Olivier, who always expected the best from the reviewer, was disappointed and discouraged. But though his delivery of the verse still gave rise to complaint it was far more muted than after “Romeo and Juliet”. John Gielgud did not like Olivier’s performance but, talking to Peter Brook, he claimed that he had never been jealous in his life, then added thoughtfully: “But I admit I burst into tears when Larry Olivier got such good notices for his Hamlet.” Whatever Olivier may have believed, the general view was that the performance was something not to miss. It was during the run of “Hamlet” that Olivier first indulged his propensity to make speeches at the end of the performance. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he announced on 30 January, 1937, “tonight a great actress has been born. Laertes has had a daughter.” Considering the age of Vanessa Redgrave at the time, Olivier was being remarkably prescient.13
After Hamlet came Toby Belch in “Twelfth Night”: a part, as Olivier remarked, “designed to demonstrate my staggering versatility”. Henry V came next. By instinct Olivier was patriotic, but he was not immune to the prevailing mood of the times. In 1937 heroism was out of fashion, appeasement had not yet become a dirty word. “I think you will be very good as Henry V and I don’t think he’s a shit at all,” Peggy Ashcroft encouraged him, but he was unconvinced. He appealed to Ralph Richardson for advice. “Henry V?” said Richardson. “He’s a scoutmaster. But he raised scoutmastership to godlike proportions … Of course you must play him.” Olivier concurred, but with a marked lack of enthusiasm. So wan was his performance that Guthrie rounded on him and accused him of betraying the sense of the play and letting down his public. “I was fortunate to have him directing me,” wrote Olivier. “I followed his eye. He knew.”14
He did not have the benefit of Guthrie’s eye for the “Macbeth” that followed. The French director Michel Saint-Denis was imported for that production. He was “a fine director with a wonderful imagination”, considered Olivier, “but he let his imagination run amok”. It was a gimmicky affair, in which the principal characters had their faces swallowed up under grotesquely heavy make-up. Usually Olivier revelled in elaborate disguises, but even he was taken aback by this excess. “Larry’s make-up comes on,” remarked Vivien Leigh, “then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on.” It was “not an unparalleled success”, Olivier wrote in his memoirs, and he felt he had done nothing to redeem it. As was so often the case, he exaggerated his own inadequacy. It was mock-modesty perhaps, designed in part to distinguish himself from the common ruck of actors who over-praised their own performances, but his self-deprecation was on the whole endearing and enhanced the value of his judgment on those occasions when he claimed to have achieved something altogether special. The critics rated his Macbeth higher than he did himself. “He brings off some magnificent vocal effects,” wrote James Agate. “Mr Olivier will probably play this part twice as well when he has twice his present years.” It was shrewd comment: it was in fact eighteen years before Olivier provided what all agreed was a great and some felt must be the definitive Macbeth. In this production he sought to cover up his unease with a display of hectic energy. His shriek on seeing Banquo’s ghost was so loud and protracted that it gave him laryngitis while the duelling became so vigorous that the man who played Macduff once needed to be removed to hospital.
Olivier had to be reminded that he was supposed to lose the fight: “I always fought with too much vigour. That came from a sort of pride.”15
He had intended to follow Macbeth with Richard II, but Gielgud protested that he planned to do them both in his own season at the Queen’s Theatre. Olivier acquiesced: “Richard II” was dropped from the Old Vic repertoire. It was one of the few great Shakespearean roles that Olivier never played; it would not have come naturally to him, but he had shown in “The Green Bay Tree” that he could play weakness and self-pity and it would have been a memorable experience to see him seated on the ground, telling sad stories of the death of kings. Instead, he played Iago to Richardson’s Othello. According to the designer, Roger Furse, both men tried to persuade Guthrie to cast the women of their choice, in Olivier’s case Vivien Leigh, as Desdemona. They failed, Guthrie instead chose Curigwen Lewis. “This is where I saw the generosity of Larry,” wrote Furse. Though he deplored Guthrie’s failure to employ Leigh, “once it was decided he worked in real harmony and generosity with Curigwen. The others didn’t.” No amount of harmony could redeem what proved to be a disaster. “It wasn’t good,” Olivier considered. “I feel a bit churlish saying it, but it wasn’t good simply because Ralph wasn’t good.” The initial reading had gone well but Richardson never improved on it, he “tried to keep within the nice cosy feeling of his reading, and you can’t”. Guthrie was in despair and at one time threatened to call off the production. Olivier, partly because he felt Richardson’s Othello imposed on him the duty to bring some life into the play, partly because it was always his instinct to seek out the comedy in any figure, however malign, played his Iago for laughs. “He was a comedian by instinct, a tragedian by art,” considered James Agate. Olivier would have seen nothing offensive in that judgment. “I maintain,” he wrote, “that a pure tragedian isn’t going to move an audience except by the sheer sound-value of a glorious voice, which, to my mind, is not the true nature of acting … Your studies of humanity are going to be far sharper if you’re a comedian.” Almost any part would be the better for a little humour, though he confessed, “It’s jolly hard to get a laugh in ‘Lear’.” But though he felt that he had been right to play Iago as he did, he did not think that it had been a success. “What I missed entirely,” he concluded, “was the essential value of the part” – an opaque comment which presumably implied that he had oversimplified Iago and not done justice to the complex emotions which shaped his conduct.16
Five major roles at the Old Vic and none of them totally successful: he had done more to establish himself as a Shakespearean actor than his own self-criticism would suggest but it had still not been a triumphant progress. There remained Coriolanus. Lewis Casson was the director and his wife, Sybil Thorndike, refused to play Coriolanus’s mother, Volumnia, unless Olivier promised to do what her husband told him. “His orders were that Larry was to get rid of all his experimental ideas and tricks, and act Coriolanus in a natural, straightforward way.” Olivier accepted the ruling meekly. He allowed himself one extravagance. “Coriolanus” was a “jolly ripping entertainment”, he told Basil Rathbone. “Whatever happens, you must do a magnificent fall at the end. I did a peach, I remember, a perfect peach.” It was to be still more of a peach when he repeated the part in 1959, but it was already spectacular enough. Otherwise he followed Casson’s bidding. “It was a great delight to watch you,” wrote Esmé Percy, who one suspects might have been briefed by Casson on what to say, “in a production which left you free to give your whole strength to the Play, without ‘stunts’ or eccentricities. How fine I thought you were, I cannot tell you, and how passionate and sincere your reading was. One may say you have been trying out all this year parts not yet quite within your compass. But that is what I feel has been so splendid for you … Now these memories are in your bones. They have given you range and depth and force.” Olivier had been growing in experience and stature ever since he had joined the Old Vic. With “Coriolanus” he came of age.17
*
His success was the more remarkable because of the strains put on him by his tempestuous private life. Early in 1936 it became evident that Jill Esmond was pregnant. So far as Olivier was concerned this seems to have been unintended, for Esmond it was a despairing effort to save a sinking ship. As the filming of “Fire Over England” went on it became ever more evident that Olivier’s infatuation for Vivien Leigh was not a passing fancy. Jill Esmond knew well what was going on but, preoccupied by pregnancy, she preferred to think of it as little as possible. “All that, from my point of view, was pretty nasty,” she remembered. Perhaps she hoped that, when their child was born, her husband’s love would be miraculously rekindled. When he c
ame, they called him Tarquin: “It came to me in a mad moment,” Olivier admitted. “It has such dramatic overtones.” But Tarquin brought no great improvement to his parents’ marriage. Olivier took a proper interest in his son but withdrew still further from any real engagement with his wife.18
Formally the marriage survived. Vivien Leigh went to inspect the baby a few days after it was born. “It is really very attractive,” she told her husband. “Larry says it is like Edward G. Robinson; which is a little cruel. He has already started reciting Shakespeare to it.” To the outside world she was still no more than a friend of the family and it was to remain that way for the best part of another year. But the veneer on the marriage was wearing thin. When filming “Fire Over England” finished the Oliviers took off for Capri. Vivien Leigh was soon in pursuit, presumably with Olivier’s consent. She was escorted by an elderly friend, Oswald Frewen, who viewed with dismay the development of a relationship which sooner or later, he felt sure, was bound to end in disaster. He pleaded with Leigh not to break up her marriage: she agreed that the advice was excellent, but she did not take it. Olivier, for his part, seems to have made occasional efforts to escape the thrall. Raymond Massey claimed that, when the filming of “Fire Over England” was almost completed, Olivier told him that: “He was consumed by guilt. He was putting an end to it, he said. He loved Jill and he’d been a fool. With Vivien, well, it was just a wild infatuation, but it was to Jill he owed his loyalty. He had talked to Vivien about it. She had agreed to a cooling-off period.” Massey can hardly have invented the exchange, but Olivier’s words do not ring true, especially so far as Leigh’s role is concerned. Even if he said something along those lines he cannot have done so with much conviction. Jill Esmond, anyway, seems to have had few illusions. “After all, she was one of the most beautiful women there have ever been,” she accepted with resignation, “and he fell desperately in love with her in a way he’d never been in love with me.”19
Things came to a head when the Old Vic company set sail for Denmark, to put on “Hamlet” at Elsinore. It was in many ways a memorable visit. The plan was to perform in the open air at the castle of Kronborg but the first night was made impossible because of heavy and continuous rain. It was a gala performance with royalty present, so Guthrie was determined not to cancel it altogether. Instead it was switched to the ballroom of a nearby hotel. For a frantic few hours the cast, with Olivier very much in the lead, laboured to reorganise the production so that it could be acted with chairs banked all around the stage. The cast rose to the challenge, the audience appreciated the effort and were determined to enjoy it. The evening was deemed a complete success. More significantly, it convinced Guthrie that Shakespeare not merely could but should be played on a proscenium stage with the audience on both sides of as well as in front of the players, not merely viewing them in a box cut out of a wall as in the more traditional theatres. Olivier reached the same conclusion. The shape of the National Theatre, first at the Old Vic, then in its present building, owes much to the success of this one performance on a rainy night in Denmark.20
The visit was also important for the effect it had on Olivier’s marriage. According to his own account, he was taken aback when Guthrie suggested that, for the Danish tour, the part of Ophelia should be taken by Vivien Leigh: “Of course, I tried to mask my feelings, and said ‘Oh, yes’.” A more convincing account maintains that it was Olivier who pressed for the change. Guthrie at first refused. Vivien then made an hysterical scene and Olivier threatened to withdraw from the excursion if he did not get his way. Probably the truth was somewhere between the two. In any case, to the annoyance of the woman who had played Ophelia in London, Olivier won the day. For reasons that are obscure, Jill Esmond decided, or was persuaded, that she should come too. “I shouldn’t have done. It was a mistake,” she admitted later. The result was open humiliation. Olivier and Vivien Leigh were unable to conceal their love for each other; indeed made very little effort to do so. Alec Guinness was delegated to look after Esmond when Olivier was acting or rehearsing: to stop her being bored, he was told; to leave the field open for the lovers to display their emotion freely, Guinness assumed. By the time they returned to London all attempts at secrecy had been abandoned. “I decided that it was time to pack up and go away,” is Esmond’s account of what came next; “Jill told,” was the terse entry in Olivier’s diary for 11 June, 1937. Whichever side took the initiative, the result was the same: the marriage was over.21
Olivier wanted to postpone a public breach for as long as possible. He had already received offensive letters denouncing his behaviour; he was convinced that a storm of abuse would follow as soon as it was known that he had left his wife for another woman, especially a woman who was married and as celebrated a star as Vivien Leigh. For another year he remained formally committed to Esmond while cohabiting more or less openly with Leigh and taking her for long, self-indulgent trips across France. It satisfied nobody; it was a “furtive life, lying life. Sneaky,” Olivier wrote in his memoirs. In July, 1937 he wrote a will. It left the house in Cheyne Walk and the fruits of all his insurance policies to Esmond. The rest, including Durham Cottage, the charming semi-rural retreat a powerful stone’s throw from the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, in which he had made a home for Leigh, he left to her. He concluded: “It is my most earnest wish that my wife and Mrs Holman [Vivien Leigh] shall live in friendliness and harmony of spirit, both forgiving and forgetting any possible bitterness that may perhaps lie between them. My dearest love, in the proportions that they know they own it, be with them and my family, my son and my good friends for ever.” The concept of Esmond and Leigh meeting in radiant harmony, presumably to discuss the merits of the deceased Olivier, is both bizarre and distasteful. Olivier does not emerge with credit from the break-up of his marriage: in his defence it can be said that he was besottedly in love. At least he made no attempt to justify his behaviour. He was from time to time to complain about Esmond’s deficiencies as a wife, but he never denied that he had been at fault and she misused. He accepted his responsibilities as a former husband and as a father and was as generous in the financial provisions that he made for her as he had been sparing in his love.22
Things were moving towards a resolution. William Wyler, probably the most distinguished and certainly among the most prominent of American film directors at the time, was pressing him to go to Hollywood to star in what would be his most important film to date. Early in November 1938 he sailed from Southampton on the French liner, the Normandie. A new chapter began.
CHAPTER FIVE
Film Star
The film in which Wyler wanted to involve Olivier was “Wuthering Heights”; Olivier, of course, being destined to play the tempestuous and vengeful Heathcliff. He was not the first choice for the part. He had been told that Colman had been preferred to him but was not available: “That makes me the poor man’s Ronald Colman,” he observed. He would have been still more disconcerted if he had known that Wyler had then transferred his favours to Robert Newton. “Newton magnificent Heathcliff. He has strength and power which Olivier lacks,” he told the producer, Sam Goldwyn. Ben Hecht, who wrote the script, argued for Olivier. He was “one of the most magnificent actors I have ever seen,” he told Goldwyn. “He could recite Heathcliff sitting on a barrel of herring and break your heart.” Goldwyn thought Newton too ugly; Douglas Fairbanks, who was also in the running, would be too weak for the part. Olivier was the safest bet.1
But Olivier himself had doubts. He thought of making it a condition that Vivien Leigh should take the leading female role of Cathy. Goldwyn would only promise vaguely that she would be offered an important part. Then Ben Hecht’s script arrived and Olivier realised what a splendid role it would be for him. When it became clear that Vivien was to be fobbed off with the secondary part of Isabella he protested, but not to the point of turning down the offer. He did not believe that the woman whom Goldwyn had chosen to play Cathy, Merle Oberon, could be of Vivien’s calibre, but he had heard good
things of her and concluded that it was worth accepting the second best. When Vivien decided that Isabella offered too little to make the part worth accepting, she and Olivier realised that they must temporarily separate. To confirm that he had made the right decision Olivier once again turned to Ralph Richardson for advice. “Yes. Bit of fame. Good,” said Richardson, and Olivier was on his way.2
He had worked in Hollywood before, but never for a director with the skills of Wyler, nor in a production which had the potential to be important, perhaps even great. His first reactions were favourable. Things were better run than in England, he wrote to Sybille. “I am horrified to have to tell you that the American workman beats the English workman hollow in efficiency, acceptance and above all in enthusiasm … which make working conditions very much more pleasant.” As for Wyler: he was “an Alsatian of great artistic integrity and photogenic brilliance … one has the comforting knowledge that his artistic conscience will not permit anything to ‘go by’ that is not good or better than good.” But the two were destined to clash. Olivier still felt that film was an inferior medium, that real acting had to be done on a stage. “I was frightfully pompous, frightfully pleased with myself, overwhelmingly opinionated,” he recollected. When Wyler made it clear that he found his star’s performance extravagant Olivier retorted: “I suppose this anaemic little medium can’t stand anything great in size like that.” For Olivier the problem was that Wyler was quick to complain about what his Heath-cliff was doing wrong but reticent when it came to suggesting how it might be done better. Even Wyler admitted that there was “a lack of communication and articulation on my part”. Olivier would produce what seemed to him a splendid rendering of some lines, Wyler would tell him to do it again. One scene was shot seventy-two times without a single constructive comment from the director. “How do you want it?” demanded an exasperated Olivier. “I’ve done it calm, I’ve shouted, I’ve done it angry, I’ve done it sad, standing up, sitting down, fast, slow – how do you want me to do it?” “Better,” was the only answer. In retrospect, Olivier concluded that Wyler was waging a war of attrition, trying to reduce him to a point where he would see for himself that cinema demanded a radically different approach to acting on a stage. In the end it worked: Olivier was never wholly to repress an urge to overact but by the time “Wuthering Heights” had been completed he had come to terms with the medium and, perhaps even more important, accepted that it was a medium with which it was worth coming to terms.3
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