Olivier (3 page)

Under an incompetent headmaster, discipline at St Edward’s had been neglected and the boys, in effect, were left to their own devices. Those devices were often mischievous. “It was a terrible school,” recalled a contemporary of Olivier’s whose father had been a master there. “The boys ran the school and it was quite horrific.” The Rugby of
Tom Brown’s School Days
may have been a little turbulent, but, at least in Olivier’s view, it was a proper public school. At St Edward’s: “I felt unhappy and awkward and misplaced … I hated it all the time.” He convinced himself that he was disliked by the other boys and, by behaving as if he were, succeeded at least in part in making it true. Probably he exaggerated his misery. In Bader’s view he was not in the least un-popular: “He was perhaps introspective, lived within himself, and he had the sort of artistic make-up that might have made him
think
he was unpopular.” In his own eyes, however, his period at St Edward’s was both unpleasant and a waste of time. The sooner he could escape from it the better.
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In fact the schooling cannot have been as bad as all that. It was at St Edward’s that Olivier learned the value and satisfaction of hard work. “A man’s prime interest in life must be his work,” he told his first wife many years later. He did not find the work at St Edward’s congenial, nor was he well suited to it, but he buckled down. He was not a notably clever boy but was endowed by nature with an extraordinarily retentive memory which, for a schoolboy faced with examinations, is quite as valuable as intellectual powers. To his mild surprise he won the Senior History Prize and was rewarded with a handsome copy of Kipling’s
Kim
; nothing sensational as academic achievements go but proving that he could more than hold his own.
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It was curious that he tried to avoid featuring in the one field in which he felt confident he could excel. When it was suggested that he might act in the school play, he refused. He believed it would make him still more unpopular; already, he complained, he was known as “that sidey little shit Olivier”; if he seized the limelight on the stage his reputation would be still worse. This may not have been the whole story: the
master in charge of the school plays had taken against him and it seems that the antipathy was mutual. Whatever the explanation, his resistance was overcome. He agreed that he would act in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and was assigned the role of Puck. It was typical of him that, having finally accepted that he must play, he at once began to deplore the inadequacy of his role. “This dismally wretched part, this utterly hopeless, so-called opportunity,” he stormed. It was as typical that he resolved to make something special of it. He flung himself into the role and, in a way that was going to become maddeningly familiar to fellow performers over the next sixty years, attracted attention far greater than his part would have been expected to command. “By far the most notable performance,” judged the school magazine. “He seemed to put more ‘go’ into it than the others.” “He was the only one in the cast who was really exciting – a born actor,” a fellow schoolboy recalled. Contrary to his fears his success earned him popularity; his last months at St Edward’s were relatively happy.
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They had need to be, for his life at home, such as it was, was fast disintegrating. His sister Sybille had gone on the stage. It soon became clear that her talents were limited and that she would never make a successful actress. Her father deplored her failure and was still more disapproving when, without his blessing, she married a man whom he felt unsuitable. Laurence Olivier became involved in her disgrace; his father discovered that he had known of the affair, but had failed to report it. Dickie was not there to share the blame since he had left home to plant tea in India. To cap it all, the Revd Gerard remarried. “I didn’t feel sore on my mother’s behalf,” Olivier recalled many years later, “because I knew my mother was saint enough to wish him to be happy. He was very miserable and dreadfully lonely.” It seems that at the time Olivier was rather less accepting. Sybille wrote that her brother resented the affection that their father lavished on his new wife. “Really, the old man is impossible,” Olivier would grumble. “Why can’t he think of
our
feelings sometimes?” Fortunately his new stepmother, Isabel or “Ibo” as she was generally known, was a woman of generosity and
perception who understood Olivier’s feelings and sympathised with them. Thanks to her, the atmosphere at home was not insufferable, but Olivier was still anxious to escape from it as soon as possible. He was now seventeen. It was time to decide the pattern of his future life.
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Up till then he had assumed, without thinking very much about it, that he would follow his father into the church. He was still a firm believer and attached great importance to regular attendance, but he had by now concluded that he did not have a sufficiently strong vocation to take the plunge. In one account of his feelings at the time he says that he contemplated following his brother to India; elsewhere, he says that he considered the possibility of an Asian exile but rejected it. Whichever may have been true, it seems to have come as a complete surprise to him when one evening the question of his future life came up and he mentioned the possibility of a career abroad. “Don’t be such a fool,” said his father: “You’re going on the stage!” “Am I?” stammered Olivier. “Well, of course you are.”
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His father had decided not only on Olivier’s career, but also on how he was to equip himself for it. Olivier was to go to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, an institution where his sister Sybille had studied some years before and which was run by a formidable lady called Elsie Fogerty. There was a snag, however. No money was available to cover the cost of his tuition. Olivier would have to secure not only a scholarship but an additional bursary as well, so as to pay for his upkeep. He trailed off to the Albert Hall where Miss Fogerty was selecting her future scholars. In the innumerable auditions that he was to endure through his acting life Olivier almost always chose Mark Antony’s speech over the corpse of Julius Caesar, but for this first effort he offered Jacques’s “All the world’s a stage” from “As You Like It”. He rendered this with immense fervour and much gesticulation – too much so in Miss Fogerty’s view. It was not necessary, she observed, to make fencing passes when delivering the words “sudden and quick in quarrel”. Nevertheless she liked what she heard: the scholarship was
Olivier’s and, after some debate, an additional bursary was thrown in as well.
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The emphasis in the Central School was much more on Speech Training than Dramatic Art. Peggy Ashcroft, who joined the same term as Olivier (rarely can any drama school have welcomed two such talented recruits at the same time), went so far as to say that the teaching of acting was virtually non-existent. So far as speech went, however, Miss Fogerty’s training proved invaluable. It provided the foundation for a lifetime’s achievement. Olivier throughout his career was famed for his breath control. “Larry has a longer breath than anybody I know,” said Sybil Thorndike. “He could do the Matins exhortation ‘Dearly Beloved Brethren’ twice through in one breath. Lewis [her husband, Sir Lewis Casson] could do it in one and a half.” To be able fully to control one’s voice is not necessarily the most important element in acting, but without it all the other elements will be irreparably diminished. Olivier’s powers were phenomenal. His ability was innate, but it was Miss Fogerty’s early training which developed it.
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Not everyone was as perceptive as Miss Fogerty. One teacher is said to have written to Olivier’s father urging him to withdraw his son: “He’s no good. He looks like a farm boy.” His appearance, indeed, still verged on the uncouth. His hair grew down to his brow, he had buck teeth. Miss Fogerty disconcerted him by putting the tip of her finger at the base of his hairline and running it down to the top of his nose. “You have a weakness
here
,” she pronounced. Olivier attributes to this gnomic utterance his passion for disguise: for many years at least, he was ill at ease with his own appearance and sought to conceal it with false noses or other such devices.
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Uncouth or not, his talent was obvious. Together with Peggy Ashcroft he won the gold medal for best actor of the year. They performed a scene from “The Merchant of Venice” for the benefit of Athene Seyler, the celebrity imported for the occasion to award the prizes. According to Olivier, Ashcroft played Portia. Miss Seyler remembered it rather differently. Olivier was growing a beard for the
part of Shylock “and Peggy, who was also playing a man, put on a false beard – so these two young people both looked idiotic. I couldn’t tell, of course, how good they were.” At all events, Olivier graduated with a First Class Dramatic Certificate adorned by a star. It was a satisfactory end to his education. Now it remained to put that education to good use. He had no doubts or inhibitions. Whether or not he had been taken by surprise by his father’s announcement that he was to go on the stage, he had, he told Peter Hall many years later, wanted to be an actor from the age of nine. Now the dream had become reality. From that moment his ambitions were boundless. “Don’t you realise?” he blurted out to a friend. “I want to be the greatest actor in the world.”
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I
n 1977 Olivier received a letter from an American admirer asking for advice on how to become an actor. Before going any further, he replied, “please enquire the employment rate against total membership of Equity in your country. In my country it is about 2 per cent, or 800 out of 25,000.” With gloomy relish he passed on the same message to any of his children who contemplated taking to the stage: going on to say that even of those who got a job only a handful could make a decent living from their activities.
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His own career was very different, but even he had some tough years at the start. He had been lucky enough to find employment of a sort during the holidays from the Central School at a playhouse in Letch-worth Garden City. Most of his work was behind the scenes as second assistant stage manager – when you hear the bell ring at the end of the interval, he proudly told the family’s old cook, “you will know,
my finger will be on it!
” In his second spell at Letchworth he did manage to sneak onto the stage in the inconsiderable role of Lennox in “Macbeth”, but though he extolled the significance of this experience when he began to haunt the offices of theatrical agents, it did not seem unduly to impress potential employers. Olivier recalled those first two years with horror, blended with profound relief that they were well behind him: “They were awful, awful, awful,” he remembered, and he was “hungry, hungry, hungry, a glass of milk for lunch, sandwich at a coffee stall for dinner”. His father rather grudgingly allowed him a few pounds a week, so
starvation was averted, but at times even
his
ebullient self-confidence burned low. His first job as a fully-fledged professional was at the Brighton Hippodrome in the summer of 1925. Suffused by the excitement of the occasion he ignored the warnings of stage hands and fellow actors that he should take great care when emerging from the wings, strode onto the stage, tripped over the concealed sill and fell flat on his face. He prided himself on being able to exploit any situation for as much humour as it could contain, but never, he recorded, “have I heard a sound so explosively loud as the joyous clamour made by that audience”.
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A few months later Olivier secured a job playing small parts in a touring company called the Lena Ashwell Players. They tended to end up in dismal venues around the outer London suburbs, sometimes performing in boarded-over swimming pools and changing in the lavatories, but Miss Ashwell took her work with great seriousness. Unfortunately Olivier did not or rather, though he pursued his career with dedication, he had a strong inclination to clown. Throughout his life he found almost irresistible the impulse to raise a laugh. With experience he learned to indulge this weakness only when no mischief would thereby be done; in his early days on the stage he felt no such inhibitions. After all, he told himself, Edmund Kean when young had been notorious for his delight in tripping up his fellow actors; what was good enough for Kean was good enough for Olivier. Alan Webb, a fellow sufferer in the company, remembered saying to him one night: “Larry, if you don’t take your work more seriously, you’ll never get on.” He never took his work lightly, but it was fun to play the fool. He cut a hole in the back-cloth so as to expose the naked bottoms of the female members of the cast changing behind the scenes; helpless with laughter, he abandoned one of his colleagues on the stage when the actor’s underpants fell down beneath his toga. Twenty years later, his wrath would have been terrible if some small-part actor at the Old Vic had behaved so irresponsibly; in 1925 he felt aggrieved when Miss Ashwell expelled him from her company.
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Once again he was looking for a job. He was offered the chance of joining a Shakespearean company touring the provinces, run by a “well-known queer”. Though in later life he was considered by some to be first and foremost a Shakespearean actor, at the time he felt no particular calling in that direction: “I just wanted to get on and I didn’t care what in.” He had no objection to the idea, however, and the sexual proclivities of the director mattered nothing to him. He had no urge to indulge in homosexuality himself, but he never saw anything reprehensible in the practice and was always ready to work with those who had other tastes. He consulted Lewis Casson about the proposition. Whether it was Shakespeare, the provinces or the queerness which displeased him, Casson dismissed the idea out of hand. “I think you’d better come to us,” he said.
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“Us” was a company run by Casson and Sybil Thorndike which the previous year had enjoyed a triumph with Thorndike’s rendering of Shaw’s “Saint Joan”. It was a splendid opportunity, and Olivier seized it with gratitude and alacrity. He played no role of any importance while he was with the company, indeed, he was involved as much in stage management as in acting, but he was associating with actors of the first rank and learning all the time. One of his two roles was that of a serving man in “Henry VIII”. Together with Carol Reed, the future film director, he had to hold up the train of Queen Katharine, played by Sybil Thorndike. Both men were in love with the already successful actress Angela Baddeley and their devotion sometimes interfered with their performance. “Calf love,” wrote Thorndike dismissively. “They used to quarrel like mad. I used to say: ‘You shut up, you two, and attend to what you’re doing.’ ” But she was struck by Olivier’s abilities and was convinced that he had a considerable future. It was the quality and range of his voice that most impressed her: “Larry didn’t have any formal musical education, but his family background was musical, and that must have helped.”
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