John Mortimer remembers Sir Laurence Olivier
The great actors of our century enjoy an immortality denied their predecessors. We must take the magic of Edmund Kean on trust from Hazlitt. We must make what we can of Irving from the strange, crackling intonations of an old recording. But Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson will live indefinitely on film and tonight you can pickup a video and summon up Hamlet or Henry V, or Richard III or Othello- many of Laurence Olivier's finest performances.
| Laurence Olivier in Coriolanus, 1938 photo by Angus McBean |
All these recollections are personal. My own begin at the Old Vic but they go back to my childhood before the war. I sat beside my father and saw Hamlet in what used to be known, as though it were in some way an unusual experience, as its entirety. I can remember everything about that production: the shape of the set, the taste of the coffee and sandwiches during the long interval and Olivier's surprising exciting, nervous and energetic way with the verse, which my father, as usual, recited half aloud from the front row of the stalls for his assistance. I remember the Richard III I saw at the matinee on a half term holiday from school and the amazing first Coriolanus where he died and rolled down a long flight of steps almost into our laps. I never dreamt then that I should meet him as a member of the Board of the National when it was at the Old Vic, or sit for hours with him and Albert Finney in one of the Nissen huts which housed its first offices, eating apples, drinking champagne and arguing our way through every line of my translation of Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear to make sure that the laughs were in exactly the right place. I never thought that I should write a play about my dead father and have to read it aloud to Laurence, who was about to play the part. “That is by far the most terrible reading of a play I have ever heard”, he was kind enough to say on that occasion.
The great quality in his acting, it has often been said, was danger. The risks he took, sometimes physical (the great leap at the end of Hamlet, another Coriolanus dying hung upside down like Mussolini), sometimes emotional (as when he became, for a minute, an old female jazz singer in The Entertainer), were always unexpected yet never vulgar or untrue. It was the danger that produced the excitement of his performances. You had to watch him closely, every second, because you simply had no idea what on earth he was going to do next. And these magnificent moments didn't come off the top of his head; they were the result of long thought, years of observing people and thinking about them, even of visits to the zoo and watching animals. As the blinded King Oedipus he uttered a terrible, desolate scream of pain which I shall always remember, and I remember his telling me how he came by it. “First of all”, he said, “I thought of foxes. Little foxes with their paws caught in a trap.” He held out his wrists helplessly. “And then I heard about how they catch ermine. It was a great help to me when I heard about that. In the Arctic they put down salt and the ermine comes to lick it. It's caught when it's tongue freezes to the ice. I thought about that sudden pain when I screamed as Oedipus.”
| Photo by Roddy McDowell |
He had been a young man with extraordinary good looks; you can still see the brooding beauty of his Heathcliff. He was not only a West End star in the days when the West End produced stars, but a great film star also. He brought to acting, and put at the disposal of the National, a great deal that he had learned in Hollywood. The tragic parts in Shakespeare, especially Hamlet and Lear, are full of comedy, and he used to say he learnt his timing in those plays from Jack Benny and Bob Hope. He remembered the rather portentous tone of Charlie Chaplain, who talked in his “half American half Cockney accent” and Laurence Olivier used some of his intonations to 'get a nice laugh in Othello'.
It was a combination of all these qualities, the danger, the unexpectedness, the high-octane star quality, that gave the early years of the National Theatre its especial glamour and theatrical excitement. Ken Tynan, the immaculate left wing hedonist whom Laurence took on as his 'dramaturge' and greyish eminence, used to say that there were Roundheads at the Royal Shakespeare and Cavaliers at the National. Certainly the National was full of dash and bravura, with occasional misguided charges at obscure plays, and many spectacular victories. Astrov, the Captain in the Dance of Death, and almost his last great stage performances in Long Day's Journey into Night, are high among Laurence Olivier's battle honours. It's a tribute to his extraordinary power, to the stewardship of Peter Hall, Richard Eyre and David Aukin, that the feeling of glamour and excitement travelled to the National's new concrete home and can still be felt in the foyer and on the stages. It all began with him.
But what was he like? Heroic of course. For years, at the National and afterwards, he fought his illness with indomitable courage and simply wouldn't allow it to win. He swam, he dived, he acted marvellously while he could stand, and then acted sitting down. At the end when he could no longer learn lines, he did a superb monologue on the radio. He was indomitable.
But, aside from the genius which, perhaps like all geniuses, he could never entirely understand, and the heroism, what he was like to be with, to talk to, have lunch and work with? I remember him as full of jokes. The ones he liked best were the old actor laddie jokes, like the actor playing Richard III to whom someone in the gallery shouted, “You're drunk!” “You think I'm drunk?” the villainous king wandered unsteadily down to the footlights to enquire. “Well, wait till you've seen the Duke of Buckingham!” It was stories like that which made him laugh most, and he would laugh until the tears came to his eyes and his voice rose to a high tenor note of delight. Indeed, for all his star quality, that is how I shall remember him: swapping jokes and reminisces in the way old actors have since they met for a drink in the tiring room at the Globe Theatre. The last time I saw him he was lying on a sofa at the party in his house. He entertained everybody. His legs were weak but the laughter was undiminished.
When he came to Board meetings he often treated us with mock humility, behaving like Othello before the Senate, calling us his “very notable and approv'd good masters”. Naturally he didn't mean of word of it. It was all, perhaps, part of a never ending and magnificent performance. Under his numerous disguises he was well hidden. “Scratch an actor.” He once said, “and you'll find an actor”.
This piece first appeared in 'Olivier at Work: The National Years', an illustrated compilation of reminiscences about Lawrence Olivier, the book is now out of print. John Mortimer translated A Flea in Her Ear for the National at the Old Vic, 1966; adapted The Captain of Köpenick, 1971; and was a National Theatre Board Member from 1967-1989.
