The critics have acclaimed Roger Lewis as a great critic of great performances who can stand comparison with Kenneth Tynan or Pauline Kael.
Laurence Olivier was both an enchanter and a force of nature. In The Real Life of Laurence Olivier Roger Lewis goes beyond the magical illusions the actor created, to tell the truth about the man's sexuality, ambition, revenges, power, preoccupations and achievements.
His family were artists, statesmen and divines. How did his intense religious and choral education shape his personality? The story moves to Olivier's time as a drama student, as an apprentice at the Birmingham Rep, and as the pseudo-camp cohort of Noel Coward.
Roger Lewis analyses Olivier's disastrous first marriage to Jill Esmond, watches Olivier become the supreme classical actor first al the Old Vie and later at the National Theatre, and shows how Olivier's roles related to his psychological and emotional needs.
Most of all, Olivier's life and work become a love story - the tale of the relationship with Vivien Leigh, who was destroyed by the extent of her passion for him, as he himself was cast into a frenzy of guilt and disillusion - which he embodied in his portrayals of Archie Rice, Macbeth, Strindberg's Edgar, and James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night. Olivier and Leigh never got over each other; they grieved for a world of lost innocence and happiness - which had never, in fact, existed.
In following the ways Olivier's life was lived in the roles he created and the way in which he wove himself into the affections of other people, from his parents, wives and children, to colleagues, rivals and friends - Greta Gar bo, Marilyn Monroe, John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth Tynan - Roger Lewis has written a book which will take its place alongside The Life and Death of Peter Sellers as a classic biography and a provocative study of the performing arts.
Hardcover: 480 pages
Publisher:London, United Kingdom Century Publishing Co Ltd (1996)
Language: English
ISBN- 0712675507 .... New ...
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