Laurence Olivier: The Authorised Biography - Softcover

Coleman, Terry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747583064 ISBN 13: 9780747583066

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2005

Synopsis

Laurence Olivier is a complex and unexpected portrait of a man tormented by his own ruthless genius and everlasting guilt. It is the story of a High Church clergyman's son who became a West End matinee idol, and only at the age of twenty-eight determined to make himself a great Shakespearean actor, which he did in one season at the Old Vic. The next year he made himself a Hollywood star in "Wuthering Heights" and "Rebecca", then produced, directed and acted in his own Shakespeare movies. Work and sex were for him inseparable: acting, he once said, was like coming for a living. Having abandoned his first wife, he entered a turbulent marriage with the manic depressive Vivien Leigh. She dominated his life for twenty years and they became the royal family of the British stage. Then, to save himself and his work, he 'dropped the legend' and wrenched himself away from her, and was ever afterwards tormented by a sense of sin which only heroic and incessant work could expiate. He married Joan Plowright, a generation younger than himself, had a new young family, and became founding director of the National Theatre. But even the National, in his view, ended in betrayal and tragedy. For twenty years he was stricken by one illness after another. When he could no longer stand on a stage he acted sitting down. In his last years he played so many famous death scenes that when he died at the age of eighty-two his son half expected him to emerge from the house to be congratulated on yet another. St Paul's and Westminster Abbey, the two principal theatres of the Church of England, outbid each other to stage the positively final appearance of the man universally seen as the most magical actor of his day.

About this title

Review

'It is not simply the elegant style delivered with magisterial authority, or the sharp understanding of what's significant and what isn't, or even the fine storyteller's gift; it is, above all, the sheer diligence with which the author has done his research' Guardian on NELSON 'This book is written in the very best of revisionist history: it is well-researched, closely argued and at odds with received wisdom, long overdue' Sunday Telegraph on NELSON 'This momentous movement has now found its perfect chronicler. Coleman is that rare phenomenon, an absolutely original writer' The Times on PASSAGE TO AMERICA

From the Publisher

A masterly biography of a major twentieth-century figure, for fans of Sheila Hancock’s The Two of Us and The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0747583064
• ISBN 13: 9780747583066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 624