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

to amaze. ‘I can’t disguise myself any more,’ he told an interviewer, as if that lust for the stage had been a secret. The truth is that it never was: one of the reasons why Peter Hall, for example, thought he might have been the greatest man of theatre we’d ever known was surely that everyone understood that his characters sprang from a passion for creation. It burned inside him.

      When Archie Rice, in John Osborne’s The Entertainer, says, ‘I’m dead behind these eyes,’ he’s talking about a talent to amuse that has dried up, having never flowed very strongly in the first place. The feet still try to find the tap-dance routines, but they’ve gone. Olivier played him, first in 1957, with an understanding of that longing. With Archie it was talent unfulfilled; with Olivier himself it was talent that could never quite be satisfied. Whatever he did, he always wanted more.

      That was because he knew he was gifted. Ellen Terry, an actress who had enthralled Edwardian theatre-goers, watched a performance of Julius Caesar at the Church of England primary school he attended and wrote in her diary: ‘The small boy who played Brutus is already a great actor.’ Olivier was 10. That was in 1917. By the time he was in his early twenties he had reached Hollywood, like a moth drawn to the flame, and he was duly singed. He was going to be Greta Garbo’s leading man in Queen Christina, and was dumped; and when he started filming Wuthering Heights the producer Sam Goldwyn thought it would be a disaster. Fortunately the director, William Wyler, kept faith and his Heathcliff was a success, leading straight on the next year, 1940, to Rebecca, in which his haunting inability to deal with sexual obsession confirmed that when you were looking for a brooding hero, with life behind those eyes, Olivier was your man.

      The brilliant stroke that turned that success into something deeper was Henry V, the Shakespearean king who touched him with heroism. He directed the film in 1944 (after Wyler and Carol Reed both pulled out), the year of the D-Day landings in occupied Europe, and William Walton produced a score that was the soundtrack of victory. The war in Europe would – everyone believed – soon be over, and against the backdrop of family tragedies and the devastation visited on so many cities, especially London, it was time for sights to be raised. The Ministry of Information had decided that the battle of Agincourt what just what was required to remind people of the glory that was war. A Henry V bursting with patriotic fervour seemed just right, and Olivier gave him that voice. He made himself inseparable from a victory that people persuaded themselves had been inevitable.

      Still in his mid-thirties, he was already a Shakespearean actor of breadth and panache. He’d been seen in London as Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus and Iago, and came to film with a technique and a confidence – what the director Tyrone Guthrie called a ‘muscularity’ – that already seemed fully formed. He was flying. His first Shakespeare had been a decade before in Romeo and Juliet at the invitation of John Gielgud (with whom he swapped the roles of Romeo and Mercutio back and forth through the run), with Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet, but within a year or two he was leading the Old Vic company on his own.

      He played Hamlet for the first time in 1937 for Guthrie and you get a sense of what a puzzle he was from the comments of James Agate, who was the incisive critic of the Sunday Times and therefore feared. Mr Olivier, he said, didn’t speak poetry badly; the thing was that he didn’t speak it at all. But he added this: that there was a pulsating vitality and excitement about his performance. J.C. Trewin, another of the critical giants of the time, said that his Coriolanus the following year was ‘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