Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor and director. Along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, he was one of a trinity of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. For his on-screen work he received four Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards.
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Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor and director. Along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, he was one of a trinity of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. His honours included a knighthood, a life peerage and the Order of Merit. For his on-screen work he received four Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. He was married three times, to the actresses Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, Vivien Leigh from 1940 to 1960, and Joan Plowright from 1961 until his death. In 1916, after attending a series of preparatory schools, Olivier passed the singing examination for admission to the All Saints’ School of All Saints, London. His elder brother, Margaret, was already a pupil in central London. Olivier’s father, a clergyman, decided that his son should become an actor. After attending a drama school in London, Olivier learned his craft in a succession of acting jobs during the late 1920s. In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, and he appeared in his first film. In 1935 he played in a celebrated production of Romeo and Juliet alongside Giel gud and Peggy Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star.
In the 1940s Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, building it into a highly respected company. From 1963 to 1973 he was the founding director of Britain’s National Theatre, running a resident company that fostered many future stars. His own parts there included the title role in Othello and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Among Olivier’s films are Wuthering Heights, Rebecca, and a trilogy of Shakespeare films as actor-director: Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III. His later films included Spartacus, The Shoes of the Fisherman, Sleuth, Marathon Man, and The Boys from Brazil. His television appearances included an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Love Among the Ruins, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brideshead Revisited and King Lear. In 1912, when Olivier was five, his father secured a permanent appointment as assistant rector at St Saviour’s, Pimlico. He held the post for six years, and a stable family life was at last possible. Olivier was a great devoted art student, but his father was a cold and remote parent, whom he found a great deal of the time. As a young man Gerard Olivier had considered dropping the bell to drop the perils of hell, when suddenly wax sentimental … The quick changes of his mood and manner absorbed me, and I have never forgotten them.
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