Sir Laurence Olivier retired from the stage in 1973. Now, at the age of eighty, he has finally stepped out of the world of films and television. It is the close of a long, uniquely distinguished career in which he has, probably better than any other actor of his time, shown how to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. The last of these accomplishments has been perfectly suited to the size and nature of his talents. Especially during and after the Second World War, he came to embody in his work a certain thrilling and heroic idea of the Englishman; he was, so to speak, the Rolls Royce among actors, not only in his great leading roles, but also in the panache, daring, and precision that he brought to every part he played, however small.
To remember his big performances is to catch great moments in the mind's eye: the animal cry of his blinded Oedipus, which became a legend in British theater; the hair-raising summons to the attack upon St. Crispin's Da-a-a-aaaaay in his filmed Henry V, the duel in his Hamlet film, shot through with fire and clashing metal and earth, his newly kinged Richard III, forcing amazed courtiers to their knees with a black-gloved hand suddenly thrust forward to be kissed, his Coriolanus at Stratford, courting Roman voters with hilarious silent loathing, inexorably losing his grip on a towering rage, and finally dying in a blind, head-first plunge from a high rostrum that looked dangerous and was. But Olivier was not merely a cobbler of startling effect and climaxes. The peculiar force of his artistry was molded and contained by intelligence and a technique that crafted the finest detail of a performance - whether it be a huge classical role, a tub-thumping patriotic wartime speech at the Albert Hall, a pot-boiling movie cameo, or a television commercial made to sell Polaroid cameras.
It has become modish for some of the pimpant theatrical eminences to speak slightingly of "Larry" and his approach to acting. Peter Hall, saying pretentiously that acting is "not imitation but revelation of the inner self" adds, "This is not what Larry does or sets out to do. He is a performer." Others, critics especially, have complained of Olivier's occasionally visible technique. The fundamental snobbery of these remarks blinks the achievements of this great actor's approach to his work. He deliberately broke the artificial convention of "singing" Shakespeare's poetry, preferring, as he said, to find the truth through the verse as he had spoken it all his life. As to the "revelation of the inner self," he said plainly, "I have never been conscious of any need other than to show off," and avowed that he built from the outside in, through the accumulation of physical details.
Commonsense about the game of "let's pretend", and a distaste for the indulgent (and rather decadent) neoromantic school of "self-expression" in acting did not prevent him from attaining an uncanny intensity and power in performance that few, if any, other actors could approach in any medium. He had that mysterious extra resource possessed by the greatest artists, and, supported it with audacity, a keen intellect, instinct, and a dazzling command of stagecraft and its technical repertoire. This equipment enabled him to build portrayals that echoed beyond the plain truth of a character, opening and lighting up the most profound recesses of the human spirit. His flair, his superb command of the actor's rite, was probably as close a match as we shall see to Shakespeare's own magical artistry as
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