Free Murderers and Other Friends by John Mortimer Page B

Olivier’s clipped, staccato way of speaking the verse was then thought by critics to be greatly inferior to Gielgud’s mellifluous tones, which I also preferred. Many years later traces of my Gielgud voice, my attempt at beautifully orchestrated pathos, would return when I was addressing the jury on behalf of some car thief or bank robber, although I doubt if it had much effect on the verdict.
    Stories abound about the differences between these giants, but Gielgud seems to have produced nothing but devotion among all those who worked with him. Later, when he was no longer a prince but an elegant, witty, chain-smoking, wonderfully tactless old man, he played some parts I had written and I found him to be the only actor you’d wish to take to a desert island. Olivier had some reputation for ruthlessness. Alec Guinness played the Fool in his Lear and was surprised that he was the only one of the supporting cast to receive any attention from the critics. Wondering at this, he remembered that the Fool only enters with Lear and leaves the stage when the King does. Then he noticed that the lights went up a good many points every time Olivier came on to the stage and dimmed to a similar extent as he departed. The Fool was therefore the only character to share in the star’s illumination, whereas Goneril, Regan, Edmund and Gloucester were left to stumble around in the dark.
    I don’t think that Olivier is to be blamed for these tricks; no doubt they’ve been part of the armoury of all the great actor-managers of the past. He has traced the secret of Shakespearian acting as whispers passed on from Burbage to Betterton, from Betterton to Garrick, from Garrick to Kean and Kean to Irving, on whose memory Olivier’s generation was raised. His well-justified claim to be part of this great chain was mixed with a very theatrical humility, a good deal of laying of the hand on the heart and the announcement that he was, indeed, a miserable sinner and altogether unworthy of the honours and praises bestowed on him. He used to address the National Theatre board in the obsequious tones of Othello before the Senate, scarcely forbearing to call us, with a great deal of mock humility, ‘my very noble and approved good masters’. He said that he got his timing, essential in playing tragedy, from great comics like Jack Benny and Bob Hope. He also admitted that when he played ‘the Black One’ (‘by far the most exhausting, dear boy’), he thought of the pompous way in which Charlie Chaplin used long words and convoluted phrases – so his addresses to the board came from Othello by way of Chaplin. In spite of these moments of dramatic self-abnegation, he was a genuine old actor laddie at heart and his favourite stories were those that elderly pros might tell in the Last Gulp, the bar in the wings of the old Brighton Theatre Royal. He loved to remember the Gloucester who staggered on to the stage to be greeted by a cry of ‘You’re drunk!’ from the gallery. ‘You think I’m drunk?’ the actor went down to the footlights and asked with great dignity. ‘Just wait till you’ve seen the Duke of Buckingham!’ He liked, even more, the story of the bankrupt touring company which was performing Macbeth when a man from the Electricity Board came to cut off the supply. Understanding that the matter was urgent, the stage-door keeper swathed himself in a cloak, put on a broad-brimmed hat and, coming on in the banquet scene, marched up to the unhappy king, who was about to see Banquo’s ghost, and said, ‘My Lord, an’t please you. There is one without that, but for us placing upon his palm certain gold pieces within the instant, threateneth to douse yon glim!’ The story, no doubt, went back to the dawn of the century, but Laurence Olivier loved it no less for that.
    He was an instinctive actor and you could no more ask him to describe his performances than