Sir Laurence had a look of anonymity about him which would have been very useful for a spy. I once travelled with him to Bradford in a crowded compartment, and nobody knew the world-famous actor was sitting in the corner. They always said he looked like Harry Worth playing a bank clerk. He had the classiest kind of fame because he was recognised as the greatest actor in the world, and probably the most famous. Yet you could meet him in the street and not know you were talking to Laurence Olivier. This is what I would call class. He had many hats, many faces, as a performer, but also as a person.
One day I was at the house in Brighton where he lived with Joan, and this is what she told us. When she had been given only an hour or so of warning, Princess Margaret came to visit her, and it wasn’t long – perhaps a year or two – after Larry's and her first child, Richard, had been born.
As the conversation wasn’t fluent – you could say a bit sticky – Joan thought it might be a good idea to bring up the topic of children, because Margaret had recently given birth to Viscount Linley, and so she started talking about the children.
Margaret suddenly stopped her, and put to her a direct question. ‘Do you remember the first words that Richard said?’
Joan thought a little while and answered, ‘Ooh ...’ She was struggling hard to remember. ‘I think the first words Richard said were just one word: “Car” because – well, he used to see Larry go off to work – yes, I feel pretty sure it was “Car”.’
And she went on, ‘So, can you remember Viscount Linley’s first words?’ Margaret paused for what seemed an eternity, then answered: ‘Chandelier!’
The image of this little baby, in his cot or chaise, looking up and saying ‘Chandelier!’ It defies all sense!
A group started to form at the National, made up of Charlie Kay, Ronald Pickup, Jeremy Brett, when he came back into the company later, and myself. We were known as ‘The Daughters’. This was a rather silly camp joke, if you like, but very much of the era. This league or cabal, as you might call it, of ‘Daughters’ was created by an actor no longer with us called Ken Parry.
Ken adored Tom Courtenay and made him the original ‘Daughter’, while Ken was ‘Mother’. He was a friend of Charlie Kay, and you didn’t have to be gay or even male, so Louise Purnell was a ‘Daughter’, and so was Maggie Smith. There wasn’t only a ridiculous campness about belonging to this sorority, but also an eccentricity, a sensitivity, a lovability, which is hard to describe. Anyway, it was a little in-joke of the ‘elect’, and of course rather childish or childlike.
The all-male production of As You Like It, which ran successfully for years from 1968, was calculated to throw the whole notion of ‘Daughters’ into confusion. Sir Laurence (I went on calling him ‘Sir’ and still do) was deeply against the whole idea of doing As You Like It in this way. It somehow stuck in his throat and made him feel very uncomfortable. It was John Dexter’s idea, endorsed by Kenneth Tynan, but ‘Sir’ had summoned Dexter, and in a ten-minute interview sacked him from this production. ‘Merely confirming what I already knew,’ commented John tartly, ‘I was trainee material,’ whereupon Clifford Williams had taken over.
The point was that the men who were playing women played it absolutely straight in their own voices. ‘Sir’ was especially sceptical of this approach when he had reluctantly acquiesced, and wondered why the girls didn’t pad out their breasts and slap on nail varnish. He sent us a very encouraging telegraph on the first night from Canada, where he was performing in A Flea in Her Ear: ‘Don’t worry if this is a flop!’
Among the straight male performances Robert Stephens was Jacques, and I played Touchstone. We had the heavy fellas playing the girls, not boys, as they would have been in Shakespeare’s time, and this was the main part of the humour. Ron Pickup played Rosalind, Charlie Kay played Celia. Both were made up ‘straight’ as women. Ralph Koltai, the designer, dressed them in ski boots, and they wore big plastic earrings.
We said to them, ‘You look marvellous!’ when they were terrible and they knew it. So they went away and designed their own costumes, Charlie appearing in a mini-skirt, Ron in a trouser suit – and both now did look wonderful.
I approached Touchstone with trepidation, but when you have Tony Hopkins playing the love interest opposite you as Audrey, with Brünnhilde plaits, you’ve got it made. I kept in mind something Dame Edith Evans once said, when someone asked her to explain the basis of her comic technique, and she answered, ‘Well, I say everything as if it were dirty.’
It is that kind of innuendo which was going to work with Touchstone, and when I was playing with the likes of Tony dressed up as Audrey, the uncouth country wench, a lot of the lines couldn’t help becoming very innuendo. They were funny because they became dirty – in other words they became sex funny. But the laughs fell mainly on Tony as the butt, and he was the only one who was really unhappy, desperately so, apart from Sir. He just didn’t want to do it. In spite of this he was so funny, and very sexy in a bovine kind of way. This made my job as Touchstone so much easier.
We took this production from the Old Vic to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Belgrade and Venice, and even when the audiences didn’t understand the verbal humour they laughed themselves silly.
To show support for us, Sir had flown out to Stockholm where we were playing. We were having a jolly after the show in the bar, and it was here we tried to make Sir a ‘Daughter’. We explained to him what it meant. But no, heavens no, he wouldn’t have any of it, and he suddenly got terribly macho – he did not at all want to be a ‘Daughter’, and he thought we were all screaming poofs!
Another little revelation to me of this mixed-up department in Larry’s psyche popped up in Franco Zeffirelli’s Much Ado About Nothing. I played the villainous Don John to begin with, in a very thick Spanish accent, and with a liberal supply of facial tics. The production was a curious hodge-podge, set in nineteenth-century Sicily, with brass bands and exaggerated opera buffa trappings and some reworking of the text by Robert Graves.
Graves had been called in to tinker with this on Kenneth Tynan’s initiative. Tynan painted a grim picture of the National’s financial plight to convince Graves to accept a risible £250 to rewrite Shakespeare, then Graves saw his 300 corrections trashed.
Everyone was very miserable, and as Bob Stephens (who was Benedick) said, our costumes made us look like Sicilian toy soldiers. Bob was forced to strut around like a temperamental Italian; not at all the true Benedick, who is defensively fending off the truth of his feelings for Beatrice. As for Maggie Smith as Beatrice, she was ‘excused being Italian because of her colouring’ – in other words left well alone, a wise tactic with Maggie. As with O’Toole’s Hamlet, the public fell for the swagger and confectionary, so people queued for hours to get in and exchanged tickets at extravagant prices.
Albert Finney as Don Pedro was unequivocally marvellous and as part of his performance and throughout the run he smoked cigars – provided free by W.D. & H.O. Wills. At the end of the play there were two banquettes on stage, on either side, and Don Pedro would be left on his tod, puffing thoughtfully on his cigar. Albert would blow a smoke ring and the smoke went curling slowly round, expanding beautifully into the auditorium. He was such a master and it was a lovely moment.
Some time during the run, which went on for years, the cast changed and Ronnie Pickup took over Don John from me. I took over from Albert the part of Don Pedro. There was a great drawback here because I couldn’t blow smoke rings, and also by now they had to buy the cigars for me – no Albert’s name on the programme! – so I sat there at the end on the banquette in a single spotlight wondering what the hell I should do. Then I had a sudden brainwave. I noticed the spotlight on me and decided to ‘blow it out’, telling the electricians ‘Blackout!’
At the end of the dress rehearsal when I tried this out, Sir Laurence rushed forward to hug me.
‘Baby, darling, baby boy, great – and I so wondered what you were going to do! That was marvellous! But I’ve got a better idea, darling, baby boy – I think you should jump up onto the banquette, pull off your wig, and shout “Je suis un homme!”’
I was nonplussed and stepped back a pace or two. It was just a joke, a very involved joke, at which I laughed dutifully, but what he meant was that I hadn’t got Albert’s balls, and that compared to Albert Finney I could have been in drag. This is what he was saying. Maybe it was a bit cruel.
Again it was this sexual complication he had, this hang-up. He adored his boys – us I mean – but he was always wary. He must have known by now that I was gay. He must have known Charlie and Jeremy were too, and it was something that irked him. So he was not, or could not have been, happy with that side of himself. It was very exaggerated of course, much later, when rumours about some gay affairs came out after his death, but some of it I remember feeling must have been true, and served to feed his insecurity.
He didn’t quite know where the borderlines lay in that area, and was over-sensitive as a result. But there was no doubting he was the most courageous actor of all of us. Who can ever forget the awesome moment in the film of Hamlet when he threw himself off the landing at Elsinore, the heroic way he led from the front as director and actor in his film of Henry V, to the extent that he had his face smashed up when a camera crashed into him? Or that even more extraordinary death scene in Coriolanus at Stratford when he was stabbed in the belly and fell, hanging upside down from a promontory caught by the heels by Albert Finney and his fellow Roman?
I took over Tattle from him in Love for Love when he went into hospital for cancer. He was due to go in on a Tuesday, and I was called in the preceding Thursday. I was in the other half of the company, so I was asked to play Tattle, as he wasn't keen on his understudy. I did not know the part, so I learned the lines over the weekend, then I was taken through the moves. Sir Laurence played it on Monday and I was out in the audience with a pair of field glasses trained on him. I rehearsed it on the Tuesday morning and was then prepped up for Tuesday night.
When they announced Sir Laurence wouldn’t be playing that evening you could hear the groan of the audience all the way to Waterloo Station. I was standing in the wings in gold costume, the full Restoration dandy rig-up, because Tattle is always waiting to go on and make them laugh.
During my first scene, my goodness they were cold – they were so disappointed they turned into a solid brick wall. But as the evening went on the pendulum began to swing in my favour.
‘Well,’ they were saying to one another, ‘the kid’s doing well, at least he knows the lines,’ and by the curtain call it had swung so that, ‘Oh, good on the kid, the kid’s done well, great, great!’ and they were applauding rapturously.
For me the real pay-off came later with an American couple who had arrived late and been placed by the box office manager Pat Layton at the back of the dress circle.
Pat said to them, ‘I’ll come and pick you up in the interval, and take you to your seats.’ He collected them and said, ‘Are you enjoying the show?’
‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘the old man’s doing great!’ They didn’t realise they weren’t seeing Sir Laurence.
Larry, aged sixty-two, as Tattle performed a number of hair-raising physical manoeuvres which I couldn’t even begin to replicate. He came out of a window way up in the flies, rapidly pulling on his clothes, to escape discovery from an amorous escapade with Miss Prue, at the same time speaking the lines rapidly so you could hear every word.
Along this ten-foot-high narrow wall, wearing high-heeled shoes, he would teeter, jump off onto a wicker chair with a roof to it, which would then sway from side to side. This was a wonderful bit of business, and during it he would have his stockings rolled down, and try to pull up his stockings – first one, then the other – and they both had false calves in them, so when he pulled up the second it was back to front and it fell out. Gales of laughter greeted this. Nearly forty years younger, I could do all this except for the walk along the wall in high heels.
Sir Laurence’s physical courage and prowess were amazing. In the most famous role of these later years, he played Othello, which was filmed, and I enjoyed the perfect role for me, that of Michael Cassio. As always Sir Laurence’s preparation for his role was extraordinary and meticulous, and we had a ten-week rehearsal period, much longer than usual.
When the cast first assembled to read the play we were utterly transfixed at the performance he gave, especially as he was clad from head to foot in black leather. During rehearsals and performance, John Dexter, who directed, was sacked and reinstated, and Sir was extremely uncomfortable with his Desdemona, Maggie Smith.
Dexter’s casting of Maggie was probably a bit wilful, and John wrote defiantly in his diary:
Casting Maggie as Desdemona. Nobody wants her. I do. A strong-willed, mature woman who’s been around and knows what she wants. She wants that big black man. Isn’t everyone tired of pretty blonde ingénue Desdemonas?
He probably had the notion that this would sting Sir Laurence into action and put him on his mettle, which indeed she did, but it built up personal tension between them. I remember how Olivier would shrink from any physical contact with her as if he thought he was literally and metaphorically untouchable, so much so that one day she burst out, ‘I’ve come all the way from Venice to see you, you’ve won the war, and what do you want me to do, back away in fuckin’ ’orror?’
Apparently he said to Bob Stephens: ‘Please tell her to stay away from me on stage, I don’t mind if she looks like a cunt, but I’m buggered if I’m going to look like one.’
Maggie could be very disdainful; this was very true, even to Sir, if you didn’t keep up with her. One night during that Cyprus scene after the battle he says, ‘Honey, you shall be well desired in Cyprus,’ but on this line he dried totally, saying something like ‘You will be well looked after in Paris.’
Hearing this, Maggie buried her face in his neck and howled with laughter, but it must have been awful for him. She could be stupendous, and on stage she thought and acted with the speed of light, and in the scenes I played with her she always set the pace and rhythm. I gained so much from her. But her unconventionality irked Sir Laurence, and he made no secret that he didn’t like the way she sounded. One night she went round to his dressing room, knocked on the door and, opening it, said in a very loud voice, ‘How now, Brown Cow!’ and then left. When Billie Whitelaw took over from Maggie it is not surprising he felt much more comfortable.
Every night Sir Laurence as Othello used to come on stage holding a red rose. The rumour was that they were supplied by Vivien Leigh, but by now he was married to Joan, so this could hardly have been true. His dresser Christopher used to sell the roses off nightly at the stage door. He gave me one, which I pressed in a book to keep, but promptly lost.
Before the production opened, when we were in Cardiff, Dexter really overreached himself in front of the cast, and tore into Sir Laurence, saying he played the Moor like a Jamaican bus conductor, and was equally scathing about the company. Sir Laurence was furious, summoned John to his dressing room and told him he was never, but never, to speak to him and his company like that again. John retaliated by telling him it was not his company, but the National Theatre Company, whereupon Sir Laurence sacked him on the spot – for the second time.
The performance did, to be fair to Dexter, put others in mind of London Transport: Michael Gambon thought of Sir Laurence’s Othello as a black bus conductor, too:
‘No standing on the top deck! Sir was experimenting all the time, and once even put padding up his nose.’
Everyone persuaded Sir Laurence to take John back. This was a rare occasion for John, because he usually left stars alone, but that day he had gone for the star’s jugular.
It took Olivier three or four hours to black up each night and it was an ordeal to wash off the make-up afterwards; Bob Stephens and John Dexter were in Larry’s dressing room after one performance when suddenly, in front of the mirror, looking at himself, Sir Laurence uttered the words, ‘What a tragedy that such a very great actor should have such a very small cock.’
I’m not altogether sure if this is what exactly happened or was said, for the version I heard direct from his dresser Christopher was not quite the same. As Bob told it, it made a good story, but it was Christopher who helped him in the shower after each performance, and Chris told me it was to him that he made this observation.
Neither Bob, Finney, or anyone else – except of course Scofield – could ever challenge Sir in his undisputed position as leader of the acting profession. I never wanted, or indeed was capable, of doing this, but some years on I did take up the taxing, indeed punishing performance of repeating his famous double act of Oedipus in Oedipus Rex and Mr Puff in Sheridan’s The Critic, at Birmingham Rep.
I didn’t realise I had broken two ribs until the middle of the night after one performance. It was not until I stopped acting and my adrenaline died down that I then realised I could have bled to death. These roles earned me a congratulatory telegram from Sir.
He wrote just two words: ‘Cheeky bugger!’