Laurence Olivier Obituary – Death: Dominated the British Stage, Laurence Olivier Dies Unexpectedly
Laurence Olivier Obituary: DW Culture, Laurence Olivier’s family, and friends pay tribute to him. On July 11, 2023, 34 years ago today, he went away. In the middle of the 20th century, he ruled the British stage and frequently worked with Vivien.
Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, to High Anglican priest Gerard Kerr Olivier and Agnes Louise (Crookenden) Olivier. His great-great-grandfather, a French Huguenot, gave him the surname.
Who was Laurence Olivier?
Olivier gained early notoriety as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage when playing “Romeo” and “Mercutio” in alternating performances of “Romeo and Juliet” with John Gielgud in 1935.
A young English actress who was just starting out in the industry fell in love with Romeo played by Olivier. During a special 1937 performance at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore (Helsingr), Denmark, their roles as “Ophelia” and “Hamlet” were switched.
She became his second wife in 1940 after they had both returned from making tremendously successful films in the United States in 1939.
Laurence preferred the film Wuthering Heights (1939), whereas she preferred Gone with the Wind (1939). In the films Fire Over England (1937), 21 Days Together (1940), and That Hamilton Woman (1941), Vivien Leigh and Olivier all had romantic relationships.
For what would have been their fourth collaboration, Olivier and Leigh traveled to Scotland in 1944 with Charles C. Bennett to research the true account of a Scottish girl who was found guilty of killing her French boyfriend.
According to Bennett, Olivier looked into the case “with all the diligence of Sherlock Holmes” and discovered “evidence, never known or produced at the trial” that “most certainly” would have led to the young woman’s execution.
The movie was then abandoned. Throughout their twenty years of marriage, Leigh and Olivier occasionally appeared in films and performed on stage in both England and the US.
Leigh was filming her adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s “Sister Carrie” while Olivier was wrapping up production on his version of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire (1951; Carrie, 1952).
She won a second Academy Award for her work on the “Blanche DuBois” film adaption. Regarding the 1952 movie Carrie, Olivier was infamously silent.
In the narrative, George Hurstwood, a middle-aged married man from Chicago, tricked a young woman into leaving a younger man who was set to propose to her. He afterwards became a New York street person. He is accurately portrayed by Olivier as a marginally nicer, less vile individual.
Early in the 1930s, Olivier and his first wife, Jill Esmond, visited Hollywood; their trip was covered in a 1987 PBS documentary on his life and career. Even in the movie industry, where he produced four times as many films as his second wife, she was able to overshadow him.