He was compared to the great Victorian actor, Sir Henry Irving, who was capable of mesmerising an audience. Perhaps he did belong to an earlier tradition.
Olivier, who was fond of sexual metaphors, said that acting was “coming for a living”. There was a bold theatricality about his work that contemporary actors might consider over the top. Mr Coleman, however, refers to Olivier's “instinctive conviction that he did not just play a character but became that character.” His performances were often unforgettable-his Henry V and Richard III on film, his Othello and his Archie Rice in John Osborne's “The Entertainer” on stage. He would observe someone, think it would make a good something for Shylock, but he was picking up mannerisms, he wasn't wondering what the person was like.” Sir John Gielgud had his reservations: “Brilliant, but his gift for mimicry as opposed to creative acting stuck in the gizzard at times.” Mr Hiley declares that Olivier was not a deep man: “Larry was not really interested in people, you see. Peter Hiley, who was an intimate associate of Olivier's, is quoted as saying that the actor was snobbish, single-minded and ruthless. But that does not mean he is sycophantic. Mr Coleman's exhaustive biography, based on papers in the British Library archive, is authorised by the family. The most brutal of these, by Garry O'Connor in the Evening Standard, a London newspaper, describes Olivier as “ultimately, a great ham”. But the revisionist view of Olivier has not appeared in Terry Coleman's book. Laurence Olivier was a great actor on stage and screen, a brilliant director and producer of films of Shakespeare plays, first director of Britain's National Theatre and a glamorous show-business celebrity. WHEN a legendary figure has been dead for 16 years, a revisionist biography is welcome.
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