ANOTHER biography of Laurence Olivier? The basic facts of his life are by now so well known that they only need a brief summary. Born to a High Church clergyman and a headmaster's daughter who died when he was 12; school in Oxford; drama school and poverty; making his way in the polished, snobbish, strongly homosexual West End theatre of the pre war years; not very successful attempt to become a Hollywood matinee idol; gradual emergence as one of a band of supremely gifted Shakespearean actors cent red around the Old Vie Theatre.
Next comes the film Henry V which he stars in and directs, its English patriotism matching the mood of the war years and anointing him in the public eye as the great actor of his age. After that it is triumph all the way, a succession of mighty roles and mighty performances, culminating in the achievement of a century old dream, the foundation of the British National Theatre.
Alongside this is the personal life, if such it can be called for someone whose private and public personas were so inextricably intertwined; the marriages, first, disastrously, to the actress Jill Esmonde, then, most famously, to Vivien Leigh, ending in betrayal, illness and death, and finally to the much younger Joan Plowright.
Faced with numerous prior biographies (he himself lists 14), Roger Lewis has opted not to tell these facts baldly again, but to evoke Olivier through his performances and his personality. It's a difficult, maybe impossible, task and not only because the great man was, by the account of his contemporaries, almost impossible to know, hiding his "real" self as thoroughly off stage as on. As well as that there is the difficulty of evoking acting in words. It's something few critics even attempt, preferring to stick with analysis of the work of the playwright or director and leaving the poor players with a few perfactory adjectives. Perhaps, at the end of the day, it is impossible to dissect great acting, which is made up of so many disparate elements of personality, physical appearance, movement, voice, timing, intelligence and intuition.
And this brings us to the main weakness of this book, which is that by his own confession Mr Lewis never actually saw Olivier live.
Perforce, then, this becomes a biography that centres around the film roles. It seems Lewis can only guess at what the stage performances were like or base his opinions on the accounts of others, though he's not above subtly intruding himself into audiences of which he was never a part. But, despite the book's claim that Olivier's style did not change between stage and screen, the films, of course, remain the lesser part of Olivier's career. There were, to be sure, theatre based performances on film, Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III, Othello (a straightforward camera record of the stage production), and The Entertainer. But many of Oliver's screen parts are either cameos or in inferior films, despite Lewis's attempt to reclaim some of the poorest (The Betsy, he writes is "like those summary, violent, experimental canvases Picasso knocked out during his last years). The nub of his argument is our old friend the Oedipus Complex. Olivier was obsessed with the mother who died in his youth and the subliminally sexual experience of being spanked by her made him associate sin and guilt with sex. Her early death made him, too, at once devoted and distant, acting both off and on the stage as a form of deceit or disguise. The same feelings governed his relationships with others, particularly in his stormy romance with Vivien Leigh.
Acting on stage or screen allowed him to recreate the happiness he had experienced with his mother and, at the same time, to escape the feelings of moral inadequacy he felt with those around him, particularly his clergyman father.
The theory offers some interesting insights into the man and his art. There is plenty of fascinating information, too: accounts of the punishing schedule Olivier imposed on himself, and the manner in which it seemed the actor was almost trying to shunt his private difficulties with Leigh out of his life, leaving for himself only a public face. But so relentlessly does Lewis push his view, shoehorning it into accounts of everything his subject ever did, that eventually one loses patience. For all the analysis, at the end, Olivier remains as tantalisingly out of reach as ever. Perhaps that is the real secret of great acting.