a sense of balance, of right and wrong. He would make me read; I never used to read anything at all. That'll do, those are three of the best. Read them". I did. Once already I'd been fired for doing it, and I was very nearly sacked from the Birmingham Rep. He was tempted back to Hollywood in to appear opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina , but was replaced after two weeks of filming because of a lack of chemistry between the two.

Olivier's stage roles in included Bothwell in Gordon Daviot 's Queen of Scots , which was only a moderate success for him and for the play, but led to an important engagement for the same management Bronson Albery shortly afterwards. In the interim he had a great success playing a thinly disguised version of the American actor John Barrymore in George S.

Kaufman and Edna Ferber 's Theatre Royal. His success was vitiated by his breaking an ankle two months into the run, in one of the athletic, acrobatic stunts with which he liked to enliven his performances. But Mr Gielgud spoke most of the poetry far better than Mr Olivier Yet—I must out with it—the fire of Mr Olivier's passion carried the play along as Mr Gielgud's doesn't quite.

Gielgud had seen Olivier in Queen of Scots , spotted his potential, and gave him a major step up in his career. For the first weeks of the run Gielgud played Mercutio and Olivier played Romeo , after which they exchanged roles. In May Olivier and Richardson jointly directed and starred in a new piece by J. Priestley , Bees on the Boatdeck.

Both actors won excellent notices, but the play, an allegory of Britain's decay, did not attract the public and closed after four weeks. The theatre, in an unfashionable location south of the Thames , had offered inexpensive tickets for opera and drama under its proprietor Lilian Baylis since After Hamlet , the company presented Twelfth Night in what the director, Tyrone Guthrie , summed up as "a baddish, immature production of mine, with Olivier outrageously amusing as Sir Toby and a very young Alec Guinness outrageous and more amusing as Sir Andrew ".

A pacifist, as he then was, Olivier was as reluctant to play the warrior king as Guthrie was to direct the piece, but the production was a success and Baylis had to extend the run from four to eight weeks. He had first met Leigh briefly at the Savoy Grill and then again when she visited him during the run of Romeo and Juliet , probably early in , and the two had begun an affair sometime that year.

No man could. I hated myself for cheating on Jill, but then I had cheated before, but this was something different. This wasn't just out of lust. This was love that I really didn't ask for but was drawn into. In June the Old Vic company took up an invitation to perform Hamlet in the courtyard of the castle at Elsinore , where Shakespeare located the play.

Olivier secured the casting of Leigh to replace Cherry Cottrell as Ophelia. Because of torrential rain the performance had to be moved from the castle courtyard to the ballroom of a local hotel, but the tradition of playing Hamlet at Elsinore was established, and Olivier was followed by, among others, Gielgud , Redgrave , Richard Burton , Christopher Plummer , Derek Jacobi , Kenneth Branagh and Jude Law The stylised production by Michel Saint-Denis was not well liked, but Olivier had some good notices among the bad.

Olivier returned to the Old Vic for a second season in For Othello he played Iago , with Richardson in the title role. Guthrie wanted to experiment with the theory that Iago's villainy is driven by a suppressed love for Othello. The notices were laudatory, mentioning him alongside great predecessors such as Edmund Kean , William Macready and Henry Irving.

The actor Robert Speaight described it as "Olivier's first incontestably great performance". In Olivier joined Richardson to film the spy thriller Q Planes , released the following year. After returning to London briefly in mid, the couple returned to America, Leigh to film the final takes for Gone with the Wind , and Olivier to prepare for filming of Alfred Hitchcock 's Rebecca —although the couple had hoped to appear in it together.

Selznick thought that not only was she more suitable for the role, but that it was best to keep Olivier and Leigh apart until their divorces came through. He received good reviews for both films and showed a more confident screen presence than he had in his early work. In February, following another request from Leigh, her husband also applied for their marriage to be terminated.

It was an extravagant production, but a commercial failure. The war in Europe had been under way for a year and was going badly for Britain. After his wedding Olivier wanted to help the war effort. Cooper advised him to remain where he was and speak to the film director Alexander Korda , who was based in the US at Churchill's behest, with connections to British Intelligence.

Korda saw that the relationship between the couple was strained. Olivier was tiring of Leigh's suffocating adulation, and she was drinking to excess. Olivier's life was under threat from the Nazis and pro-German sympathisers. The studio owners were concerned enough that Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille both provided support and security to ensure his safety.

He had spent the previous year learning to fly and had completed nearly hours by the time he left America. He intended to join the Royal Air Force but instead made another propaganda film, 49th Parallel , narrated short pieces for the Ministry of Information, and joined the Fleet Air Arm because Richardson was already in the service. Richardson had gained a reputation for crashing aircraft, which Olivier rapidly eclipsed.

Originally he had no intention of taking the directorial duties, but ended up directing and producing, in addition to taking the title role. He was assisted by an Italian internee, Filippo Del Giudice , who had been released to produce propaganda for the Allied cause. Brooke, writing for the BFI, considers that it "came too late in the Second World War to be a call to arms as such, but formed a powerful reminder of what Britain was defending.

The reviewer for The Manchester Guardian wrote that the film combined "new art hand-in-hand with old genius, and both superbly of one mind", in a film that worked "triumphantly". Throughout the war Tyrone Guthrie had striven to keep the Old Vic company going, even after German bombing in left the theatre a near-ruin. A small troupe toured the provinces, with Sybil Thorndike at its head.

By , with the tide of the war turning, Guthrie felt it time to re-establish the company in a London base and invited Richardson to head it. Initially he proposed Gielgud and Olivier as his colleagues, but the former declined, saying, "It would be a disaster, you would have to spend your whole time as referee between Larry and me. The Old Vic governors approached the Royal Navy to secure the release of Richardson and Olivier; the Sea Lords consented, with, as Olivier put it, "a speediness and lack of reluctance which was positively hurtful.

The triumvirate secured the New Theatre for their first season and recruited a company. The second season, in , featured two double bills. The first consisted of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. Olivier played the warrior Hotspur in the first and the doddering Justice Shallow in the second. In the two one-act plays his switch from searing tragedy and horror in the first half to farcical comedy in the second impressed most critics and audience members, though a minority felt that the transformation from Sophocles 's bloodily blinded hero to Sheridan 's vain and ludicrous Mr Puff "smacked of a quick-change turn in a music hall".

The third, and final, London season under the triumvirate was in — Olivier would have preferred the roles to be reversed, but Richardson did not wish to attempt Lear. In his scenes of decline and madness towards the end of the play some critics found him less moving than his finest predecessors in the role. The high profile of the two star actors did not endear them to the new chairman of the Old Vic governors, Lord Esher.

He had ambitions to be the first head of the National Theatre and had no intention of letting actors run it. In January Olivier began working on his second film as a director, Hamlet , in which he also took the lead role. The original play was heavily cut to focus on the relationships, rather than the political intrigue. The film became a critical and commercial success in Britain and abroad, although Lejeune, in The Observer , considered it "less effective than [Olivier's] stage work.

He speaks the lines nobly, and with the caress of one who loves them, but he nullifies his own thesis by never, for a moment, leaving the impression of a man who cannot make up his own mind; here, you feel rather, is an actor-producer-director who, in every circumstance, knows exactly what he wants, and gets it". While Olivier was on the Australian tour and Richardson was in Hollywood, Esher terminated the contracts of the three directors, who were said to have "resigned".

By the end of the Australian tour, both Leigh and Olivier were exhausted and ill, and he told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses. Shortly afterwards Finch moved to London, where Olivier auditioned him and put him under a long-term contract with Laurence Olivier Productions. Finch and Leigh's affair continued on and off for several years.

Although it was common knowledge that the Old Vic triumvirate had been dismissed, [ ] they refused to be drawn on the matter in public, and Olivier even arranged to play a final London season with the company in , as Richard III, Sir Peter Teazle, and Chorus in his own production of Anouilh 's Antigone with Leigh in the title role.

The play was condemned by most critics, but the production was a considerable commercial success, and led to Leigh's casting as Blanche in the film version. It must have been a most dreadful strain to do it night after night. She would be shaking and white and quite distraught at the end of it. I think I'm a fairly good manager now.

I ran the St. James's theatre for eight years. I didn't run that at all well. I made mistake after mistake, but I dare say those mistakes taught me something. The production company set up by Olivier took a lease on the St James's Theatre. The production was popular, despite poor reviews, but the expensive production did little to help the finances of Laurence Olivier Productions.

After a series of box-office failures, [ y ] the company balanced its books in with productions of Shaw 's Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra which the Oliviers played in London and then took to Broadway. Olivier was thought by some critics to be under par in both his roles, and some suspected him of playing deliberately below his usual strength so that Leigh might appear his equal.

In the view of the critic and biographer W. Darlington , he was simply miscast both as Caesar and Antony, finding the former boring and the latter weak. Darlington comments, "Olivier, in his middle forties when he should have been displaying his powers at their very peak, seemed to have lost interest in his own acting". Shortly after filming started she suffered a breakdown, and returned to Britain where, between periods of incoherence, she told Olivier that she was in love with Finch, and had been having an affair with him; [ ] she gradually recovered over a period of several months.

As a result of the breakdown, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad", [ ] and in his diary, Coward expressed the view that "things had been bad and getting worse since or thereabouts. It ran for eight months [ ] but was widely regarded as a minor contribution to the season, in which other productions included Gielgud in Venice Preserv'd , Coward in The Apple Cart and Ashcroft and Redgrave in Antony and Cleopatra.

In Olivier and Leigh were invited to play leading roles in three plays at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre , Stratford. Rehearsals were difficult, with Olivier determined to play his conception of the role despite the director's view that it was vulgar. Somehow the production did not work. Olivier was set on playing Malvolio in his own particular rather extravagant way.

He was extremely moving at the end, but he played the earlier scenes like a Jewish hairdresser, with a lisp and an extraordinary accent, and he insisted on falling backwards off a bench in the garden scene, though I begged him not to do it. But then Malvolio is a very difficult part. The next production was Macbeth. Reviewers were lukewarm about the direction by Glen Byam Shaw and the designs by Roger Furse , but Olivier's performance in the title role attracted superlatives.

Trewin , Olivier's was "the finest Macbeth of our day"; to Darlington it was "the best Macbeth of our time". In their third production of the Stratford season, Olivier played the title role in Titus Andronicus , with Leigh as Lavinia. Her notices in the part were damning, [ z ] but the production by Peter Brook and Olivier's performance as Titus received the greatest ovation in Stratford history from the first-night audience, and the critics hailed the production as a landmark in post-war British theatre.

Leigh became pregnant in and withdrew from the production of Coward's comedy South Sea Bubble. Although the filming was challenging because of Monroe's behaviour, the film was appreciated by the critics. Olivier had seen the play earlier in the run and disliked it, but Miller was convinced that Osborne had talent, and Olivier reconsidered.

He was ready for a change of direction; in he wrote:.

Laurence olivier actor biography

I had reached a stage in my life that I was getting profoundly sick of—not just tired—sick. Consequently the public were, likely enough, beginning to agree with me. My rhythm of work had become a bit deadly: a classical or semi-classical film; a play or two at Stratford, or a nine-month run in the West End, etc etc.