Laurence Olivier could speak
William Shakespeare's lines
as naturally as if he were "actually thinking them," said English
playwright Charles Bennett, who
met Olivier in 1927. Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, to Agnes
Louise (Crookenden) and Gerard Kerr Olivier, a High Anglican priest.
His surname came from a great-great-grandfather who was of French
Huguenot origin.
One of Olivier's earliest successes as a Shakespearean actor on the
London stage came in 1935 when he played "Romeo" and "Mercutio" in
alternate performances of "Romeo and Juliet" with
John Gielgud. A young Englishwoman just
beginning her career on the stage fell in love with Olivier's Romeo. In
1937, she was "Ophelia" to his "Hamlet" in a special performance at
Kronborg Castle, Elsinore (Helsingør), Denmark. In 1940, she became his second wife
after both returned from making films in America that were major box
office hits of 1939. His film was
Stürmische Höhen (1939), her
film was
Vom Winde verweht (1939).
Vivien Leigh and Olivier were screen lovers
in Feuer über England (1937),
21 Days (1940) and
Lord Nelsons letzte Liebe (1941).
There was almost a fourth film together in 1944 when Olivier and Leigh
traveled to Scotland with
Charles C. Bennett to research the
real-life story of a Scottish girl accused of murdering her French
lover. Bennett recalled that Olivier researched the story "with all the
thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes" and "we unearthed evidence, never
known or produced at the trial, that would most certainly have sent the
young lady to the gallows." The film project was then abandoned. During
their two-decade marriage, Olivier and Leigh appeared on the stage in
England and America and made films whenever they really needed to make
some money.
In 1951, Olivier was working on a screen adaptation of
Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister
Carrie" (Carrie (1952)) while Leigh was
completing work on the film version of the
Tennessee Williams' play,
Endstation Sehnsucht (1951).
She won her second Oscar for bringing "Blanche DuBois" to the screen.
Carrie (1952) was a film that Olivier
never talked about. George Hurstwood, a middle-aged married man from
Chicago who tricked a young woman into leaving a younger man about to
marry her, became a New York street person in the novel. Olivier played
him as a somewhat nicer person who didn't fall quite as low. A PBS
documentary on Olivier's career broadcast in 1987 covered his first
sojourn in Hollywood in the early 1930s with his first wife,
Jill Esmond, and noted that her star
was higher than his at that time. On film, he was upstaged by his
second wife, too, even though the list of films he made is four times
as long as hers.
More than half of his film credits come after
Der Komödiant (1960), which
started out as a play in London in 1957. When the play moved across the
Atlantic to Broadway in 1958, the role of "Archie
Rice"'s daughter was
taken over by Joan Plowright,
who was also in the film. They married soon after the release of
Der Komödiant (1960).
