The Secret Life Of Laurence Olivier

The Secret Life Of Laurence Olivier

People often refer to Lawrence Olivier as the greatest actor of his generation, if not of all time, but behind the scenes he struggled desperately with painful secrets. In his Memoirs, Sir Lawrence Olivier confessed to having a brief affair with a male friend, and for many years people believed that he was talking about his mentor Noel Coward, but when Olivier’s own letters were discovered they revealed the truth story, which is coming up.

Lawrence’s father had a flair for the dramatic and considered a career as a stage actor before eventually becoming a priest in the Anglican Church. Little Lawrence was inspired by his father’s performance every week, which went from quiet reference to booming admonition, even slipping in a joke in between with the greatest of ease.

Lawrence gained admission to the All Saints Choir School, where he began to perform in Shakespeare plays. During this time, doctors discovered that his mother Agnes was suffering from a brain tumor. When Lawrence visited his home, Agnes pulled him close and whispered, goodbye my darling.

Sadly, just two weeks after she’d said her words of farewell to her son, Agnes died. Lawrence was only 12 years old, and the loss was earth-shattering. After All Saints, Olivier attended St Edward’s School, where he focused on school plays to the detriment of pretty much everything else.

He was underweight, delicate, and often took on the female parts in plays. This led to some experimentation with his male schoolmates. Later, Lawrence attended the same school as his older sister Sybil, the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts.

His father approved of the choice, but there was one caveat: he was cutting his son off and expected him to get by on a scholarship. Luckily for Lawrence, the school was desperate for male students, and everything went according to plan. Soon enough, Lawrence fell for fellow actress Jill Esmond when they appeared in a play together.

In the third week of the production, he proposed. Her reaction was brutal; not only did she say no, but he found out that she was also taking off to Broadway. Still, Olivier wasn’t going to let a little thing like the Atlantic Ocean get between them. He followed her to New York.

At this point, Lawrence Olivier was 21 years old, and his only experience in the bedroom had been with other boys at the school. He was absolutely desperate to get married and see what the fairer sex had to offer, so his campaign to convince Esmond to be his wife continued in New York. While she accepted a ring from him, she continued to say how unsure she was about the whole marriage thing.

Could this have been a bad omen? When Olivier returned to England to wait for Esmond to finish her run in the states, he made a disturbing discovery: his sister Sybil, who had just become a new mother, was struggling with her mental health. She’d have frequent screaming fits and even tried to give her baby away to a group of nuns.

Olivier helped to have her committed. Tragically, this would not be the only time he would send away a woman he loved into a mental institution. In June of 1930, Lawrence Olivier and Jill Esmond tied the knot. It took mere weeks for them to realize they’d made a terrible mistake, but by then it was too late.

Olivier hid from the sad reality of his broken relationship by throwing himself into work. At the time, Noel Coward was one of the hottest playwrights in London. When he caught Lawrence on stage, he was blown away by the actor’s talent and cast him in his play Private Lives. It was a smashing success and became Olivier’s big break.

Coward became both a close friend and a mentor. When the time came to take the play to New York, they needed to find a new leading lady, so they made the convenience choice to take Jill along. In London, critics called Olivier the next big thing, but in the US they only had eyes for his wife.

Esmond received some big offers from film studios back home. She was making 8 pounds a week, but Fox Studios in Hollywood wanted to pay 875 dollars a week for a year. When Olivier finally got a similar offer, she made the decision for both of them: a year in Hollywood to make bank, and then they could move on with their lives.

When they arrived in Los Angeles, the couple immediately found themselves at the center of the Hollywood scene, but their social successes didn’t translate into film success. With a few flops under his belt, Olivier headed back to the comfort of the London stage. At this point, Esmond lost interest in her husband and began to have affairs with other women behind his back.

Still, the couple managed to get pregnant soon after. Olivier hoped the baby could help turn it all around, but even after she gave birth to their son, it was clear that too much damage had been done for them to fix things. Olivier again threw himself into his career.

He worked at breakneck speed, appearing in countless Shakespeare productions and learning over 12,000 of the Bard’s lines over the course of about a year. One day, after a production of Romeo and Juliet, he personally learned the meaning of the term star-crossed.

Actress Vivien Leigh, then still a fledgling star, approached him at a restaurant and congratulated him on his performance. Her beauty and poise enchanted him. Olivier said that when it came to Leigh, he couldn’t help himself, and he immediately pursued her.

Vivien was no stranger to infidelity, and they soon began a passionate affair. The fact that they’d been cast opposite each other in the film called Fire Over England gave them further pretense to continue the tryst. In 1937, Olivier received an invite to play Hamlet at Elsinore, the Danish castle where the play is set.

He slightly suggested that the producers cast Leigh as Ophelia. One day during rehearsals for Hamlet at Elsinore, Leigh began to exhibit strange behavior. She started screaming at Olivier before going silent the next day. When Olivier asked her about it, she couldn’t remember a thing. It was jarring, and sadly, as we’ll see, a dark omen of what was to come.

When they returned home, both Olivier and Lee told their spouses that they were leaving them, but their plan didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. Despite Esmond’s own issues within the marriage, when Olivier asked her for a divorce, she refused. Leigh faced the same problem, but despite all that, they forged ahead and began to live together.

Lawrence went back to Hollywood to star as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, but Leigh had her eyes on another great romance. The casting of Gone with the Wind was one of the hottest topics in Hollywood, and many people thought that Olivier had a chance to get the role of Rhett Butler. While he toiled on the set of Wuthering Heights, Leigh campaigned hard for the role of Scarlett O’Hara.

As happy for Leigh as he was, Olivier had no interest in hanging around Hollywood and waiting for another part. After finishing his movie, he went back to the stage while she made Gone with the Wind. During this separation, Olivier and Leigh frequently called and wrote to each other.

While his letters were fervent and occasionally explicit declarations of his desire, her phone calls were occasions for her to express her jealousy. One night she gave him the scare of a lifetime. After a heated phone conversation, Leigh accidentally overdosed on sleeping pills. Her maid was able to revive her after a lot of panic.

Leigh later apologized, but she was fragile, and both the distance and her long days on Gone with the Wind were making that seriously apparent. Lawrence came back to Hollywood and was due to star in Rebecca and Pride and Prejudice in quick succession, and in each case he pushed to have Leigh cast opposite him. The studios outright rejected the idea. After all, they were both still married to other people, and it was a bad look.

Finally, in 1940, both spouses agreed to the divorces, leaving Olivier and Leigh free to tie the knot that August. They exchanged rings in Santa Barbara. With their newfound freedom, they jumped into acting projects together, but things didn’t always go according to plan.

As World War II escalated and things got bad back home, Lawrence Olivier felt called to help in some way. The men in charge were encouraging English actors to stay in Hollywood and make pictures that would portray Britain positively, so Olivier and Lee got together with director Alexander Korda to make That Hamilton Woman. It was their first film together since their marriage, and it did not go well.

Their mutual obsession with each other had been fine when it took place in passion-filled letters, but in real life Olivier soon grew tired of it. To cope, Leigh began to drink heavily on set. Olivier returned to England. His friend Ralph Richardson, who wanted to keep the Old Vic Theater open during World War II to boost morale, suggested Olivier as a co-director.

In his fourth year at the Old Vic, King George VI knighted Olivier for his contributions to stage and screen, making him the youngest actor to receive the honor. On top of that, Olivier directed and starred in a film adaptation of Hamlet, which went on to win the Best Picture and Best Actor Academy Awards.

Olivier took Leigh and the Old Vic company on a 6-month tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1948. The grueling tour strained their marriage, and as Olivier put it later, he lost Vivien in Australia. And there was a more scandalous reason behind their divide.

While they were there, Leigh began an affair with actor Peter Finch. To add insult to injury, Olivier actually hired Finch for his production company and gave him a generous contract, all the while Finch was sleeping with his wife behind his back. With that said, the betrayal wasn’t one-sided.

During the filming of A Streetcar Named Desire, which starred Leigh and Marlon Brando, one of Olivier’s friends remembered coming out of the pool and catching Lawrence in an embrace with Brando. It wasn’t the first time Olivier had an affair with another man, and it definitely wouldn’t be the last.

Both Olivier and Leigh’s careers flourished, but behind the scenes each was fighting a private battle. Leigh seemed to be fighting with herself, while Olivier struggled to know what to do as her behavior became more and more unpredictable. Finally, they saw a doctor who helped them understand what was happening to Leigh: she was suffering from manic depression, now called bipolar disorder.

While it was comforting to know the root of Leigh’s extreme mood swings, it didn’t help fix them, and as time wore on everything got worse. In 1953, Leigh made a movie abroad with Peter Finch, and when she came back she made a stunning declaration. Leigh told Olivier that she was in love with Finch and wanted a divorce.

Leigh’s mental health declined, and soon enough the affair with Finch fizzled out. Sadly, even that couldn’t fix her marriage with Olivier. By this point, Leigh was completely losing touch with reality. She would scream for hours in her dressing room until doctors had to eventually sedate her.

Olivier felt that he had only one option left: he placed Leigh in an asylum for 3 months, where she endured multiple painful sessions of electroshock therapy. Leigh and Olivier’s marriage had been through the ringer at this point, and their time together was coming to an end.

In 1956, 44-year-old Vivien Leigh miraculously became pregnant with Olivier’s child. The unlikely mother hoped the baby could give her and Olivier a fresh start, but fate had other plans in store for the couple. Leigh had a miscarriage and fell into a horrible depressive spiral and a breakdown filled with public outbursts.

When Leigh wasn’t stripping naked in a public park, she was trying to beat Olivier with a towel. Things were out of control, and there was nothing Olivier could do to make them better. Instead, he sought out a relationship that was much more solid and easy, and he found it with actress Joan Plowright.

But there was a sick twist to their union: not only was she 22 years younger, but they had also met while she was playing his daughter on stage. Despite her fragile state, Leigh wasn’t about to take this sitting down. She threatened to take her own life if Olivier left her. Still, he was determined to get out while he could.

When the news broke out about the impending divorce, Leigh told the press about the other woman. With the paperwork filed, Olivier was free to tie the knot with Plowright, and they did move right into married life. Nine months after their wedding, Plowright gave birth to a son and then two daughters in quick succession.

It looked like Olivier was finally having the kind of stable family life he’d never been able to achieve before. Olivier helped develop the National Theater and ran the Chichester Festival, where he directed icons like Peter O’Toole, Maggie Smith, and Anthony Hopkins. But then, right as he was in the middle of a run of stage successes, disaster struck: doctors diagnosed Olivier with prostate cancer.

Olivier’s pains weren’t just physical. In July of 1967, Vivien Leigh died after a battle with tuberculosis. Her partner, John Merivale, discovered her body, and the first person he called was Lawrence Olivier. Even though they’d broken up 7 years earlier, the acclaimed actor rushed to see her one last time. He insisted on staying with the body until the authorities removed it.

In his final years, Olivier took on roles that he might have scoffed at in the decades before, including a series of Polaroid ads and some cameos in lesser quality films. Still, very little could keep Lawrence Olivier down, and when his health allowed it he could still lock down Oscar-nominated performances well into his 70s.

Olivier fought through 22 long years of illness, acting as much as he could when his health allowed him. Finally, in 1989, Olivier died of kidney failure at the age of 82. Many of his contemporaries and critics agree that he was the greatest actor of his generation, if not of all time.

For years, friends, fans, and biographers alike speculated about Lawrence Olivier’s sexuality. After all, he was always quite open about his experiences with men. In his biography, Olivier wrote a passage about being tempted by another man, and many believed he was talking about his old friend Noel Coward, but Olivier’s own letters later revealed the truth.

A series of letters between Olivier and fellow Shakespearean actor Henry Ainley seemed to strongly hint that the pair had a passionate if brief affair in the mid 1930s before Olivier took up with Vivien Leigh. One biographer believes that Olivier had a decade-long affair with comedian and actor Danny Kaye. Friends like Noel Coward and Princess Marina seemed to confirm their romance.

Of course, when it comes to Olivier’s secrets, who better to ask than his third and final wife? After Olivier’s passing, his official biographer finally asked Plowright flat out if he’d had affairs with men. Her reply was, if he did, so what?

Sadly, not everyone accepted her late husband’s sexuality. Olivier’s son from his first marriage, Tarquin, did everything in his power to suppress any stories of same-sex dalliances. But there was clearly one romance that haunted Olivier more than any other in his life.

In the weeks before Olivier’s own demise, he reportedly watched a movie that starred Vivien Leigh. As he began to weep, Olivier simply said, this, this was love. Even though their relationship didn’t last forever, Leigh felt the same way about Olivier. The actress once said, I would rather have lived a short life with Larry than faced a long one without him.

Their own story was full of love and woe, just like the tale of the star-crossed lovers who brought them together all those years ago.