Letters hint at Olivier's gay suitor Jack Grimston Fairbanks: possible 'suitor' © HE was the most famous British actor of his generation, revered across the world for his interpretations of Shakespeare. His companion was a dashing Hollywood star, renowned for his sexual dalliances. The carefully preserved archive of Laurence Olivier, seen for the first time, suggests that his friendship with Douglas Fairbanks Jr almost turned to an affair. The personal papers also show Olivier employed a "minder" to report on the health of Vivien Leigh, his second wife, before they were even married. The archive, stored in 180 large crates, was bought by the British Library from the Olivier family for £1m in April. Seen exclusively by The Sunday Times Magazine before it is opened to the public next month, the collection includes passionate love letters between Olivier and Leigh, and accounts from doctors and others of her bouts of mental illness. The archives are reviewed in a three-week series of articles starting in today's magazine. Kathryn Johnson, the curator of modern drama at the British Library, said the Olivier archive was the biggest it had relating to a single theatre figure. "It's going to be one of the stars of the collection and very important for the study of theatre in the 20th century," she said. Olivier, who died in 1989 at the age of 82, co-founded the National Theatre and was famous the world over both as a stage performer and a film star. He and Leigh became the most glamorous celebrity couple of their era. But their 20-year marriage, which ended in divorce in 1960, was marred by Leigh's manic depression. Although her illness was believed by most biographers to have come on gradually during their marriage, the archive shows that Olivier knew before they wed that Leigh was unstable. He even employed an assistant, Sunny Lash, to report to him on his future wife's health and state of mind while she was playing Scarlett O'Hara on the set of Gone with the Wind. Lash describes her staggering around her room after taking too many sedatives. "I get so upset when things aren't right - and Vivien is impossible - or need I tell you?" Lash wrote to Olivier. The telegrams from his "Vivling" during their frequent separations testify to their passionate love and chart her gradual mental degeneration. Although they both had affairs, Leigh's five-year liaison with Peter Finch, an actor renowned for his charm, hard drinking and womanising, had a devastating effect on her and her marriage. After Finch abruptly abandoned her in 1953, she was treated in a mental institution. The archive reveals other aspects of Olivier's sex life. Although his first wife, Jill Esmond, was bisexual, Olivier was not, but he confessed to being tempted by a man on one occasion. In the past, speculation has centred on Noël Coward, Danny Kaye or Richard Burton, but the archive suggests the real "suitor" may have been Fairbanks. An old and close friend of Olivier, famous for his wide-ranging sexual tastes, he was recently named as the prime suspect in the infamous "headless man" photograph at the centre of the Duchess of Argyll's divorce. The picture showed the duchess, wearing only a string of pearls, performing a sex act on an unidentified man. There is a series of highly camp letters from Fairbanks, including a set of pornographic drawings featuring a well-endowed man. One of the letters, not dated but evidently in response to a note from Olivier, says: "'Spurned?' No, dear! Only anxious not to suspect recollections of your visit had placed me in that awkward 'Oh Christ! What'll I do? What'll I say?' category. I gather now that was not the case." In contrast to his virtuoso performances on stage and in films such as Henry V and Wuthering Heights, Olivier the man was often portrayed as a dull character, handsome but with little original to say for himself. He was painfully aware of his own inarticulacy, in contrast to his fellow thespian knights Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. Some of the most valuable papers for theatre lovers relate to the setting up of the National Theatre. There is a letter from Richard Burton declining the offer to succeed Olivier as director of the National, saying he did not have "the administrative ability . . . and apart from anything else . . . you were a hard man to follow". Burton adds: "Haven't had a drink for months and am as lean as Johnny Gielgud's knees." Some of the papers - which Olivier's widow, Joan Plowright, was anxious to keep in Britain - will be opened for study by library members next month. Staff are still sorting the crates, however, and it will take two years to complete a full catalogue of their contents.


British Library Aims to Buy Olivier Papers

The London Times 6/21/99

Picture below by Michael Powell - The London Times

 

 THE British Library is trying to raise money to keep Laurence Olivier's historic archive of manuscripts and papers in Britain. It needs £1.2 million to acquire it.

More than 250 boxes are overflowing with extraordinary material. Scholars have yet to study and catalogue a collection that offers an insight into one of the nation's most towering figures as well as into the history of British theatre this century. Most of it, including Lord Olivier's screenplay for Macbeth, which was never made, has not been published before.

Here are his first ideas for Henry V, letters to Marilyn Monroe discussing her expenses claim, and intimate correspondence with Vivien Leigh, to whom he was married from 1940 to 1961.

A mass of documents includes theatre designs, contracts and photographs. Here, too, are diaries with entries recording meetings with Noël Coward and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and letters signed "Larry" offering lead roles to actors such as Michael Redgrave.

Judging by the volume of material, he seems to have been a compulsive hoarder. Unless £1.2 million can be raised, the collection will go to auction where it will be broken up and sold abroad for far more than the price at which it is being offered to the nation.

The Olivier family, headed by his widow, Joan Plowright, is so keen for the archive to remain in Britain that they are not setting a deadline, but they need to be sure that the library is serious about its intention to raise the money. The sale is being negotiated by the antiquarian bookseller, Bernard Quaritch. Brian Lang, director of the British Library, said that it would be a national tragedy if the collection went overseas. Once dispersed, its value to scholars would be lost for ever: "This is a key archive for the history of theatre," he said. "I have no doubt that this archive is a piece of history that should be properly conserved and kept together." He added: "It would be absolutely appropriate that his papers are cared for here."

He said that the library intended to be an important home for theatrical archives. Sir John Gielgud is going to donate his collection to the library, boosting holdings that include the papers of George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Kenneth Tynan and Harold Pinter. The collection of the Lord Chamberlain, covering his function as theatrical censor, is already in the library: plays by Pinter were littered with comments from his "regiment of ex-colonels" who were employed to make comments on the artistic and literary merits of dramas, Dr Lang said, adding: "It's hilarious."

Olivier, who died at the age of 82 in 1989, was widely acknowledged as theatre's greatest interpreter of Shakespeare and as a genius of classical and modern theatre. He left behind almost 60 films, directing and producing some of them, and taking on more than 120 stage roles. Weeks after his divorce from Vivien Leigh, Olivier married his third wife, the actress Joan Plowright, whom he met in the play The Entertainer, and with whom he had a son, Richard, and two daughters, Tamsin and Julie-Kate. Despite the sensitivity of some of the most intimate letters, they want the entire archive to be saved for the nation.

Links:

The British Library

Bernard Quaritch

 

Back to top