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In the 1950s, other girls had crushes on Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and James Dean. My crush was Laurence Olivier --- maybe it was because my father taught Shakespeare, but really I think it was his beautiful voice, sensitive mouth, brooding Heathcliffian eyes…you get the picture. I kept a scrapbook; I even wrote to him, and he replied --- well, sort of: a blue aerogramme thanking me for my kind letter and signed "L. Olivier." I wish I still had it.
So you can see that I was disposed to be fascinated by OLIVIER, the new biography by journalist Terry Coleman. Actually, this is the first and only biography to be sanctioned by Sir Laurence's widow, actress Joan Plowright, and the Olivier estate. The advantage of "official" works, of course, is that the author gets access to all sorts of formerly unavailable personal papers. The downside is that he tends to be weighed down by the need to document endlessly, explain copiously, and set the record straight. This is not a fast-moving book. But it is a compelling and sometimes touching one that lets us glimpse the private side of an honest-to-God genius.
The view isn't always edifying. Olivier is revealed as self-absorbed, vulnerable, flirtatious, excessive, sometimes embarrassingly silly (in his letters to Vivien Leigh, his second wife and grand passion) and surprisingly shrewd about business (I remember being a bit shocked when Sir Laurence did American TV ads for Polaroid, but it turns out that years earlier he had made a deal for the production of Olivier cigarettes, giving him a lot of free smokes and a hefty percentage of the take). A self-described "liar," he isn't the easiest subject for a biographer to decipher, though Coleman does his best to sort out the facts from the embroidery.
Olivier could also be generous and devoted: The sad story of his deteriorating relationship to the mentally unstable Leigh (she was a victim of bipolar, also known as "manic," depression) often shows him to be remarkably forbearing. The demise of the marriage took years; it's not clear why --- loyalty, public relations? --- but the circumstances were not made public at the time. I remember being distressed by the breakup and blaming him (he had already moved on to Plowright), but the truth is, Leigh had affairs as well (a long one with actor Peter Finch) and they seem to have inflicted equal-opportunity suffering.
The issue of sexuality is a principal one for Coleman. A less respectful 1991 Olivier biography by Donald Spoto got a lot of play for its "revelation" that the actor was bisexual and had a long relationship with comedian Danny Kaye. In a seven-page Author's Note, Coleman acknowledges the probability of a fleeting early affair with a man (not Kaye) and observes that Olivier's on-stage, on-screen appeal had an element of androgyny, but he devotes most of the space to emphatic denials of Spoto's assertions. Indeed, Olivier's bedroom prowess (extensive, on the evidence; he was unfaithful to all three wives) appears to have been overwhelmingly hetero. Although Coleman seems to me to protest a bit too much, his evidence is persuasive --- and anyway, who cares? As Shakespeare wrote in Henry V (and Sir Laurence spoke so eloquently in his film of the play), "Nice customs curtsy to great kings," and Olivier certainly achieved almost the status of royalty.
What OLIVIER doesn't really do is explore how the complex, flawed man got to be a great actor (some would say the great actor) of stage and film. In the '80s Sir Laurence did write his own books on the subject (CONFESSIONS OF AN ACTOR and ON ACTING), neither of which I've read; perhaps Coleman felt that his main brief was to venture into the less charted territory of Olivier's intimate life. Still, it's a pity not to have had more on the meat of his profession. A hint of his far-sightedness: Although Olivier did not care for Look Back in Anger, the subversive play by the "angry young man" of British theatre, John Osborne, in 1956 he nonetheless asked Osborne to write him something. The result was The Entertainer, a signal departure for Olivier and one of his greatest triumphs. There are glimpses in the book, too, of his physical audacity; his perfectionism; his acuteness and courage not only as an actor but as a director and artistic administrator.
Olivier really did do everything in the theatre short of toting flats and sewing costumes; he was a key player in the development of Britain's National Theatre (one of the houses in the complex now located on the South Bank of the Thames is named after him). But Coleman spends far too long on the NT's protracted and highly political struggle to be born; unless you're a true aficionado, it unbalances the book.
More successful is his moving account of the last 20-odd years of Olivier's life: I had no idea (nor did most of the world) that he'd had a series of illnesses, many of them grave; that he suddenly began to suffer from stage fright and memory loss; that his stunning cameos (many in mediocre films) and full-scale late roles (I'm thinking particularly of the TV films King Lear and Brideshead Revisited, though he may be better known in the U.S. as the sadistic Nazi dentist in Marathon Man) had been managed despite these handicaps, with gallantry and reliable brilliance. Even his address to Queen Elizabeth II (and the assembled throng) at the opening of the Olivier Theatre was a masterpiece.
Olivier died in 1989. He would have been "tickled pink," as his son Richard noted, to have known that Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's --- London's foremost Anglican institutions --- were competing over who would get the glory of hosting his memorial service and housing his ashes. His final exit, too, was terrific theatre.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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