Laurence Olivier is a complex and unexpected portrait
of a man tormented by his own ruthless genius and
everlasting guilt. It is the story of a High Church
clergyman's son who became a West End matinee idol, and
only at the age of twenty-eight determined to make
himself a great Shakespearean actor, which he did in one
season at the Old Vic. The next year he made himself a
Hollywood star in ''Wuthering Heights'' and Rebecca,
then produced, directed and acted in his own Shakespeare
movies. Work and sex were for him inseparable: acting,
he once said, was like coming for a living. Having
abandoned his first wife, he entered a turbulent
marriage with the manic-depressive Vivien Leigh. She
dominated his life for twenty years and they became the
royal family of the British stage. Then, to save himself
and his work, he 'dropped the legend' and wrenched
himself away from her, and was ever afterwards tormented
by a sense of sin which only heroic and incessant work
could expiate. He married Joan Plowright, a generation
younger than himself, had a new young family, and became
founding director of the National Theatre. But even the
National, in his view, ended in betrayal and tragedy.For
twenty years he was stricken by one illness after
another. When he could no longer stand on a stage he
acted sitting down. In his last years he played so many
famous death scenes that when he died at the age of
eighty-two, his son half expected him to emerge from the
house to be congratulated on yet another. St Paul's and
Westminster Abbey, the two principal theatres of the
Church of England, outbid each other to stage the
positively final appearance of the man universally seen
as the most magical actor of his day. |
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