The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (310 page)

Lord Laurence Olivier
(1907–89), b. Dorking, England
It’s easier, in hindsight, to appreciate the brave energy of Olivier. He loved to be a public figure in Britain, and if that reputation relied on his being the great actor, still he became both leader and emblem of the National Theatre. He was devoted to theatre, to Shakespeare, to the church of acting; and it surely underlined his patriotism that, when he was young, Hollywood never quite took to him, and never crowned him as the new Ronald Colman, an ambition that had preoccupied him. Then, he was the husband to Vivien Leigh who went from novice to Scarlett O’Hara in the brief span of their love affair. She was a greater star and a lesser actor, and a rival in his need for prime attention. In his last years, when he had been retired by the National Theatre, and when large stage parts were too much for him, he told himself he had poverty to avoid, and a legend to protect. All of these pressures played their part in Olivier’s curiously fluctuating interest in film.

He was a movie director once:
Henry V
(45),
Hamlet
(48), and
Richard III
(55), famous models that schools hire for students reading the plays. But the first two are more than educational tools.
Richard III
was not much more than the recording of a famous performance: the film settles for melodrama (Olivier had a taste for it—he loved fights, falls, and alarums), and Olivier’s rather lurid way with crippled villainy does not carry much weight now (perhaps he was too set on copying Jed Harris). Whereas,
Hamlet
, if slow, is a film noir—a 1948 movie in black and white, full of shadows and brooding, a very clever director’s vision in which Olivier’s prince is one of the few shortcomings. He’s a little too pretty, or smug, for the concept.

Then there is
Henry V
, a film I like more and more as time goes by. It was a project that Olivier only took on when William Wyler and Carol Reed proved unavailable—yet if it resembles anyone, it should be a film by the Archers, Powell, and Pressburger. For it has such magic, gaiety, and flights of fancy: the recreation of the Globe; the actor clearing his throat to be the king; the fluent shift from staginess to rolling Irish verdure; William Walton’s music and the rush of arrows in the air; the look of the very rich hours of the Duc de Berri mixed with the flourish and pride of an England winning its war. And Technicolor. How could the man who made that film show so little interest in returning to cinematic adventure? How could he let
The Prince and the Showgirl
(57) come out so dull and plodding? Was it just because he could not see or credit Marilyn Monroe’s crazed potential, because his professionalism was offended, because he liked to keep his pretending as a trick? Or was it that Olivier could never get that excited about women, once the thrill of the young Vivien had gone from his life? He was not happy—don’t we feel that?—and he rather cultivated a magnificent solitude.

After that Olivier treated the movies either doubtfully or cynically. Most of his performances were lavishly paid cameos. The National Theatre preoccupied him, and the movies were a way of relaxation and reward. He directed only once more:
The Three Sisters
(70), which was made with the same careless rush as ruined the film of his
Othello
(65, Stuart Burge). Incidentally, that praised stage performance looks on film like a curry-colored showoff. The only other movie performance that seems to have engaged Olivier was his Archie Rice in
The Entertainer
(60, Tony Richardson). That, too, is embarrassing for its misjudged intimacy and because of the way the actor’s schemes can almost be seen and heard. Otherwise, he was aristocratic and sinister in
Spartacus
(60, Stanley Kubrick), flashy but vacuous as the Mahdi in
Khartoum
(66, Basil Dearden), and seemingly bored by
Bunny Lake Is Missing
(65, Otto Preminger).

It is not always realized that Olivier made his film debut in 1930 in the English version of a Lillian Harvey movie,
The Temporary Widow
(Gustav Ucicky). In those days, he was unmistakably a romantic lead, much less squeamish about the threadbare material offered by movies. By 1931, he was in Hollywood under contract to RKO:
Friends and Lovers
(31, Victor Schertzinger), with Ann Harding in
Westward Passage
(32, Robert Milton); and, on loan to Fox,
The Yellow Ticket
(31, Raoul Walsh). But he was not happy in America and came back to London to make
Perfect Understanding
(33, Cyril Gardner) with Gloria Swanson. Garbo politely rejected him for
Queen Christina
and Olivier stayed in England as Orlando to Elizabeth Bergner’s Rosalind in
As You Like It
(36, Paul Czinner) and
Fire Over England
(37, William K. Howard).

He made
21 Days
(37, Basil Dean),
The Divorce of Lady X
(38, Tim Whelan), and
Q-Planes
(39, Whelan and Arthur Woods) before accepting Goldwyn’s invitation to return to America to play Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
(39, Wyler). It was a good part for him, and it raised his standing, but he knew the film was a folly. He stayed on as Darcy in
Pride and Prejudice
(40, Robert Z. Leonard) and Maxim de Winter in
Rebecca
(40, Alfred Hitchcock)—the latter by far the best film he had been involved with and Hitchcock’s first portrait of the attractive man unable to digest his “secret” past. In America, he made
That Hamilton Woman
(41, Alexander Korda) as Nelson opposite his then-wife, Vivien Leigh; as Frenchie in
49th Parallel
(41, Michael Powell); and
The Demi-Paradise
(43, Anthony Asquith). Only a few more performances need to be mentioned: in
Carrie
(52, Wyler)—his Hurstwood is a masterpiece of crushed hope; as Macheath in
The Beggar’s Opera
(53, Peter Brook); an urbane Burgoyne in
The Devil’s Disciple
(59, Guy Hamilton);
Term of Trial
(62, Peter Glenville); and
Sleuth
(72, Joseph L. Mankiewicz). So much diversity, but with a mixture of self-effacement and time-serving. If only Olivier could have blended his middle-aged underplaying with his zest for the medium and glamour in the 1930s. As it is, his underplaying hogs the screen in
Lady Caroline Lamb
(72, Robert Bolt), but is abandoned in
Sleuth
, where it might have redeemed the cross-plot of identity from such a wearying wealth of high Shaftesbury cleverness.

Converted into a Lord and beset by ill-health and the prolonged gestation of the British National Theatre, his movies were either ways of getting away from demanding work or means to provide for his children: a fearful but remote villain in
Marathon Man
(76, John Schlesinger);
A Bridge Too Far
(77, Richard Attenborough); as a founding father of the Detroit auto industry in
The Betsy
(78, Daniel Petrie), in which visible distress owed itself to grave illness, the struggle to master the American accent, having to screw every woman in the picture, and the realization that with just a little less taste the picture could have been one of the most memorable pieces of high schlock. Looking frailer than ever, he contrived to swamp dignity and pain with mannerism in
The Boys from Brazil
(78, Franklin Schaffner), stole screen time from the pleasant kids in
A Little Romance
(79, George Roy Hill), and appeared in
Dracula
(79, John Badham).

In his last decade, he was either very sick, or working desperately to provide for his little ones—in all manner of rogue films. Another interpretation is that he could not stop acting, and that even illness had become a performance. In fact, his late interviews are often better value than the films. Long before death, Olivier realized he had an immortality that could sustain any whim or oddity in his work. He was not simply a great actor; he was the human being as actor.

The last films are
The Jazz Singer
(80, Richard Fleischer);
Clash of the Titans
(81, Desmond Davis); the blind father in
A Voyage Round My Father
(81, Alvin Rakoff); Lord Marchmain in
Brideshead Revisited
(81, Charles Sturridge and Michael Lindsay-Hogg);
King Lear
(82, Michael Elliott) for television; Douglas MacArthur in
Inchon!
(82, Terence Young);
Wagner
(83, Tony Palmer);
A Talent for Murder
(83, Rakoff);
The Jigsaw Man
(84, Young);
The Bounty
(84, Roger Donaldson);
The Last Days of Pompeii
(84, Peter Hunt);
Wild Geese II
(85, Hunt);
Peter the Great
(86, Marvin J. Chomsky and Lawrence Schiller); and
War Requiem
(88, Derek Jarman).

Ermanno Olmi
, b. Bergamo, Italy, 1931
1959:
Il Tempo si è Fermato/Time Stood Still
. 1961:
Il Posto
. 1962:
I Fidanzati/The Engagement
. 1964:
E Venne un Uomo/A Man Named John
. 1968:
Un Certo Giorno/One Fine Day
. 1969:
Il Recuperanti/The Scavengers
. 1971:
Durante l’Estate/During the Summer
. 1974:
La Circostanza/The Circumstance
. 1978:
L’Albero degli Zoccoli/The Tree of the Wooden Clogs; Cammina Cammina/Keep Walking
. 1987:
Lunga Vita alla Signora/Long Live the Lady
. 1988:
La Leggenda del Santo Bevitore/The Legend of the Holy Drinker
. 1993:
Il Segreto del Bosco Vecchio/The Secret of the Old Wood
. 1994:
Genesi: La Creazione e il Diluvio
. 1999:
Il Denaro non Esiste
(codirected with Alberto Rondalli). 2000:
Il Mestiere delle Armi
. 2003:
Cantando Dietro i Paraventi
. 2005:
Tickets
. 2007:
Centochiodi
. 2009:
Terra Madre; Il Premio; Rupi del Vino
.

The uneventful life of a clerk—like that of the young man in
Il Posto
—led Olmi into more creative work. Having worked as an actor and producer in the theatre, he made industrial documentaries in the late 1950s before his first feature, a study of a veteran and a younger man living together in isolation because of their work on a dam project.

Olmi is a director in a reticent, elliptical, and detached vein that is not characteristically Italian. Equally, it is not easy to fix him in neorealism, despite his preference for real settings, ordinary people, and slight plots. Although he has professed a debt to de Sica, his near-mystical tenderness for people is more impressive than de Sica’s sentiment, and the most intriguing element in his films seems closer to the abstracting eye of an Antonioni.

In
Time Stood Still
, the elements of human kindliness and documentary observation of work rested on a gradual distillation of the relations between the two men. At his best—in
I Fidanzati
—Olmi achieves a subtle mastery of apparent visual simplicity to suggest complex emotions. The subject of the film is very plain—the separation of a couple because of the job the man must take. But the filming of it wonderfully suggests the feeling of separation and melancholy through the concentration on ordinary street scenes and interiors and the use of natural silence. Olmi’s true subject is the state of mind made manifest in a way of seeing undramatic reality.
I Fidanzati
is an ostensibly neutral account that, we suddenly realize, is so subjective as to be nearly hallucinatory.

The quality has been present, too, in
Il Posto
(which is generally closer to neorealistic sentiment) and
Durante l’Estate
—the first, promising sign of comedy in Olmi with a note of Chaplinesque social criticism and a defense of eccentrics that veers toward whimsicality.

E Venne un Uomo
is too dutiful and vague a life story of Pope John XXIII, while the other films were made for Italian television.
I Recuperanti
repeated the relationship of
Time Stood Still
. This time the two men recover ironmongery from battlefields. As well as the evolving relationship between them, Olmi is commenting on the way a war’s wounds heal. The observation is clear, sympathetic, and amusing, but Olmi still seems passive, too deeply rooted in a laudable but commonplace humanism: “I am interested in ‘producing’ ideas. In order to distribute these ideas, it seems to me that the cinema is the most useful medium of our times. So I make films because I desire to talk about the reality of the times in which I live, in other words I desire to express ideas and propose them to the largest number of people. The only unit of measure for me, the only point of reference, the only common denominator is Man.”

There is a hint of the evangelical bureaucrat about that, a conventional sensitivity belied by the subtlety of Olmi’s style. Visually, he is not far short of being austere; yet that suggests an intensity that he seems shy of. A question mark hangs over Olmi, as if he needed some gust of passion or surrealism to free him from the aspirations of realism.

His masterpiece is
The Tree of the Wooden Clogs
, a peasant epic set in Lombardy at the end of the nineteenth century, yet made with innate fondness for the commonplace and for humble attitudes. The daily routine blends effortlessly into a spiritual perspective so that the three-hour movie is like a religious panorama, a mix of Breughel and neorealism. Since then, Olmi has worked less frequently. But he is his own man, a devout Catholic, cameraman and editor as well as director, determined on an unstressed view of life.

His version of Genesis is a kind of revery, with a narrative read by Paul Scofield, while his latest film would seem to be a story about the innovative impact of artillery.