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A disappointing Life of Lord Olivier
Contemporary Review, Summer, 2006 by Ralph Berry
Olivier: The Authorised Biography. Terry Coleman. Bloomsbury. [pounds sterling]20.00. xvi + 607 pages. ISBN 0-7475-7798-6.
This oddly disappointing Life comes with all the best recommendations. Terry Coleman has based his book firmly on the Olivier papers lodged in the British Library archive, and these are voluminous. Olivier kept everything. The author has had full co-operation from Dame Joan Plowright and the other members of Olivier's family, as also from Suzanne Barrington, daughter of Vivien Leigh. As the Arts Correspondent of The Guardian, he regularly met Olivier and saw his performances. Mr Coleman is well informed, and his judgments invariably balanced and fair. Yet this book reads like a plodding route march through a great life.
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One trouble, I think, is that this book should have been shorter or longer. There is always a case for an elegant, 350-page distillation of a life. Olivier's was surely a three-volume Life (which is what John Cottrell, acting for Time-Life Books, thought). A famous writer, colourful private life aside, may do little but write. Books remain to be written on Olivier as man of the theatre, on his career in films, and on his time as Director of the National Theatre. His private life ranged through all the phases of technicolor. To stuff these unwritten books into one is procrustean.
A Life of Olivier should be driven by passion. There is no passion here, nothing of Roger Lewis's The Real Life of Laurence Olivier. That book, ignored here, was a profoundly searching enquiry into the relationship between Olivier's roles and his life. But Mr Coleman seems to have little interest in Olivier on stage: there is nothing of the essential juices of his acting. I well remember the effect Olivier had on an audience. It was like a giant electric eel, galvanizing 1500 people. Films get no better treatment. Spartacus took six months of Olivier's life, and gets only a mention of the contract involved. Peter Ustinov (Batiatus to Olivier's Crassus) is ignored, though he describes the filming in Dear Me. Marathon Man (three months) gets some production details, nothing of the part itself. (I would propose Olivier's Nazi as a model of inflection variation, with 'Is it safe?' repeated nine times, each one of them differently.) Mr Coleman just wants to get on with the next film and the next.
There is, likewise, no engagement with the controversies of Olivier, both during his life and subsequently. I don't mean the public row over Hochhut's The Soldiers. There has always been an anti-Olivier faction. Gielgudists were opposed to him. The Left, for whom the National Theatre had been one of their causes (Shaw, Granville-Barker) were horrified to discover that the NT was the plaything of the Establishment. Many found his black Othello 'racist' (a line still taken by those who have seen only the film record) and Simon Callow, in his review of this book in The Times (5 September), sees him as representative of the star system, that evil vestige of feudalism destined to be overthrown by ensemble (cheers cheers). I don't mind where Mr Coleman comes out in these great public feuds but he ought to engage with them.
What he does is to quote, at stupefying length, from the letters. He has the letters. They fill space. But even in factual matters his book is incomplete. There are chronologies of Olivier's work on stage, film, and TV, but not on radio. Olivier's much-underrated recordings of the Bible, now forgotten, are worth at least a mention. Mr Coleman also makes this amazing exclusion: 'I have used nothing from any previous biography except Mr Barker's'. Nothing from John Cottrell, whose biography Olivier quite liked and no serious attempt to trawl the many autobiographies that mention Olivier? When Fay Wray died recently, her obituary stated that she had lunched with Olivier just once. All he wanted to know about, apparently, was the technical means by which King Kong was put on screen. There speaks a great technician. Some hundreds of people, still living, must have had a significant if fleeting relationship with Olivier. (I once met a lady who saw him in an elevator at The Bay, in Winnipeg. She had a good story to tell.) Serious biographers must pursue them, while they can. The archives can tell only part of the story. The Life of Olivier awaits other hands.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Contemporary Review Company Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
