Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier ( ə-LIV-ee-ay; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor and director. He and his contemporaries John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave and Ralph Richardson made up a quartet of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles in a career spanning six decades. Late in his career, Olivier had considerable success in television roles.
Olivier's family had no theatrical connections, but his father, a clergyman, decided that his son should become an actor. After attending a drama school in London, Olivier learned his craft in a succession of acting jobs during the late 1920s. In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Coward's Private Lives, and he appeared in his first film. In 1935 he played in a celebrated production of Romeo and Juliet alongside Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star. In the 1940s, together with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, building it into a highly respected company. There his most celebrated roles included Shakespeare's Richard III and Sophocles's Oedipus.
In the 1950s Olivier was an independent actor-manager, but his stage career had stagnated until he joined the avant-garde English Stage Company in 1957 to play the title role in The Entertainer, a part he later reprised on film. From 1963 to 1973 he was the founding director of Britain's National Theatre, running a resident company that fostered many future stars. His own parts there included the title role in Othello (1965), and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1970). Among Olivier's films are Wuthering Heights (1939), Rebecca (1940) and a trilogy of Shakespeare films as actor/director: Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). His later films included Spartacus (1960), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Sleuth (1972), Marathon Man (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). His television appearances included an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence (1960), Long Day's Journey into Night (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), A Little Romance (1979), Brideshead Revisited (1981) and King Lear (1983).
Olivier's honours included a knighthood (1947), a life peerage (1970) and the Order of Merit (1981). For his on-screen work he received an Academy Award, five British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards in addition to nominations for a Tony Award, two British Academy Television Awards and a Grammy Award. Olivier was awarded with two non-competitive Academy Honorary Awards in 1947 and 1979, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1983 and a BAFTA Fellowship in 1976. The National Theatre's largest auditorium is named in his honour, and he is commemorated in the Laurence Olivier Awards, given annually by the Society of London Theatre. He was married three times: to the actresses Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, Vivien Leigh from 1940 to 1960, and Joan Plowright from 1961 until his death in 1989, and had four children.
1907–1924: Early life and education
Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on 22 May 1907 in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of the three children of the Reverend Gerard Kerr Olivier and Agnes Louise (née Crookenden). He had two older siblings: Sybille and Gerard Dacres "Dickie". His great-great-grandfather was of French Huguenot descent, and Olivier came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. Gerard Olivier had begun a career as a schoolmaster, but in his thirties he discovered a strong religious vocation and was ordained as a priest of the Church of England. He belonged to the high church, ritualist wing of Anglicanism and was known as "Father Olivier". Some Anglican congregations did not like this style, and the only church posts he was offered were temporary, usually deputising for regular incumbents in their absence. This meant a nomadic existence, and for Laurence's first few years, he never lived in one place long enough to make friends.
In 1912, when Olivier was five, his father secured a permanent appointment as assistant rector at St Saviour's, Pimlico. He held the post for six years, and a stable family life was at last possible. Olivier was devoted to his mother, but not to his father, whom he found a cold and remote parent, though he learned a great deal of the art of performing from him. As a young man Gerard Olivier had considered a stage career and was a dramatic and effective preacher. Olivier wrote that his father knew "when to drop the voice, when to bellow about the perils of hellfire, when to slip in a gag, when suddenly to wax sentimental ... The quick changes of mood and manner absorbed me, and I have never forgotten them."
In 1916, after attending a series of preparatory schools, Olivier passed the singing examination for admission to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street, in central London. His elder brother was already a pupil and Olivier gradually settled in, though he felt himself to be something of an outsider. The church's style of worship was (and remains) Anglo-Catholic, with emphasis on ritual, vestments and incense. The theatricality of the services appealed to Olivier, and the vicar encouraged the students to develop a taste for secular as well as religious drama. In a school production of Julius Caesar in 1917, the ten-year-old Olivier's performance as Brutus impressed an audience that included Lady Tree, the young Sybil Thorndike and Ellen Terry, who wrote in her diary, "The small boy who played Brutus is already a great actor." He later won praise in other schoolboy productions, as Maria in Twelfth Night (1918) and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (1922).
From All Saints, Olivier went on to St Edward's School, Oxford, from 1921 to 1924. He made little mark until his final year, when he played Puck in the school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream; his performance was a tour de force that won him popularity among his fellow pupils. In January 1924, his brother left England to work in India as a rubber planter. Olivier missed him greatly and asked his father how soon he could follow. He recalled in his memoirs that his father replied, "Don't be such a fool, you're not going to India, you're going on the stage."
1924–1929: Early acting career
In 1924 Gerard Olivier, a habitually frugal man, told his son that he must gain not only admission to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, but also a scholarship with a bursary to cover his tuition fees and living expenses. Olivier's sister had been a student there and was a favourite of Elsie Fogerty, the founder and principal of the school. Olivier later speculated that it was on the strength of this connection that Fogerty agreed to award him the bursary.
One of Olivier's contemporaries at the school was Peggy Ashcroft, who observed he was "rather uncouth in that his sleeves were too short and his hair stood on end but he was intensely lively and great fun". By his own admission he was not a very conscientious student, but Fogerty liked him and later said that he and Ashcroft stood out among her many pupils.
After leaving the Central School in 1925, Olivier worked for small theatrical companies; his first stage appearance was in a sketch called The Unfailing Instinct at the Brighton Hippodrome in August 1925. Later that year, he was taken on by Sybil Thorndike (the daughter of a friend of Olivier's father) and her husband Lewis Casson as a bit-part player, understudy and assistant stage manager for their London company. Olivier modelled his performing style on that of Gerald du Maurier, of whom he said, "He seemed to mutter on stage but had such perfect technique. When I started I was so busy doing a du Maurier that no one ever heard a word I said. The Shakespearean actors one saw were terrible hams like Frank Benson." Olivier's concern with speaking naturally and avoiding what he called "singing" Shakespeare's verse was the cause of much frustration in his early career, as critics regularly decried his delivery.