Stage titan who built Britain’s National Theatre
Laurence Olivier (1907–1989) stood with Gielgud, Redgrave, and Richardson atop mid-century British theatre, then carried Shakespeare from Old Vic stages onto film as actor-director. Knight, life peer, Order of Merit—and the man whose name crowns both a National Theatre auditorium and London’s annual theatre awards.
Born 22 May 1907 in Dorking to a clergyman father who steered him toward acting, Olivier trained in London and rose through late-1920s jobs. West End notice arrived with Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1930); by decade’s end he was a star after a celebrated Romeo and Juliet with Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft (1935). In the 1940s he co-directed the Old Vic with Richardson and John Burrell, famous there as Richard III and as Sophocles’s Oedipus. A childhood choir-school Brutus had already impressed Ellen Terry, who called the small boy a great actor in waiting.
Film work included Wuthering Heights (1939), Rebecca (1940), and his Shakespeare trilogy Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955). Later screens brought Spartacus, The Shoes of the Fisherman, Sleuth, Marathon Man, and The Boys from Brazil. From 1963 to 1973 he was founding director of the National Theatre, playing Othello in 1965 and Shylock in 1970 among other parts; joining the English Stage Company for The Entertainer in 1957 had earlier revived a stagnating independent career.
Honours stacked high: knighthood in 1947, life peerage in 1970, Order of Merit in 1981, competitive Oscars and Emmys plus honorary Academy Awards in 1947 and 1979, a BAFTA Fellowship, and the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award. He married Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, then Joan Plowright, and had four children. He died 11 July 1989; the Laurence Olivier Awards still measure London stage excellence in his name.
Source: Laurence Olivier
