Olivier, by Philip Ziegler (2013)

Of the three, great theatrical knights of the 20^th Century, Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) always came in third with Your Correspondent, trailing far behind both John Gielgud (1904-2000) and Ralph Richardson (1902-1983).  Olivier was indeed a great actor, but he lacked, to us, the poetry of Gielgud or the twinkle of Richardson.

However, it becomes clear in reading this champion biography by Philip Ziegler (born 1929) that of the three, Olivier was the most ambitious, the most tenacious and the most daring.  For Olivier, becoming a great actor was less a feat of artistry than an act of great will and determination.  Throughout his life, Olivier would seemingly set higher and more complex challenges for himself, stretching his powers as a performer, as an advocate for the theater, and as a man.  He sometimes fell far from his mark (most notably as a man), but as a record of passion, energy and drive, Olivier is hard to beat.

Olivier did not initially consider being an actor, but when his clergyman father (a distant, rather brutal figure) told him that he would be on the stage (“of course”), young Laurence took to it with alacrity.  He was fortunate in his early roles and in mentors … while still a young man, he was playing classical parts like Romero and Mercutio, while also finding offers to star in mainstream movies.  With successes in both Wuthering Heights (1939) and Rebecca (1940), it would have been easy for Oliver to take the easy route and become a movie star; instead, he stuck to his loftier ambition to become the premier classical stage actor of his day.

However, his success in film (something denied Gielgud and Richardson in their early years) also provided Olivier with insight enough to know that cinema was an important medium.  While he claimed that he didn’t fully understand ‘movie acting’ until rather late in the game, he was wise enough to make large-scale movie adaptations of several Shakespeare plays that provide us some clue as to his in-person dynamism.  His film versions of Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III – both as director and star -- are not only good Shakespeare, they are good movie-making.

But this complete man of the theater was unsatisfied with performing and filmmaking; he also wanted to be the man who created a National Theater of Britain.  It was a project to which Olivier would dedicate more than a decade of his life and his not inconsiderable energies.  As star actor, occasional director, business manager, spokesman and man-of-all work, Olivier faced the Herculean task of building a national theater that showcased both the classics and contemporary plays.  It was not for the faint of heart.

In a book with more than its share of delicious gossip and screamingly-funny theater bitchiness, Ziegler devotes most of the book to the almost day-to-day business dealings of building the National.  For one of the foremost actors of his age, the great dramas of Olivier’s life were born in board rooms, political gatherings and backstage meetings.  More than just an actor-manager of the old school, Olivier virtually carried the foundation, creation, formation and survival of the National Theater on his back.  When the Board, in a stunning act of treachery, let him go after it was up-and-running, Olivier’s physical and mental health were permanently hampered.  It’s odd for a theatrical biography to read like a business primer, but it is this heroic struggle that made Olivier so interesting, and what makes Ziegler’s book so out of the ordinary.

This is certainly a warts-in-all portrait, but more often it seems that Olivier was more sinned-against than sinning.  Ziegler looks at Olivier the husband and father, as well as at Olivier the artist.  It would seem that he was a man capable of great generosity, kindness and wit – but a basilisk if you crossed him or got in the way of his ambition.  Like many great men, he was a mixture of the petty and the perfect, of vaunting ambition and piddling meanness.

For those who love backstage stories, Ziegler does not disappoint.  One of the more interesting revelations for Your Correspondent was Olivier’s volcanic temper and gifted potty-mouth.  At one point, Olivier calls fellow actor Laurence Harvey a “fucking stupid, sniveling, little cunt-faced asshole.”  Though hardly Shakespearen, such invective is heroic.

But these aren’t the stories that resonate with Ziegler, amusing as they are.  Olivier had Olympian aspirations, and Ziegler wisely reflects those aspirations in the story of his life, matching them up against his very real achievements, which continue to reverberate in the world of theater today.  Ziegler, a biographer of Lord Mountbatten, actually closes his biography with notes on the similarity between the two men.  This is a book for those who long for star biographies, but with a little more depth.  Highly recommended.

Children of Edward by Hippolyte Paul Delaroche (1831)

Today we start a weeklong look at the work of Hippolyte Delaroche (1797-1857), also known as Paul Delaroche.  Paul came from an artistic family; his father was an art dealer who made his fortune buying, selling and cataloging art.  His father encouraged young Paul and worked hard to advance his artistic education, sending young Paul to work with Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1771– 1835) in 1818.

Paul studied landscape painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and he made his first appearance in the Salon with an oversized picture, Josabeth Saving Joas (1822). This picture met with great success and, as a result, he soon became the friend of such luminaries as Géricault and Delacroix.  In fact, the three of them were the center of the historical painting scene of the era.

Following his debut, Paul spent most of his life as an active (and prolific) artist.  He visited Italy in 1838 and 1843, when his father-in-law, Horace Vernet (1789-1863) was director of the French Academy. His studio in Paris was in the rue Mazarine, where he built a reputation for patient industry.

The great love of Paul’s life was Louise Vernet.  They married in 1835, the same year he exhibited Head of an Angel, for which she served as a model.  Paul never recovered fully from the shock of her death 10 years later, aged only 31.  After her loss he created a series of small, exquisite pictures based on the Passion of the Christ, focusing his attention on the story’s dimension of human suffering.

Paul was extremely adept at history paintings – meaning not only pictures depicting historic events, but also mythological or biblical pictures, scenes from great literature and allegorical paintings. 

The key to Paul’s enduring success was that he had a dramatist’s eye and sense for the key moment of heightened tension.  His pictures depicting past events were not, perhaps, always scrupulously accurate in the representation of the actual historical moment, but were always intensely dramatic and psychologically true.

With that in mind, let’s look at one of his great pictures, The Children of Edward (1831).  The scene is, of course, familiar to anyone who has seen Shakespeare’s Richard III.  Two princes, held in the Tower of London, are about to be smothered on the order of Crooked-Back Richard, their uncle and usurper of their rights (and, eventually, the throne of England).  Knowing the fate of the children as we do, the sense of dramatic suspense is remarkable.

The two children, pale with terror, cling to one another on a four-poster bed in a dark room.  Edward V, and his brother Richard, children of the late king, Edward IV, have heard a noise and stopped reading.  The king gazes sadly at us, the gaze of his younger brother is drawn to the door, where his eventual murderer will enter.  The dog sees the shadow of a foot in the light under the door….

When this picture debuted at the Salon in 1831, it was a riotous success.  It was immediately purchased by the administrators of the Royal Museums; indeed, it was the inspiration for Casimir Delavigne to write a play, The Children of Edward (1833), which is little-performed today.

With this picture, Paul renders the subject in a manner both natural and emotional.  The children are quite real, and the dog emphasizes the tragic pathos of the moment.  There are few warm colors in evidence, and Paul’s inherent sense of dramatic romanticism is contained – such a moment did not need embellishment.

The scene can be found in Richard III, Act 4, Scene 3, where it is described in the words of Sir James Tyrell, who had commissioned their murder from Dighton and Forrest:

The tyrannous and bloody act is done -

The most arch deed of piteous massacre

That ever yet this land was guilty of.

'O thus', quoth Dighton, 'lay the gentle babes';

'Thus, thus', quoth Forrest, 'girding one another

Within their alabaster innocent arms.

Their lips were four red roses on a stalk,

And in their summer beauty kissed each other.

A book of prayers on their pillow lay,

'Which once', quoth Forrest, 'almost changed my mind.

But O, the devil' -- there the villain stopped,

When Dighton thus told on, 'We smothered

The most replenished sweet work of nature,

That from the prime creation e'er she framed.'

More Delaroche tomorrow.