Cry God For Larry
Yesterday afternoon, on the exact centenary of Laurence Olivier’s birth (22 May 1907) I dreamt I went to Mandelay. In reality, I went to Dorking. Olivier was born there, at 26 Wathen Road, just off the High Street, in the shadow of Box Hill and the glorious north Downs of Surrey, and two hundred yards from St Martin’s Church of England where his father was a curate. It was a glorious day, but there was no outward sign of festivity. Low key would be an exaggerated way of describing the town’s celebration of its most famous son, the greatest actor of the twentieth century, and the founding director of our National Theatre. In Wathen Road, a street of handsome red brick Edwardian villas, a group of disinterested punk teenagers ambled up the slope from the nearby Meadowbank park. As they disappeared into the High Street, a great silence fell. You could hear a pin drop. The houses all appeared to be unoccupied. Then a faint playing on the flute in a nearby upper storey. Number 26 showed no signs of life. A single red rose had been pinned to the wall next to the blue plaque proclaiming the actor’s birth on this site.
I paid my respects in a reverie of remembrance of the Old Vic performances of my youth, of Captain Brazen and Solness, of Strindberg’s Captain, Shylock and James Tyrone. And the greatest performance of all, his swaying, panther-like, over-heated Othello, ripe and sensual in soaring cadences and magnetic bestiality. Over the road, in the White Hart pub, the regulars were not even contemplating Olivier until I raised the subject. One of them had been taken by his father to see A Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Another informed me of the town’s cock-fighting history, and the five-clawed chicken that is a Dorking speciality. A man from Dorking — and a superman like Olivier — may be referred to as a “Five-Clawed’n”; we drank to this, and — for reasons which escape me — to the prosperity of Tottenham Hotspur and the other White Hart (Lane) former regulars, Oasis and Oliver Reed. This was an infinitely more spirited celebration of our hero than the pitiful exhibition out at the Denbies Wine Estate, where a few photographs and biographical details have been hastily assembled in the Ralph Vaughan Williams room in the library.
As dusk fell, we repaired to the Dorking Halls, where Tarquin Olivier, Sir Larry’s son by his first wife, Jill Esmond, gave an evocative talk of his “life with father” and even lapsed into a creditable impersonation. He recalled the Edrwadian splendour of Notley Abbey, where Olivier and Vivien Leigh, his second wife, held court, “everyone over-acted like mad” and Noel Coward once asked him (Tarquin) if he was a little bit queer. “Not even a little bit? Pity!” There followed a screening of Wuthering Heights, whose director, William Wyler, Olivier always credited with teaching him the true art of screen acting. And what a performance it was, and remains, not remotely dated. How could Cliff Richard ever have even thought of playing the gypsy Heathcliff? As Merle Oberon dies as Cathy, going curiously mad at the same time, Olivier just burns up the screen with his inner demonic passion. “I cannot love without my life…I cannot die without my soul.” There was, in truth, not a dry seat in the house. I retreated moistly to Dorking station, content at last that the great man’s memory had been honoured and that we had, indeed, seen the finest emotional actor of our times.