The New Elizabethans: Sixty Portraits of our Age. James Naughtie

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘a pillar of fire on a plinth of marble’.

      It meant that after the success of the film of Henry V – which got him his first Oscar – he was ready to exploit that experience for a wider audience, for whom Hollywood had turned him into the feral lover of Wuthering Heights, then the mysterious obsessive of Rebecca caught between innocence and guilt and the boy king with a warrior’s spirit. The years that followed saw him propelled ever upwards. In the seasons at the Old Vic immediately after the war he played more Shakespeare – entrancing a teenage Peter Hall, whom he inspired with a love of the stage that would change his life – and in 1947 he became the youngest actor to be knighted. Everything was at his feet – which didn’t stop him making a film of Hamlet in 1948 that cut great swaths of the text and drained his performance of some of the zest people had experienced in the theatre. That didn’t prevent Hollywood giving the film four Oscars: they had decided Olivier was theirs, and loved him.

      There was never any danger that he would stop playing himself in a way that the public wanted. And then there was his love life. He met Vivienne Leigh when he was filming Fire over England and, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton a generation later, they conducted a public affair that seemed to consume them, which is why their public loved it. Leigh left her lawyer husband behind in London to pursue Olivier to Los Angeles, seemingly incapable of being away from him, and then turned it into a fairy tale by winning the part of Scarlett O’Hara in 1940 in Gone With the Wind (although Victor Fleming decided she would have to put up with Clark Gable as her leading man, Rhett Butler, and not Olivier). But even before the film was released he had divorced, and so had she, so that they could marry. It was as if they were making a statement that they were going to have a fiery time together, throwing themselves together with abandon into the flames, and they did.

      Celebrity gossip-mongers watched every twist and turn, and the story was all the better for Olivier’s response: far from being weakened by the picture of a reckless love, he thrived on it. When his Oedipus confronted the fact that he had killed his father and married his mother, Kenneth Tynan – always ready to charge over the top – said that Olivier’s scream contained ‘3,000 years of confrontation with the fates, the gods, with himself’. The actor said that he had perfected the noise by reading the account of how ermine are trapped for their fur: they lick salt scattered in the snow and, finding it stuck to their tongue, scream. He imagined what it must be like.

      That was a typical piece of Olivier’s debunking of the idea that he might have an irresistible force in him that just found its way out: he was always keen to talk about how he worked at the artifice of the theatre, with the stage his laboratory. On one hand he was celebrated for his vesuvial passion, which seemed to pour out from the depths, and on the other he liked to speak of the tricks of the trade. A stream of stories has him sniffing at actors who used ‘the method’, trying to think themselves into the emotions of the character instead of creating the performance piece by piece. A famous victim was said to be Dustin Hoffman, although he insisted that he looked rough on the set of Marathon Man only because he had been partying, and not from spending a sleepless night in order to replicate the feelings of a tortured man. There’s no argument about Olivier’s advice to him, however: ‘Try acting, my dear boy. It’s much easier.’

      As he was reaching the top of his own theatrical career, in the late forties, that ability to take on a new persona with apparently little effort had become dazzling. The Oedipal scream that chilled Kenneth Tynan’s blood in 1945 came on a night in which Oliver starred in a double bill: Oedipus in one half, and in the other Mr Puff, the frothy fop in Sheridan’s The Critic who’d be incapable of saying boo to a goose, let alone killing his father and sleeping with his mother.

      The Old Vic seasons after the war confirmed Olivier’s place as the leading man of the English-speaking stage, and they produced something else in him that left a legacy maybe as important as those performances. He found that he enjoyed leading a company. A seed had been planted. In 1948, at a time of vigour in the post-war cultural debate, the first moves were made to establish a National Theatre. Might Olivier like to make his company the foundation stone? He certainly would. But by the time he returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand the first of many disappointments had come along. The scheme was in ruins, not for the last time. He and Ralph Richardson were dropped by the Old Vic as actor-directors because the theatre had gone cold on the idea of a National Theatre. There was jealousy in the air. Everything ground to a halt.

      It was one of the reasons that the early fifties were a gloomy time for Olivier, and by the time the British theatre was being given a hefty kick by John Osborne with Look Back in Anger in 1956 he was, in the words of his biographer Anthony Holden, ‘going mad and desperately searching for something suddenly fresh and thrillingly exciting’. The marriage to Leigh was taking its inevitable course towards a bitter break-up, he’d had a terrible time directing Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl in 1957, and then came Osborne’s second play, The Entertainer, at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

      Olivier was a picture of despair on stage, revealing Archie Rice as a broken, empty vessel brought face to face with his all-consuming failure. So by the sixties he was taking on new roles, full of energy, still capable of dominating in Shakespeare but turning to Tom Stoppard too, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

      And the National Theatre was back. The Old Vic would house the company until a new theatre was built, but, even without a proper home, it would exist. Olivier was in charge and throughout the sixties, as the Royal Shakespeare Company, founded in 1960, was beginning to develop a personality and style, he was powering ahead in parallel, leading a company that seemed to deserve a home. By the time it was built, on the South Bank in London in the early seventies, the board had decided that it shouldn’t be Olivier who would lead it in its new home, but Peter Hall, who’d built up the RSC. Time had moved on. But the biggest theatre at the National would be the Olivier, which it still is.

      By the time it opened, Olivier’s career was past its zenith. He took on too many second-rate films for the money, and in the seventies became, quite quickly, an actor who stirred great memories rather than gave fine performances. With Joan Plowright, his third wife, he represented a kind of aristocracy of the theatre that was losing its power, and gradually he slipped from view. As he put it in a interview with Newsweek in 1979, perhaps half disingenuous and half self-pitying: ‘I can’t disguise myself any more. I’m afraid the audience know me too well. They know every shade of the voice, every trick, every goddam movement I can make.’

      But when he died, in 1989 at the age of 82 after a long, wasting illness that sapped his strength, the memories came pouring back, etched for ever in the minds of those who had enjoyed him on stage and shared his story. His actor friend Anthony Quayle, when he heard of Olivier’s death, said that it marked ‘the closing of a very great book’.

Benjamin Britten

      Benjamin Britten was a musician who was English in every way – in social habit and in manner, by religion and upbringing, in his sensibilities and outlook – who spoke to the whole world as an outsider, with a voice that was his alone. The Russian giant Dmitri Shostakovich, the most celebrated symphonist of the twentieth century, once said to him: ‘You great composer; I little composer.’

      He was original in chamber music and opera, in choral arrangement and song, in orchestral works of every kind. He had a gift for writing for children’s voices that was unique, and he was a pianist of brilliance, producing what was once described as the shimmer of sound like the shudder of electricity. He was the complete musician, whose character was stamped on his work and gleamed through every note. But Leonard Bernstein noted that his power came from being ‘at odds with the world’, and Britten himself said of music: ‘It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain; of strength and freedom; the beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied СКАЧАТЬ