Two years later though he seemed to take a step back by appearing in Stratford in Coriolanus, in a season that deliberately celebrated the past with a host of famous older actors: himself, Edith Evans, Harry Andrews, Paul Robeson, Charles Laughton. Following this success this most heroic of actors chose to play Archie Rice, a failing music hall performer, in John Osborne’s play The Entertainer. Olivier realised he could be left behind by the fundamental changes that were sweeping London theatre. One recognised, though one had never heard it before, the noise made in its last extremity by the cornered human soul”. One hears great cries, which, like all this actor’s best effects, seem to have been dredged up from an ocean-bed of fatigue. “Titus enters, not as a beaming hero, but as a battered veteran, stubborn and shambling…A hundred campaigns have tanned his heart to leather, and from the cracking of that heart there issues a terrible music not untinged by madness. In his review Kenneth Tynan described his performance: Olivier’s own performance, though, was mesmerising.

Unsettling sounds were played, and in this bloodiest of plays there was no stage blood. Brook sought to ensure this would not happen.

It was the only play in the accepted Shakespeare canon that had not been produced in Stratford, and when it had been performed at the Old Vic in London the horrors had provoked laughter. In 1955 he joined forces to perform Titus Andronicus, directed by the young and revolutionary Peter Brook. In 1956 Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger shook the theatre world, but even before that Olivier had been involved in a minor revolution in the unlikely setting of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. His career took him to Hollywood as well as London and he became the most famous and glamorous of English actors.Īfter the war he continued to cement his reputation, but was aware that theatre needed to move in new directions. London soon beckoned, and although the energy and charisma of his performances were praised he was often unfavourably compared with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, both great stage actors. His professional acting career began early, with a couple of seasons at that great cradle of talent, the Birmingham Rep. It received much attention and the praise of Ellen Terry and Sybil Thorndike, who described him as “the best Shrew I ever saw – a bad-tempered little bitch”. His first performance in Stratford was as a 14-year old schoolboy in 1922 when he appeared at Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in a production featuring the boys of All Saints School in London. Other actors of his generation have dropped out of popular consciousness, but Olivier’s name is still famous. It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole quarter of a century. Laurence Olivier as Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, 1922

King richard iii laurence olivier