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Laurence Olivier, by Terry Coleman
Olivier the FascinatorLaurence Olivier was the founding director of the National Theatre. He knew what he was taking on. “It looks,” he wrote, “like the most tiresome, awkward, embarrassing, forever-compromised, never-right, thankless fucking post that anyone could be fool enough to take on and it fills me with dread.” But he had no doubt that it was his destiny and the central duty of his career, and God help anyone who stood in his way.
No one like Olivier exists today. In the early 1930s he was a swashbuckling matinee idol in the West End. He never played a Shakespeare lead until he was 28. Then in one year he played Hamlet, Henry V, Macbeth, Iago, and Coriolanus at Lilian Baylis's Old Vic and made himself into a great classical actor. The next year he became a Hollywood star with Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, and then a director and producer with his films of Henry V and Hamlet. He had a triumph with his stage version of Richard III, was knighted, and turned West End impresario. In the 1950s he and his second wife Vivien Leigh were the royal family of the English stage. He directed a film with Marilyn Monroe, which he said was like teaching Urdu to a marmoset, and then reinvented himself by playing Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer at the Royal Court. He gave an address at the Washington inauguration of President John F Kennedy, and spoke the television commentary at Churchill's funeral. Theatre directors don't come that big or that various any more. He took the directorship of the National in 1962 at £5,000 a year, which was little more than he earned from royalties on his own Olivier brand of cigarettes, and one twentieth of what Universal had just paid him for a supporting role in the Hollywood epic of Spartacus.
His National opened in October 1963 at the Old Vic, a building which had many memories for him but for whose fabric he felt no affection, thinking it crumbling and moribund. He spent a fortune of the Arts Council's money extending the stage, taking out rows of seats, crucifying the traditionally excellent acoustics, and cheerfully admitted he had ruined the place. What he wanted was the long promised new theatre on the South Bank. It was meant to open in 1964, but by 1967 not a spadeful of earth had been shifted. At the Old Vic there was not even space for offices, and for years he and his company were housed in workmen's wooden huts, of a type known in the trade as Terrapin 19, bought second hand and erected on a nearby bomb-site.
But it was on the stage of the Old Vic that he gave his last great performances – Astrov in Uncle Vanya, his black Othello, the Captain in Dance of Death, his last stage Shakespeare as Shylock, and Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. His company also staged new plays, the most distinguished and popular of them by Tom Stoppard, Peter Nichols and Peter Shaffer. The National was a court where Sir Laurence, or Sir, or Larry, depending on how well you knew him, was king, and a fascinator. He would remember a bowl of flowers for Maureen in reception, but was at his uneasiest as an administrator, and was brought into bitter conflict with the Board by the scheming of Kenneth Tynan, his literary advisor, who disingenuously pressed him to stage a play accusing Churchill of murder and, when the Board objected, urged him to resign. He did not resign, and when Harold Wilson first offered him a peerage, in 1967, declined, saying he had not time because he was “entirely wrapped up in the National Theatre.”
A few months later, at the age of 60, he suffered the first of his grave illnesses, prostate cancer. Through the treatment he continued leaping on to a table in Strindberg's Dance of Death, even touring Canada. Pleurisy followed. He played Shylock, and then Tyrone, and at last accepted the offered peerage. Illnesses ganged up on him. A thrombosis swelled his right leg to twice its size. It was plain that he could not long continue as Director. His contract was anyway running out. He himself wanted an actor to succeed him, favoured Albert Finney, and one evening, having dined too well, virtually offered the job to Richard Burton and next day had to explain that it was, alas, not his to offer. Meantime the new South Bank theatre was at last beginning to take shape. The Board quietly approached Peter Hall.
What follows is unhappy. Olivier always said that he was summarily given six months' notice in March 1972. He was not, but he believed he was, and thought of it as a betrayal. The proposal was in fact that Hall should join as director-designate and that Olivier should retire when the new building opened, which was then expected to be in 1973.
The Board named the biggest of the new auditoriums after Olivier, a name which at first he declined to use; offered him the title of President of the National, which he summarily declined; and proposed to commission a portrait of him by Hockney, which he outright refused. Hall, as director-designate, wooed Olivier, asking him to play Lear; Olivier temporised. Hall asked him to play Prospero; for a whole weekend Olivier appeared to have agreed, only to change his mind on the Monday. He then determined to go. In his diary for 1 November 1973 he wrote “FIN DIR NT.” There was no ceremony, only a sing-song in the Old Vic rehearsal room. He played his last part on any stage as a Glaswegian Trotskyite in The Party by Trevor Griffiths. Then in 1974 he suffered far the worst of all his plague of diseases. This time it was dermato-poly-myosotis. He was in hospital for four months and expected to die. He did not, though he was frail ever afterwards.
He recovered enough to film sitting down when he could not stand, and did a marvellous Lear for Granada Television. But he had separated himself from the National. He was still consultant director and could have attended board meetings, but scribbled “Keep Out” across the papers sent to him. Hall, trying to attract him back in any capacity, offered him carte blanche. Would he direct Romeo and Juliet? Or any Chekhov, or Ibsen? Or a Feydeau farce? He declined. He was wilfully mischievous – as Hall put it, at his most Richard III.
The formal royal opening of the new National was to be in October 1976. Hall asked Olivier to take charge of it. “You have,” he said, “to open your own building.” Olivier countered with a droll proposal that the bars should be kept open on the great night and that the Queen should dance on stage. As for himself, he might say what he called a few ill-chosen words, or he might not. Nobody knew. On the night it rained hard. The Queen unveiled a plaque. Olivier then walked alone on to the Olivier stage and gave one of the great performances of his life. For ten minutes he dominated everything, with a kind of magic. To Queen and audience his last words were: “I thank you for your kind attention, and for the glory, and the lustre, of your attendance” – with a gesture at “glory” that took in Queen and theatre and all. It did not really matter what he said. The presence was all. It was the only appearance he ever made on any stage in the new National Theatre which, as he put it, had bloody nearly killed him.
© Terry Coleman, June 2007
This article originally appeared in the National's Olivier and Lyttelton programmes, July to October 2007
Terry Coleman is author of Olivier: the authorised biography, published in paperback by Bloomsbury at £8.99, and on sale at the NT Bookshop. nationaltheatre.org.uk/bookshop
Laurence Olivier was born on 22 May 1907. The National Theatre is celebrating his centenary with a gala performance, on Sunday 23 September 2007, in the theatre that bears his name.
