Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier,  (; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, was one of a trio 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. Late in his career he had considerable success in television roles.

His family had no theatrical connections, but 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 Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star. In the 1940s, together with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, building it into a highly respected company. There his most celebrated roles included Shakespeare's Richard III and Sophocles's Oedipus. In the 1950s Olivier was an independent actor-manager, but his stage career was in the doldrums until he joined the avant-garde English Stage Company in 1957 to play the title role in The Entertainer, a part he later played on film. 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 (1965) and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1970).

Among Olivier's films are Wuthering Heights (1939), Rebecca (1940), and a trilogy of Shakespeare films as actor/director: Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955). His later films included Spartacus (1960), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Sleuth (1972), Marathon Man (1976), and The Boys from Brazil (1978). His television appearances included an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence (1960), "Long Day's Journey into Night" (1973), Love Among the Ruins (1975), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1976), Brideshead Revisited (1981) and King Lear (1983).

Olivier's honours included a knighthood (1947), a life peerage (1970), and the Order of Merit (1981). For his on-screen work he received two Academy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards, five Emmy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. The National Theatre's largest auditorium is named in his honour, and he is commemorated in the Laurence Olivier Awards, given annually by the Society of London Theatre. 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.

Life and career

1907–1924: Early life and education

Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of the three children of Agnes Louise (née Crookenden) and Reverend Gerard Kerr Olivier. He had two older siblings: Sybille and Gerard Dacres "Dickie". His great-great-grandfather was of French Huguenot descent, and Olivier came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. Gerard Olivier had begun a career as a schoolmaster, but in his thirties he discovered a strong religious vocation and was ordained as a priest of the Church of England. He belonged to the high church, ritualist wing of Anglicanism and was known as "Father Olivier". Some Anglican congregations did not like this style, and the only church posts he was offered were temporary, usually deputising for regular incumbents in their absence. This meant a nomadic existence, and for Laurence's first few years, he never lived in one place long enough to make friends.

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 devoted to his mother, but not to his father, whom he found a cold and remote parent, though he learned a great deal of the art of performing from him. As a young man Gerard Olivier had considered a stage career and was a dramatic and effective preacher. Olivier wrote that his father knew "when to drop the voice, when to bellow about the perils of hellfire, when to slip in a gag, when suddenly to wax sentimental ... The quick changes of mood and manner absorbed me, and I have never forgotten them."

In 1916, after attending a series of preparatory schools, Olivier passed the singing examination for admission to the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street, in central London. His elder brother was already a pupil and Olivier gradually settled in, though he felt himself to be something of an outsider. The church's style of worship was (and remains) Anglo-Catholic, with emphasis on ritual, vestments and incense. The theatricality of the services appealed to Olivier, and the vicar encouraged the students to develop a taste for secular as well as religious drama. In a school production of Julius Caesar in 1917, the ten-year-old Olivier's performance as Brutus impressed an audience that included Lady Tree, the young Sybil Thorndike, and Ellen Terry, who wrote in her diary, "The small boy who played Brutus is already a great actor." He later won praise in other schoolboy productions, as Maria in Twelfth Night (1918) and Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (1922).

From All Saints, Olivier went on to St Edward's School, Oxford, from 1921 to 1924. He made little mark until his final year, when he played Puck in the school's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream; his performance was a tour de force that won him popularity among his fellow pupils. In January 1924, his brother left England to work in India as a rubber planter. Olivier missed him greatly and asked his father how soon he could follow. He recalled in his memoirs that his father replied, "Don't be such a fool, you're not going to India, you're going on the stage."

1924–1929: Early acting career
In 1924 Gerard Olivier, a habitually frugal man, told his son that he must gain not only admission to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, but also a scholarship with a bursary to cover his tuition fees and living expenses. Olivier's sister had been a student there and was a favourite of Elsie Fogerty, the founder and principal of the school. Olivier later speculated that it was on the strength of this connection that Fogerty agreed to award him the bursary.

One of Olivier's contemporaries at the school was Peggy Ashcroft, who observed he was "rather uncouth in that his sleeves were too short and his hair stood on end but he was intensely lively and great fun". By his own admission he was not a very conscientious student, but Fogerty liked him and later said that he and Ashcroft stood out among her many pupils.

After leaving the Central School in 1925, Olivier worked for small theatrical companies; his first stage appearance was in a sketch called The Unfailing Instinct at the Brighton Hippodrome in August 1925. Later that year, he was taken on by Sybil Thorndike (the daughter of a friend of Olivier's father) and her husband Lewis Casson as a bit-part player, understudy, and assistant stage manager for their London company. Olivier modelled his performing style on that of Gerald du Maurier, of whom he said, "He seemed to mutter on stage but had such perfect technique. When I started I was so busy doing a du Maurier that no one ever heard a word I said. The Shakespearean actors one saw were terrible hams like Frank Benson." Olivier's concern with speaking naturally and avoiding what he called "singing" Shakespeare's verse was the cause of much frustration in his early career, as critics regularly decried his delivery.

In 1926, on Thorndike's recommendation, Olivier joined the Birmingham Repertory Company. His biographer Michael Billington describes the Birmingham company as "Olivier's university", where in his second year he was given the chance to play a wide range of important roles, including Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer, the title role in Uncle Vanya, and Parolles in All's Well That Ends Well. Billington adds that the engagement led to "a lifelong friendship with his fellow actor Ralph Richardson that was to have a decisive effect on the British theatre."

While playing the juvenile lead in Bird in Hand at the Royalty Theatre in June 1928, Olivier began a relationship with Jill Esmond, the daughter of the actors Henry V. Esmond and Eva Moore. Olivier later recounted that he thought "she would most certainly do excellent well for a wife ... I wasn't likely to do any better at my age and with my undistinguished track-record, so I promptly fell in love with her."

In 1928 Olivier created the role of Stanhope in R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, in which he scored a great success at its single Sunday night premiere. He was offered the part in the West End production the following year, but turned it down in favour of the more glamorous role of Beau Geste in a stage adaptation of P. C. Wren's 1929 novel of the same name. Journey's End became a long-running success; Beau Geste failed. The Manchester Guardian commented, "Mr. Laurence Olivier did his best as Beau, but he deserves and will get better parts. Mr. Olivier is going to make a big name for himself". For the rest of 1929 Olivier appeared in seven plays, all of which were short-lived. Billington ascribes this failure rate to poor choices by Olivier rather than mere bad luck.

1930–1935: Rising star
In 1930, with his impending marriage in mind, Olivier earned some extra money with small roles in two films. In April he travelled to Berlin to film the English-language version of The Temporary Widow, a crime comedy with Lilian Harvey, and in May he spent four nights working on another comedy, Too Many Crooks. During work on the latter film, for which he was paid £60, he met Laurence Evans, who became his personal manager. Olivier did not enjoy working in film, which he dismissed as "this anaemic little medium which could not stand great acting", but financially it was much more rewarding than his theatre work.

Olivier and Esmond married on 25 July 1930 at All Saints, Margaret Street, although within weeks both realised they had erred. Olivier later recorded that the marriage was "a pretty crass mistake. I insisted on getting married from a pathetic mixture of religious and animal promptings. ... She had admitted to me that she was in love elsewhere and could never love me as completely as I would wish". Olivier later recounted that following the wedding he did not keep a diary for ten years and never followed religious practices again, although he considered those facts to be "mere coincidence", unconnected to the nuptials.

In 1930 Noël Coward cast Olivier as Victor Prynne in his new play Private Lives, which opened at the new Phoenix Theatre in London in September. Coward and Gertrude Lawrence played the lead roles, Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne. Victor is a secondary character, along with Sybil Chase; the author called them "extra puppets, lightly wooden ninepins, only to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again". To make them credible spouses for Amanda and Elyot, Coward was determined that two outstandingly attractive performers should play the parts. Olivier played Victor in the West End and then on Broadway; Adrianne Allen was Sybil in London, but could not go to New York, where the part was taken by Esmond. In addition to giving the 23-year-old Olivier his first successful West End role, Coward became something of a mentor. In the late 1960s Olivier told Sheridan Morley:

In 1931 RKO Pictures offered Olivier a two-film contract at $1,000 a week; he discussed the possibility with Coward, who, irked, told Olivier "You've no artistic integrity, that's your trouble; this is how you cheapen yourself." He accepted and moved to Hollywood, despite some misgivings. His first film was the drama Friends and Lovers, in a supporting role, before RKO loaned him to Fox Studios for his first film lead, a British journalist in a Russia under martial law in The Yellow Ticket, alongside Elissa Landi and Lionel Barrymore. The cultural historian Jeffrey Richards describes Olivier's look as an attempt by Fox Studios to produce a likeness of Ronald Colman, and Colman's moustache, voice and manner are "perfectly reproduced". Olivier returned to RKO to complete his contract with the 1932 drama Westward Passage, which was a commercial failure. Olivier's initial foray into American films had not provided the breakthrough he hoped for; disillusioned with Hollywood, he returned to London, where he appeared in two British films, Perfect Understanding with Gloria Swanson and No Funny Business—in which Esmond also appeared. He was tempted back to Hollywood in 1933 to appear opposite Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, but was replaced after two weeks of filming because of a lack of chemistry between the two.

Olivier's stage roles in 1934 included Bothwell in Gordon Daviot's Queen of Scots, which was only a moderate success for him and for the play, but led to an important engagement for the same management (Bronson Albery) shortly afterwards. In the interim he had a great success playing a thinly disguised version of the American actor John Barrymore in George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's Theatre Royal. His success was vitiated by his breaking an ankle two months into the run, in one of the athletic, acrobatic stunts with which he liked to enliven his performances.

In 1935, under Albery's management, John Gielgud staged Romeo and Juliet at the New Theatre, co-starring with Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans and Olivier. Gielgud had seen Olivier in Queen of Scots, spotted his potential, and gave him a major step up in his career. For the first weeks of the run Gielgud played Mercutio and Olivier played Romeo, after which they exchanged roles. The production broke all box-office records for the play, running for 189 performances. Olivier was enraged at the notices after the first night, which praised the virility of his performance but fiercely criticised his speaking of Shakespeare's verse, contrasting it with his co-star's mastery of the poetry. The friendship between the two men was prickly, on Olivier's side, for the rest of his life.

1936–1938: Old Vic and Vivien Leigh
In May 1936 Olivier and Richardson jointly directed and starred in a new piece by J. B. Priestley, Bees on the Boatdeck. Both actors won excellent notices, but the play, an allegory of Britain's decay, did not attract the public and closed after four weeks. Later in the same year Olivier accepted an invitation to join the Old Vic company. The theatre, in an unfashionable location south of the Thames, had offered inexpensive tickets for opera and drama under its proprietor Lilian Baylis since 1912. Her drama company specialised in the plays of Shakespeare, and many leading actors had taken very large cuts in their pay to develop their Shakespearean techniques there. Gielgud had been in the company from 1929 to 1931 and Richardson from 1930 to 1932. Among the actors whom Olivier joined in late 1936 were Edith Evans, Ruth Gordon, Alec Guinness and Michael Redgrave. In January 1937 Olivier took the title role in an uncut version of Hamlet in which once again his delivery of the verse was unfavourably compared with that of Gielgud, who had played the role on the same stage seven years previously to enormous acclaim. The Observers Ivor Brown praised Olivier's "magnetism and muscularity" but missed "the kind of pathos so richly established by Mr Gielgud". The reviewer in The Times found the performance "full of vitality", but at times "too light ... the character slips from Mr Olivier's grasp".

After Hamlet, the company presented Twelfth Night in what the director, Tyrone Guthrie, summed up as "a baddish, immature production of mine, with Olivier outrageously amusing as Sir Toby and a very young Alec Guinness outrageous and more amusing as Sir Andrew". Henry V was the next play, presented in May to mark the Coronation of George VI. A pacifist, as he then was, Olivier was as reluctant to play the warrior king as Guthrie was to direct the piece, but the production was a success and Baylis had to extend the run from four to eight weeks.

Following Olivier's success in Shakespearean stage productions, he made his first foray into Shakespeare on film in 1936, as Orlando in As You Like It, directed by Paul Czinner, "a charming if lightweight production", according to Michael Brooke of the British Film Institute's (BFI's) Screenonline. The following year Olivier appeared alongside Vivien Leigh in the historical drama Fire Over England. He had first met Leigh briefly at the Savoy Grill and then again when she visited him during the run of Romeo and Juliet, probably early in 1936, and the two had begun an affair sometime that year. Of the relationship, Olivier later said that "I couldn't help myself with Vivien. No man could. I hated myself for cheating on Jill, but then I had cheated before, but this was something different. This wasn't just out of lust. This was love that I really didn't ask for but was drawn into." While his relationship with Leigh continued he conducted an affair with the actress Ann Todd, and possibly had a brief affair with the actor Henry Ainley, according to the biographer Michael Munn.

In June 1937 the Old Vic company took up an invitation to perform Hamlet in the courtyard of the castle at Elsinore, where Shakespeare located the play. Olivier secured the casting of Leigh to replace Cherry Cottrell as Ophelia. Because of torrential rain the performance had to be moved from the castle courtyard to the ballroom of a local hotel, but the tradition of playing Hamlet at Elsinore was established, and Olivier was followed by, among others, Gielgud (1939), Redgrave (1950), Richard Burton (1954), Christopher Plummer (1964), Derek Jacobi (1979), Kenneth Branagh (1988) and Jude Law (2009). Back in London, the company staged Macbeth, with Olivier in the title role. The stylised production by Michel Saint-Denis was not well liked, but Olivier had some good notices among the bad. On returning from Denmark, Olivier and Leigh told their respective spouses about the affair and that their marriages were over; Esmond moved out of the marital house and in with her mother. After Olivier and Leigh made a tour of Europe in mid-1937 they returned to separate film projects—A Yank at Oxford for her and The Divorce of Lady X for him—and moved into a property together in Iver, Buckinghamshire.

Olivier returned to the Old Vic for a second season in 1938. For Othello he played Iago, with Richardson in the title role. Guthrie wanted to experiment with the theory that Iago's villainy is driven by a suppressed love for Othello. Olivier was willing to co-operate, but Richardson was not; audiences and most critics failed to spot the supposed motivation of Olivier's Iago, and Richardson's Othello seemed underpowered. After that comparative failure, the company had a success with Coriolanus starring Olivier in the title role. The notices were laudatory, mentioning him alongside great predecessors such as Edmund Kean, William Macready and Henry Irving. The actor Robert Speaight described it as "Olivier's first incontestably great performance". This was Olivier's last appearance on a London stage for six years.

1938–1944: Hollywood and war years

In 1938 Olivier joined Richardson to film the spy thriller Q Planes, released the following year. Frank Nugent, the critic for The New York Times, thought Olivier was "not quite so good" as Richardson, but was "quite acceptable". In late 1938, lured by a salary of $50,000, the actor travelled to Hollywood to take the part of Heathcliff in the 1939 film Wuthering Heights, alongside Merle Oberon and David Niven. In less than a month Leigh had joined him, explaining that her trip was "partially because Larry's there and partially because I intend to get the part of Scarlett O'Hara"—the role in Gone with the Wind in which she was eventually cast. Olivier did not enjoy making Wuthering Heights, and his approach to film acting, combined with a dislike for Oberon, led to tensions on set. The director, William Wyler, was a hard taskmaster, and Olivier learned to remove what Billington described as "the carapace of theatricality" to which he was prone, replacing it with "a palpable reality". The resulting film was a commercial and critical success that earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor and created his screen reputation. Caroline Lejeune, writing for The Observer, considered that "Olivier's dark, moody face, abrupt style, and a certain fine arrogance towards the world in his playing are just right" in the role, while the reviewer for The Times wrote that Olivier "is a good embodiment of Heathcliff ... impressive enough on a more human plane, speaking his lines with real distinction, and always both romantic and alive."

After returning to London briefly in mid-1939, the couple returned to America, Leigh to film the final takes for Gone with the Wind, and Olivier to prepare for filming of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca—although the couple had hoped to appear in it together. Instead, Joan Fontaine was selected for the role of Mrs de Winter, as the producer David O. Selznick thought that not only was she more suitable for the role, but that it was best to keep Olivier and Leigh apart until their divorces came through. Olivier followed Rebecca with Pride and Prejudice, in the role of Mr. Darcy. To his disappointment Elizabeth Bennet was played by Greer Garson rather than Leigh. He received good reviews for both films and showed a more confident screen presence than he had in his early work. In January 1940 Olivier and Esmond were granted their divorce. In February, following another request from Leigh, her husband also applied for their marriage to be terminated.

On stage, Olivier and Leigh starred in Romeo and Juliet on Broadway. It was an extravagant production, but a commercial failure. In The New York Times Brooks Atkinson praised the scenery but not the acting: "Although Miss Leigh and Mr Olivier are handsome young people they hardly act their parts at all." The couple had invested almost all their savings in the project, and its failure was a grave financial blow. They were married in August 1940, at the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara.

The war in Europe had been under way for a year and was going badly for Britain. After his wedding Olivier wanted to help the war effort. He telephoned Duff Cooper, the Minister of Information under Winston Churchill, hoping to get a position in Cooper's department. Cooper advised him to remain where he was and speak to the film director Alexander Korda, who was based in the US at Churchill's behest, with connections to British Intelligence. Korda—with Churchill's support and involvement—directed That Hamilton Woman, with Olivier as Horatio Nelson and Leigh in the title role. Korda saw that the relationship between the couple was strained. Olivier was tiring of Leigh's suffocating adulation, and she was drinking to excess. The film, in which the threat of Napoleon paralleled that of Hitler, was seen by critics as "bad history but good British propaganda", according to the BFI.

Olivier's life was under threat from the Nazis and pro-German sympathisers. The studio owners were concerned enough that Samuel Goldwyn and Cecil B. DeMille both provided support and security to ensure his safety. On the completion of filming, Olivier and Leigh returned to Britain. He had spent the previous year learning to fly and had completed nearly 250 hours by the time he left America. He intended to join the Royal Air Force but instead made another propaganda film, 49th Parallel, narrated short pieces for the Ministry of Information, and joined the Fleet Air Arm because Richardson was already in the service. Richardson had gained a reputation for crashing aircraft, which Olivier rapidly eclipsed. Olivier and Leigh settled in a cottage just outside RNAS Worthy Down, where he was stationed with a training squadron; Noël Coward visited the couple and thought Olivier looked unhappy. Olivier spent much of his time taking part in broadcasts and making speeches to build morale, and in 1942 he was invited to make another propaganda film, The Demi-Paradise, in which he played a Soviet engineer who helps improve British-Russian relationships.

In 1943, at the behest of the Ministry of Information, Olivier began working on Henry V. Originally he had no intention of taking the directorial duties, but ended up directing and producing, in addition to taking the title role. He was assisted by an Italian internee, Filippo Del Giudice, who had been released to produce propaganda for the Allied cause. The decision was made to film the battle scenes in neutral Ireland, where it was easier to find the 650 extras. John Betjeman, the press attaché at the British embassy in Dublin, played a key liaison role with the Irish government in making suitable arrangements. The film was released in November 1944. Brooke, writing for the BFI, considers that it "came too late in the Second World War to be a call to arms as such, but formed a powerful reminder of what Britain was defending." The music for the film was written by William Walton, "a score that ranks with the best in film music", according to the music critic Michael Kennedy. Walton also provided the music for Olivier's next two Shakespearean adaptations, Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955). Henry V was warmly received by critics. The reviewer for The Manchester Guardian wrote that the film combined "new art hand-in-hand with old genius, and both superbly of one mind", in a film that worked "triumphantly". The critic for The Times considered that Olivier "plays Henry on a high, heroic note and never is there danger of a crack", in a film described as "a triumph of film craft". There were Oscar nominations for the film, including Best Picture and Best Actor, but it won none and Olivier was instead presented with a "Special Award". He was unimpressed, and later commented that "this was my first absolute fob-off, and I regarded it as such."

1944–1948: Co-directing the Old Vic
Throughout the war Tyrone Guthrie had striven to keep the Old Vic company going, even after German bombing in 1942 left the theatre a near-ruin. A small troupe toured the provinces, with Sybil Thorndike at its head. By 1944, with the tide of the war turning, Guthrie felt it time to re-establish the company in a London base and invited Richardson to head it. Richardson made it a condition of accepting that he should share the acting and management in a triumvirate. Initially he proposed Gielgud and Olivier as his colleagues, but the former declined, saying, "It would be a disaster, you would have to spend your whole time as referee between Larry and me." It was finally agreed that the third member would be the stage director John Burrell. The Old Vic governors approached the Royal Navy to secure the release of Richardson and Olivier; the Sea Lords consented, with, as Olivier put it, "a speediness and lack of reluctance which was positively hurtful."

The triumvirate secured the New Theatre for their first season and recruited a company. Thorndike was joined by, among others, Harcourt Williams, Joyce Redman and Margaret Leighton. It was agreed to open with a repertory of four plays: Peer Gynt, Arms and the Man, Richard III and Uncle Vanya. Olivier's roles were the Button Moulder, Sergius, Richard and Astrov; Richardson played Peer, Bluntschli, Richmond and Vanya. The first three productions met with acclaim from reviewers and audiences; Uncle Vanya had a mixed reception, although The Times thought Olivier's Astrov "a most distinguished portrait" and Richardson's Vanya "the perfect compound of absurdity and pathos". In Richard III, according to Billington, Olivier's triumph was absolute: "so much so that it became his most frequently imitated performance and one whose supremacy went unchallenged until Antony Sher played the role forty years later". In 1945 the company toured Germany, where they were seen by many thousands of Allied servicemen; they also appeared at the Comédie-Française theatre in Paris, the first foreign company to be given that honour. The critic Harold Hobson wrote that Richardson and Olivier quickly "made the Old Vic the most famous theatre in the Anglo-Saxon world."

The second season, in 1945, featured two double bills. The first consisted of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. Olivier played the warrior Hotspur in the first and the doddering Justice Shallow in the second. He received good notices, but by general consent the production belonged to Richardson as Falstaff. In the second double bill it was Olivier who dominated, in the title roles of Oedipus Rex and The Critic. In the two one-act plays his switch from searing tragedy and horror in the first half to farcical comedy in the second impressed most critics and audience members, though a minority felt that the transformation from Sophocles's bloodily blinded hero to Sheridan's vain and ludicrous Mr Puff "smacked of a quick-change turn in a music hall". After the London season the company played both the double bills and Uncle Vanya in a six-week run on Broadway.

The third, and final, London season under the triumvirate was in 1946–47. Olivier played King Lear, and Richardson took the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac. Olivier would have preferred the roles to be reversed, but Richardson did not wish to attempt Lear. Olivier's Lear received good but not outstanding reviews. In his scenes of decline and madness towards the end of the play some critics found him less moving than his finest predecessors in the role. The influential critic James Agate suggested that Olivier used his dazzling stage technique to disguise a lack of feeling, a charge that the actor strongly rejected, but which was often made throughout his later career. During the run of Cyrano, Richardson was knighted, to Olivier's undisguised envy. The younger man received the accolade six months later, by which time the days of the triumvirate were numbered. The high profile of the two star actors did not endear them to the new chairman of the Old Vic governors, Lord Esher. He had ambitions to be the first head of the National Theatre and had no intention of letting actors run it. He was encouraged by Guthrie, who, having instigated the appointment of Richardson and Olivier, had come to resent their knighthoods and international fame.

In January 1947 Olivier began working on his second film as a director, Hamlet (1948), in which he also took the lead role. The original play was heavily cut to focus on the relationships, rather than the political intrigue. The film became a critical and commercial success in Britain and abroad, although Lejeune, in The Observer, considered it "less effective than [Olivier's] stage work. ... He speaks the lines nobly, and with the caress of one who loves them, but he nullifies his own thesis by never, for a moment, leaving the impression of a man who cannot make up his own mind; here, you feel rather, is an actor-producer-director who, in every circumstance, knows exactly what he wants, and gets it". Campbell Dixon, the critic for The Daily Telegraph thought the film "brilliant ... one of the masterpieces of the stage has been made into one of the greatest of films." Hamlet became the first non-American film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Olivier won the Award for Best Actor.

In 1948 Olivier led the Old Vic company on a six-month tour of Australia and New Zealand. He played Richard III, Sir Peter Teazle in Sheridan's The School for Scandal and Antrobus in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, appearing alongside Leigh in the latter two plays. While Olivier was on the Australian tour and Richardson was in Hollywood, Esher terminated the contracts of the three directors, who were said to have "resigned". Melvyn Bragg in a 1984 study of Olivier, and John Miller in the authorised biography of Richardson, both comment that Esher's action put back the establishment of a National Theatre for at least a decade. Looking back in 1971, Bernard Levin wrote that the Old Vic company of 1944 to 1948 "was probably the most illustrious that has ever been assembled in this country". The Times said that the triumvirate's years were the greatest in the Old Vic's history; as The Guardian put it, "the governors summarily sacked them in the interests of a more mediocre company spirit".

1948–1951: Post-war work

By the end of the Australian tour, both Leigh and Olivier were exhausted and ill, and he told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he would comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia, a reference to Leigh's affair with the Australian actor Peter Finch, whom the couple met during the tour. Shortly afterwards Finch moved to London, where Olivier auditioned him and put him under a long-term contract with Laurence Olivier Productions. Finch and Leigh's affair continued on and off for several years.

Although it was common knowledge that the Old Vic triumvirate had been dismissed, they refused to be drawn on the matter in public, and Olivier even arranged to play a final London season with the company in 1949, as Richard III, Sir Peter Teazle, and Chorus in his own production of Anouilh's Antigone with Leigh in the title role. After that, he was free to embark on a new career as an actor-manager. In partnership with Binkie Beaumont he staged the English premiere of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, with Leigh in the central role of Blanche DuBois. The play was condemned by most critics, but the production was a considerable commercial success, and led to Leigh's casting as Blanche in the 1951 film version. Gielgud, who was a devoted friend of Leigh's, doubted whether Olivier was wise to let her play the demanding role of the mentally unstable heroine: "[Blanche] was so very like her, in a way. It must have been a most dreadful strain to do it night after night. She would be shaking and white and quite distraught at the end of it."

The production company set up by Olivier took a lease on the St James's Theatre. In January 1950 he produced, directed and starred in Christopher Fry's verse play Venus Observed. The production was popular, despite poor reviews, but the expensive production did little to help the finances of Laurence Olivier Productions. After a series of box-office failures, the company balanced its books in 1951 with productions of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra which the Oliviers played in London and then took to Broadway. Olivier was thought by some critics to be under par in both his roles, and some suspected him of playing deliberately below his usual strength so that Leigh might appear his equal. Olivier dismissed the suggestion, regarding it as an insult to his integrity as an actor. In the view of the critic and biographer W. A. Darlington, he was simply miscast both as Caesar and Antony, finding the former boring and the latter weak. Darlington comments, "Olivier, in his middle forties when he should have been displaying his powers at their very peak, seemed to have lost interest in his own acting". Over the next four years Olivier spent much of his time working as a producer, presenting plays rather than directing or acting in them. His presentations at the St James's included seasons by Ruggero Ruggeri's company giving two Pirandello plays in Italian, followed by a visit from the Comédie-Française playing works by Molière, Racine, Marivaux and Musset in French. Darlington considers a 1951 production of Othello starring Orson Welles as the pick of Olivier's productions at the theatre.

1951–1954: Independent work
While Leigh made Streetcar in 1951, Olivier joined her in Hollywood to film Carrie, based on the controversial novel Sister Carrie; although the film was plagued by troubles, Olivier received warm reviews and a BAFTA nomination. Olivier began to notice a change in Leigh's behaviour, and he later recounted that "I would find Vivien sitting on the corner of the bed, wringing her hands and sobbing, in a state of grave distress; I would naturally try desperately to give her some comfort, but for some time she would be inconsolable." After a holiday with Coward in Jamaica, she seemed to have recovered, but Olivier later recorded, "I am sure that ... [the doctors] must have taken some pains to tell me what was wrong with my wife; that her disease was called manic depression and what that meant—a possibly permanent cyclical to-and-fro between the depths of depression and wild, uncontrollable mania. He also recounted the years of problems he had experienced because of Leigh's illness, writing, "throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness—an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."

In January 1953 Leigh travelled to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to film Elephant Walk with Peter Finch. Shortly after filming started she suffered a breakdown, and returned to Britain where, between periods of incoherence, she told Olivier that she was in love with Finch, and had been having an affair with him; she gradually recovered over a period of several months. As a result of the breakdown, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad", and in his diary, Coward expressed the view that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."

For the Coronation season of 1953, Olivier and Leigh starred in the West End in Terence Rattigan's Ruritanian comedy, The Sleeping Prince. It ran for eight months but was widely regarded as a minor contribution to the season, in which other productions included Gielgud in Venice Preserv'd, Coward in The Apple Cart and Ashcroft and Redgrave in Antony and Cleopatra.

Olivier directed his third Shakespeare film in September 1954, Richard III (1955), which he co-produced with Korda. The presence of four theatrical knights in the one film—Olivier was joined by Cedric Hardwicke, Gielgud and Richardson—led an American reviewer to dub it "An-All-Sir-Cast". The critic for The Manchester Guardian described the film as a "bold and successful achievement", but it was not a box-office success, which accounted for Olivier's subsequent failure to raise the funds for a planned film of Macbeth. He won a BAFTA award for the role and was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award, which Yul Brynner won.

1955–1956: Last productions with Leigh
In 1955 Olivier and Leigh were invited to play leading roles in three plays at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford. They began with Twelfth Night, directed by Gielgud, with Olivier as Malvolio and Leigh as Viola. Rehearsals were difficult, with Olivier determined to play his conception of the role despite the director's view that it was vulgar. Gielgud later commented:

The next production was Macbeth. Reviewers were lukewarm about the direction by Glen Byam Shaw and the designs by Roger Furse, but Olivier's performance in the title role attracted superlatives. To J. C. Trewin, Olivier's was "the finest Macbeth of our day"; to Darlington it was "the best Macbeth of our time". Leigh's Lady Macbeth received mixed but generally polite notices, although to the end of his life Olivier believed it to have been the best Lady Macbeth he ever saw.

In their third production of the 1955 Stratford season, Olivier played the title role in Titus Andronicus, with Leigh as Lavinia. Her notices in the part were damning, but the production by Peter Brook and Olivier's performance as Titus received the greatest ovation in Stratford history from the first-night audience, and the critics hailed the production as a landmark in post-war British theatre. Olivier and Brook revived the production for a continental tour in June 1957; its final performance, which closed the old Stoll Theatre in London, was the last time Leigh and Olivier acted together.

Leigh became pregnant in 1956 and withdrew from the production of Coward's comedy South Sea Bubble. The day after her final performance in the play she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. In the same year Olivier directed and co-starred with Marilyn Monroe in a film version of The Sleeping Prince, retitled The Prince and the Showgirl. Although the filming was challenging because of Monroe's behaviour, the film was appreciated by the critics.

1957–1963: Royal Court and Chichester
During the production of The Prince and the Showgirl, Olivier, Monroe and her husband, the American playwright Arthur Miller, went to see the English Stage Company's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court. Olivier had seen the play earlier in the run and disliked it, but Miller was convinced that Osborne had talent, and Olivier reconsidered. He was ready for a change of direction; in 1981 he wrote:

Osborne was already at work on a new play, The Entertainer, an allegory of Britain's post-colonial decline, centred on a seedy variety comedian, Archie Rice. Having read the first act—all that was completed by then—Olivier asked to be cast in the part. He had for years maintained that he might easily have been a third-rate comedian called "Larry Oliver", and would sometimes play the character at parties. Behind Archie's brazen façade there is a deep desolation, and Olivier caught both aspects, switching, in the words of the biographer Anthony Holden, "from a gleefully tacky comic routine to moments of the most wrenching pathos". Tony Richardson's production for the English Stage Company transferred from the Royal Court to the Palace Theatre in September 1957; after that it toured and returned to the Palace. The role of Archie's daughter Jean was taken by three actresses during the various runs. The second of them was Joan Plowright, with whom Olivier began a relationship that endured for the rest of his life. Olivier said that playing Archie "made me feel like a modern actor again". In finding an avant-garde play that suited him, he was, as Osborne remarked, far ahead of Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who did not successfully follow his lead for more than a decade. Their first substantial successes in works by any of Osborne's generation were Alan Bennett's Forty Years On (Gielgud in 1968) and David Storey's Home (Richardson and Gielgud in 1970).

Olivier received another BAFTA nomination for his supporting role in 1959's The Devil's Disciple. The same year, after a gap of two decades, Olivier returned to the role of Coriolanus, in a Stratford production directed by the 28-year-old Peter Hall. Olivier's performance received strong praise from the critics for its fierce athleticism combined with an emotional vulnerability. In 1960 he made his second appearance for the Royal Court company in Ionesco's absurdist play Rhinoceros. The production was chiefly remarkable for the star's quarrels with the director, Orson Welles, who according to the biographer Francis Beckett suffered the "appalling treatment" that Olivier had inflicted on Gielgud at Stratford five years earlier. Olivier again ignored his director and undermined his authority. In 1960 and 1961 Olivier appeared in Anouilh's Becket on Broadway, first in the title role, with Anthony Quinn as the king, and later exchanging roles with his co-star.

Two films featuring Olivier were released in 1960. The first—filmed in 1959—was Spartacus, in which he portrayed the Roman general, Marcus Licinius Crassus. His second was The Entertainer, shot while he was appearing in Coriolanus; the film was well received by the critics, but not as warmly as the stage show had been. The reviewer for The Guardian thought the performances were good, and wrote that Olivier "on the screen as on the stage, achieves the tour de force of bringing Archie Rice ... to life". For his performance, Olivier was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He also made an adaptation of The Moon and Sixpence in 1960, winning an Emmy Award.

The Oliviers' marriage was disintegrating during the late 1950s. While directing Charlton Heston in the 1960 play The Tumbler, Olivier divulged that "Vivien is several thousand miles away, trembling on the edge of a cliff, even when she's sitting quietly in her own drawing room", at a time when she was threatening suicide. In May 1960 divorce proceedings started; Leigh reported the fact to the press and informed reporters of Olivier's relationship with Plowright. The decree nisi was issued in December 1960, which enabled him to marry Plowright in March 1961. A son, Richard, was born in December 1961; two daughters followed, Tamsin Agnes Margaret—born in January 1963—and actress Julie-Kate, born in July 1966.

In 1961 Olivier accepted the directorship of a new theatrical venture, the Chichester Festival. For the opening season in 1962 he directed two neglected 17th-century English plays, John Fletcher's 1638 comedy The Chances and John Ford's 1633 tragedy The Broken Heart, followed by Uncle Vanya. The company he recruited was forty strong and included Thorndike, Casson, Redgrave, Athene Seyler, John Neville and Plowright. The first two plays were politely received; the Chekhov production attracted rapturous notices. The Times commented, "It is doubtful if the Moscow Arts Theatre itself could improve on this production." The second Chichester season the following year consisted of a revival of Uncle Vanya and two new productions—Shaw's Saint Joan and John Arden's The Workhouse Donkey. In 1963 Olivier received another BAFTA nomination for his leading role as a schoolteacher accused of sexually molesting a student in the film Term of Trial.

National Theatre

1963–1968
At around the time the Chichester Festival opened, plans for the creation of the National Theatre were coming to fruition. The British government agreed to release funds for a new building on the South Bank of the Thames. Lord Chandos was appointed chairman of the National Theatre Board in 1962, and in August Olivier accepted its invitation to be the company's first director. As his assistants, he recruited the directors John Dexter and William Gaskill, with Kenneth Tynan as literary adviser or "dramaturge". Pending the construction of the new theatre, the company was based at the Old Vic. With the agreement of both organisations, Olivier remained in overall charge of the Chichester Festival during the first three seasons of the National; he used the festivals of 1964 and 1965 to give preliminary runs to plays he hoped to stage at the Old Vic.

The opening production of the National Theatre was Hamlet in October 1963, starring Peter O'Toole and directed by Olivier. O'Toole was a guest star, one of occasional exceptions to Olivier's policy of casting productions from a regular company. Among those who made a mark during Olivier's directorship were Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi and Anthony Hopkins. It was widely remarked that Olivier seemed reluctant to recruit his peers to perform with his company. Evans, Gielgud and Paul Scofield guested only briefly, and Ashcroft and Richardson never appeared at the National during Olivier's time. Robert Stephens, a member of the company, observed, "Olivier's one great fault was a paranoid jealousy of anyone who he thought was a rival".

In his decade in charge of the National, Olivier acted in thirteen plays and directed eight. Several of the roles he played were minor characters, including a crazed butler in Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear and a pompous solicitor in Maugham's Home and Beauty; the vulgar soldier Captain Brazen in Farquhar's 1706 comedy The Recruiting Officer was a larger role but not the leading one.

Apart from his Astrov in the Uncle Vanya, familiar from Chichester, his first leading role for the National was Othello, directed by Dexter in 1964. The production was a box-office success and was revived regularly over the next five seasons. His performance divided opinion. Most of the reviewers and theatrical colleagues praised it highly; Franco Zeffirelli called it "an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the past three centuries." Dissenting voices included The Sunday Telegraph, which called it "the kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable ... near the frontiers of self-parody"; the director Jonathan Miller thought it "a condescending view of an Afro Caribbean person". The burden of playing this demanding part at the same time as managing the new company and planning for the move to the new theatre took its toll on Olivier. To add to his load, he felt obliged to take over as Solness in The Master Builder when the ailing Redgrave withdrew from the role in November 1964. For the first time Olivier began to suffer from stage fright, which plagued him for several years. The National Theatre production of Othello was released as a film in 1965, which earned four Academy Award nominations, including another for Best Actor for Olivier.

During the following year Olivier concentrated on management, directing one production (The Crucible), taking the comic role of the foppish Tattle in Congreve's Love for Love, and making one film, Bunny Lake is Missing, in which he and Coward were on the same bill for the first time since Private Lives. In 1966, his one play as director was Juno and the Paycock. The Times commented that the production "restores one's faith in the work as a masterpiece". In the same year Olivier portrayed the Mahdi, opposite Heston as General Gordon, in the film Khartoum.

In 1967 Olivier was caught in the middle of a confrontation between Chandos and Tynan over the latter's proposal to stage Rolf Hochhuth's Soldiers. As the play speculatively depicted Churchill as complicit in the assassination of the Polish prime minister Władysław Sikorski, Chandos regarded it as indefensible. At his urging the board unanimously vetoed the production. Tynan considered resigning over this interference with the management's artistic freedom, but Olivier himself stayed firmly in place, and Tynan also remained. At about this time Olivier began a long struggle against a succession of illnesses. He was treated for prostate cancer and, during rehearsals for his production of Chekhov's Three Sisters he was hospitalised with pneumonia. He recovered enough to take the heavy role of Edgar in Strindberg's The Dance of Death, the finest of all his performances other than in Shakespeare, in Gielgud's view.

1968–1974
Olivier had intended to step down from the directorship of the National Theatre at the end of his first five-year contract, having, he hoped, led the company into its new building. By 1968 because of bureaucratic delays construction work had not even begun, and he agreed to serve for a second five-year term. His next major role, and his last appearance in a Shakespeare play, was as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, his first appearance in the work. He had intended Guinness or Scofield to play Shylock, but stepped in when neither was available. The production by Jonathan Miller, and Olivier's performance, attracted a wide range of responses. Two different critics reviewed it for The Guardian: one wrote "this is not a role which stretches him, or for which he will be particularly remembered"; the other commented that the performance "ranks as one of his greatest achievements, involving his whole range".

In 1969 Olivier appeared in two war films, portraying military leaders. He played Field Marshal French in the First World War film Oh! What a Lovely War, for which he won another BAFTA award, followed by Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding in Battle of Britain. In June 1970 he became the first actor to be created a peer for services to the theatre. Although he initially declined the honour, Harold Wilson, the incumbent prime minister, wrote to him, then invited him and Plowright to dinner, and persuaded him to accept.

After this Olivier played three more stage roles: James Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night (1971–72), Antonio in Eduardo de Filippo's Saturday, Sunday, Monday and John Tagg in Trevor Griffiths's The Party (both 1973–74). Among the roles he hoped to play, but could not because of ill-health, was Nathan Detroit in the musical Guys and Dolls. In 1972 he took leave of absence from the National to star opposite Michael Caine in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's film of Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth, which The Illustrated London News considered to be "Olivier at his twinkling, eye-rolling best"; both he and Caine were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor, losing to Marlon Brando in The Godfather.

The last two stage plays Olivier directed were Jean Giradoux's Amphitryon (1971) and Priestley's Eden End (1974). By the time of Eden End, he was no longer director of the National Theatre; Peter Hall took over on 1 November 1973. The succession was tactlessly handled by the board, and Olivier felt that he had been eased out—although he had declared his intention to go—and that he had not been properly consulted about the choice of successor. The largest of the three theatres within the National's new building was named in his honour, but his only appearance on the stage of the Olivier Theatre was at its official opening by the Queen in October 1976, when he made a speech of welcome, which Hall privately described as the most successful part of the evening.

1975–1989: Later years and death
Olivier spent the last 15 years of his life securing his finances and dealing with deteriorating health, which included thrombosis and dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder. Professionally, and to provide financial security, he made a series of advertisements for Polaroid cameras in 1972, although he stipulated that they must never be shown in Britain; he also took a number of cameo film roles, which were in "often undistinguished films", according to Billington. Olivier's move from leading parts to supporting and cameo roles came about because his poor health meant he could not get the necessary long insurance for larger parts, with only short engagements in films available.

Olivier's dermatomyositis meant he spent the last three months of 1974 in hospital, and he spent early 1975 slowly recovering and regaining his strength. When strong enough, he was contacted by the director John Schlesinger, who offered him the role of a Nazi torturer in the 1976 film Marathon Man. Olivier shaved his pate and wore oversized glasses to enlarge the look of his eyes, in a role that the critic David Robinson, writing for The Times, thought was "strongly played", adding that Olivier was "always at his best in roles that call for him to be seedy or nasty or both". Olivier was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role, and won the Golden Globe of the same category.

In the mid-1970s Olivier became increasingly involved in television work, a medium of which he was initially dismissive. In 1973 he provided the narration for a 26-episode documentary, The World at War, which chronicled the events of the Second World War, and won a second Emmy Award for Long Day's Journey into Night (1973). In 1975 he won another Emmy for Love Among the Ruins. The following year he appeared in adaptations of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Harold Pinter's The Collection. Olivier portrayed the Pharisee Nicodemus in Franco Zeffirelli's 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth.  In 1978 he appeared in the film The Boys from Brazil, playing the role of Ezra Lieberman, an ageing Nazi hunter; he received his eleventh Academy Award nomination. Although he did not win the Oscar, he was presented with an Honorary Award for his lifetime achievement.

Olivier continued working in film into the 1980s, with roles in The Jazz Singer (1980), Inchon (1981), The Bounty (1984) and Wild Geese II (1985). He continued to work in television; in 1981 he appeared as Lord Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, winning another Emmy, and the following year he received his tenth and last BAFTA nomination in the television adaptation of John Mortimer's stage play A Voyage Round My Father. In 1983 he played his last Shakespearean role as Lear in King Lear, for Granada Television, earning his fifth Emmy. He thought the role of Lear much less demanding than other tragic Shakespearean heroes: "No, Lear is easy. He's like all of us, really: he's just a stupid old fart." When the production was first shown on American television, the critic Steve Vineberg wrote:

The same year he also appeared in a cameo alongside Gielgud and Richardson in Wagner, with Burton in the title role; his final screen appearance was as an elderly wheelchair-using soldier in Derek Jarman's 1989 film War Requiem.

After being ill for the last 22 years of his life, Olivier died of renal failure on 11 July 1989 aged 82 at his home in the village of Ashurst, near Steyning, West Sussex. His cremation was held three days later; a memorial service was held in Westminster Abbey in October that year, where his ashes were later buried in Poets' Corner.

Honours

Olivier was appointed Knight Bachelor in the 1947 Birthday Honours for services to the stage and to films. A life peerage as Baron Olivier, of Brighton in the County of Sussex, followed in the 1970 Birthday Honours for services to the theatre. Olivier was later appointed to the Order of Merit in 1981. He also received honours from foreign governments. In 1949 he was made Commander of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog; France appointed him , Legion of Honour, in 1953; the Italian government created him , Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, in 1953; and in 1971 he was granted the Order of Yugoslav Flag with Golden Wreath.

Awards and memorials
From academic and other institutions, Olivier received honorary doctorates from Tufts University in Massachusetts (1946), Oxford (1957) and Edinburgh (1964). He was also awarded the Danish Sonning Prize in 1966, the Gold Medallion of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in 1968; and the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts in 1976.

For his work in films, Olivier received four Academy Awards: an honorary award for Henry V (1947), a Best Actor award and one as producer for Hamlet (1948), and a second honorary award in 1979 to recognise his lifetime of contribution to the art of film. He was nominated for nine other acting Oscars and one each for production and direction. He also won two British Academy Film Awards out of ten nominations, five Emmy Awards out of nine nominations, and three Golden Globe Awards out of six nominations. He was nominated once for a Tony Award (for best actor, as Archie Rice) but did not win.

In February 1960, for his contribution to the film industry, Olivier was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, with a star at 6319 Hollywood Boulevard; he is included in the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 1977 Olivier was awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship.

In addition to the naming of the National Theatre's largest auditorium in Olivier's honour, he is commemorated in the Laurence Olivier Awards, bestowed annually since 1984 by the Society of London Theatre. In 1991 Gielgud unveiled a memorial stone commemorating Olivier in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. In 2007, the centenary of Olivier's birth, a life-sized statue of him was unveiled on the South Bank, outside the National Theatre; the same year the BFI held a retrospective season of his film work.

Technique and reputation
Olivier's acting technique was minutely crafted, and he was known for changing his appearance considerably from role to role. By his own admission, he was addicted to extravagant make-up, and unlike Richardson and Gielgud, he excelled at different voices and accents. His own description of his technique was "working from the outside in"; he said, "I can never act as myself, I have to have a pillow up my jumper, a false nose or a moustache or wig... I cannot come on looking like me and be someone else." Rattigan described how at rehearsals Olivier "built his performance slowly and with immense application from a mass of tiny details". This attention to detail had its critics: Agate remarked, "When I look at a watch it is to see the time and not to admire the mechanism. I want an actor to tell me Lear's time of day and Olivier doesn't. He bids me watch the wheels go round."

Tynan remarked to Olivier, "you aren't really a contemplative or philosophical actor"; Olivier was known for the strenuous physicality of his performances in some roles. He told Tynan this was because he was influenced as a young man by Douglas Fairbanks, Ramon Navarro and John Barrymore in films, and Barrymore on stage as Hamlet: "tremendously athletic. I admired that greatly, all of us did. ... One thought of oneself, idiotically, skinny as I was, as a sort of Tarzan." According to Morley, Gielgud was widely considered "the best actor in the world from the neck up and Olivier from the neck down." Olivier described the contrast thus: "I've always thought that we were the reverses of the same coin... the top half John, all spirituality, all beauty, all abstract things; and myself as all earth, blood, humanity."

Olivier, a classically trained actor, was known to have been distrustful of method acting. In his memoir, On Acting, he exhorts actors to "have Stanislavski with you in your study or in your limousine... but don't bring him onto the film set." During production of The Prince and the Showgirl, he quarrelled with Marilyn Monroe, who was trained under Lee Strasberg's method, over her acting process. Similarly, an anecdote casts him as offering Dustin Hoffman, enduring physical travails while playing in Marathon Man, a curt suggestion: "why don't you just try acting?" Hoffman disputes the details of this account, which he claims was distorted by a journalist: he had been up all night at the Studio 54 nightclub for personal rather than professional reasons and Olivier, who understood this, was joking.

Together with Richardson and Gielgud, Olivier was internationally recognised as one of the "great trinity of theatrical knights" who dominated the British stage during the middle and later decades of the 20th century. In an obituary tribute in The Times, Bernard Levin wrote, "What we have lost with Laurence Olivier is glory. He reflected it in his greatest roles; indeed he walked clad in it—you could practically see it glowing around him like a nimbus.... no one will ever play the roles he played as he played them; no one will replace the splendour that he gave his native land with his genius." Billington commented:

After Olivier's death, Gielgud reflected, "He followed in the theatrical tradition of Kean and Irving. He respected tradition in the theatre, but he also took great delight in breaking tradition, which is what made him so unique. He was gifted, brilliant, and one of the great controversial figures of our time in theatre, which is a virtue and not a vice at all."

Olivier said in 1963 that he believed he was born to be an actor, but his colleague Peter Ustinov disagreed; he commented that although Olivier's great contemporaries were clearly predestined for the stage, "Larry could have been a notable ambassador, a considerable minister, a redoubtable cleric. At his worst, he would have acted the parts more ably than they are usually lived." The director David Ayliff agreed that acting did not come instinctively to Olivier as it did to his great rivals. He observed, "Ralph was a natural actor, he couldn't stop being a perfect actor; Olivier did it through sheer hard work and determination." The American actor William Redfield had a similar view:

In comparing Olivier and the other leading actors of his generation, Ustinov wrote, "It is of course vain to talk of who is and who is not the greatest actor. There is simply no such thing as a greatest actor, or painter or composer". Nonetheless, some colleagues, particularly film actors such as Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, came to regard Olivier as the finest of his peers. Peter Hall, though acknowledging Olivier as the head of the theatrical profession, thought Richardson the greater actor. Olivier's claim to theatrical greatness lay not only in his acting, but as, in Hall's words, "the supreme man of the theatre of our time", pioneering Britain's National Theatre. As Bragg identified, "no one doubts that the National is perhaps his most enduring monument".

Stage roles and filmography

See also
Laurence Olivier Awards
List of British Academy Award nominees and winners
List of actors with Academy Award nominations
List of actors with two or more Academy Award nominations in acting categories
List of actors with two or more Academy Awards in acting categories

Notes and references

Notes

References

Sources

External links

 Laurence Olivier: 10 essential films at the British Film Institute
 Laurence Olivier Archive at the British Library

1907 births
1989 deaths
Laurence
20th-century English male actors
20th-century theatre managers
Academy Honorary Award recipients
Actor-managers
Actors awarded British peerages
Actors awarded knighthoods
Alumni of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama
Artistic directors
BAFTA fellows
Best Actor Academy Award winners
Best British Actor BAFTA Award winners
Best Drama Actor Golden Globe (film) winners
Best Supporting Actor BAFTA Award winners
Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe (film) winners
Burials at Westminster Abbey
Cecil B. DeMille Award Golden Globe winners
David di Donatello winners
Directors of Golden Lion winners
Deaths from kidney failure
English Anglo-Catholics
English male film actors
English film directors
English male Shakespearean actors
English male stage actors
English male television actors
English theatre directors
English people of French descent
Fleet Air Arm personnel of World War II
Knights Bachelor
Life peers
Male actors from Surrey
Members of the Order of Merit
Officers of the Legion of Honour
Outstanding Performance by a Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie Primetime Emmy Award winners
Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or Movie Primetime Emmy Award winners
People educated at St Edward's School, Oxford
People from Dorking
Royal Navy officers of World War II
Life peers created by Elizabeth II

Laurence Olivier


Bernard II (, ; died 1100) was the Count of Besalú and Ripoll in Catalonia, the brother, co-ruler (from 1052), and successor of William II, who was assassinated in 1066. The second son of William I of Besalú and his wife, Adelaide, Bernard married his first cousin Ermengarda, daughter of Ponç I of Empúries and Adelaide, sister of William I.

He was suspected of involvement in the murder of his brother. He was also a strong proponent of the Gregorian reforms. Described as "piadós i versatil" (pious and versatile), he was the opposite of his brother, "iracund i violent de caràcter" (of an irascible and violent character). He almost certainly took the cross and joined the First Crusade.

Coinage
During his co-reign with his brother, denarii and oboli were minted by the church bearing an effigy of Saint Raphael on the obverse, with the initials S-R, and an effigy of Saint Prim or perhaps Jesus Christ on the reverse. In 1075 Bernard recovered the right to mint coinage, which had been granted to the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary by his father. The coins he minted, weighing between 0.5 and 0.6 grams, were divided by a cross on the obverse, with the words SANC-TA CR-VX (sancta crux means holy cross) on the horizontal and vertical bars respectively, and with the letters BR-NR-DS-CO (Bernardus comes, meaning count Bernard) in the spaces remaining. The reverse bore the word BISIL-DVNO (Bisilduno, of Besalú). Bernard did grant to the church a tenth of the money minted in Besalú in perpetuity, whether of gold or of silver.

Ecclesiastical politics
We beseech most carefully your lordships on behalf of the city or rather the church of Tarragona and we order you to make a vigorous effort to restore it in every possible way for the remission of sins. For you know what a great defence it would be for Christ's people and what a terrible blow it would be to the Saracens if, by the goodness of God, the position of that famous city were restored. If the knights of other provinces have decided with one mind to go to the aid of the Asian Church and to liberate their brothers from the tyranny of the Saracens, so ought you with one mind and with our encouragement to work with greater endurance to help a church so near you resist the invasions of the Saracens. No one must doubt that if he dies on this expedition for the love of God and his brothers his sins will surely be forgiven and he will gain a share of eternal life through the most compassionate mercy of our God. So if any of you has made up his mind to go to Asia, it is here instead that he should try to fulfill his vow, because it is no virtue to rescue Christians from the Saracens in one place, only to expose them to the tyranny and oppression of the Saracens in another. May almighty God arouse in your hearts a love of your brothers and reward your bravery with victory over the enemy.—Letter of Pope Urban II to Bernard and the other Catalan counts preparing to go on the First Crusade

He presided over synods held at Girona in 1068, 1078, and 1097, and was forced to act against his simoniacal relative, Wifred, Archbishop of Narbonne. Around 1068 Bernard, Wifred, and the bishops Berengar of Girona and William of Vic had to expel by force the simoniacal abbot of Ripoll, Miro. In 1070 he subjected the monasteries of Santa Maria de Ripoll, Sant Pere de Besalú, and Sant Martí de Les to that of Saint-Victor de Marseille. It was probably at the instigation of his relative Hunald, abbot of Moissac, that Bernard ceded Ripoll to the jurisdiction of the abbot of Saint-Victor, Bernard de Rodez, at a meeting of the two on 27 December 1070. On 2 February 1071 a Marseillaise abbot, Bernard, is already recorded acting in charge of Ripoll. Bernard had granted the monastery of Cuberes to the Cluniac foundation of Moissac by 1073. In 1078 he joined his three monasteries of Sant Pere de Camprodon, Sant Pau del Fenollet (Valloles), and Santa Maria d'Arles de Tec to Moissac.

In December 1077 in a synod was held in Besalú by the papal legate Amatus, Bishop of Oloron. Bernard, acting upon the advice of the legate, deposed and replaced the simoniacal abbots of his realm. He then issued a charter wherein he listed the payments (census) due the Holy See from seven religious houses in his lands, he declared an irregularly or simoniacally elected abbot deposed by papal authority, and he promised that he and his successors would incur a personal census of 100 gold mancuses annually in order that he might be considered a "special knight of Saint Peter" (pecularis miles sancti Petri). Despite the promises, there is no actual evidence of payment during the pontificate of Gregory VII. It is sometimes said that Bernard—following the example of Sancho Ramírez, who had done the same with the Kingdom of Aragon in 1068—surrendered his county to the Papacy and received it back as a fief. The abbot of Saint-Victor de Marseille and papal legate to the council, Ricard de Milhau, and the monks of Ripoll pressed Bernard to join the abbey of Sant Joan de les Abadesses to Saint-Victor, perhaps by promising to restore Benedictine rule there. The cession was finalised on 4 January 1083. There is no contemporary record of this, however. Rather the legend dates from the 1115 house chronicle of Sant Joan. Bernard held his county directly from God.

By a charter dated 26 September 1084, Bernard donated the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Besalú to the Abbey of Saint Rufus in Valence. This charter refers to a son, but Bernard was succeeded on his death by Bernard III, whose precise relationship with the previous counts of Besalú has not been discovered.

Having taken the cross to join the First Crusade after the Council of Clermont (1095), Bernard was nonetheless counselled by Pope Urban II to instead remain in Spain and fight the Reconquista. In a letter that must be dated between January 1096 and July 1099, Urban wrote to Bernard, his brother Wifred, Hugh II of Empúries, Giselbert II of Roussillon, and their followers, urging the recovery of the city of Tarragona and its vacant archdiocese.

Secular politics
In 1097 Bernard ceded the lordship of Olot to Ripoll. In 1099 Dalmau Berenguer, viscount of Rocabertí, ceded the allodial castle of Hortal to Bernard, who bestowed it on him as a fief. Donald Kagay translates an example of the "transfer of castle by a lord to the son of a deceased vassal" taken from the surviving charters of Bernard:
This is a pact in commemoration of an agreement which Count Bernat of Besalú made with Bernat Terron. The aforesaid Count gives to aforesaid Bernat the castle of Fenollet and commends to him all of his father's fief after his father's death. And because of this, he is his vassal who shall be faithful to him for all time and post the sureties for him which he must just as his other liege vassals do and must do for him. And Bernat after the death of his father must grant freely, faithfully, and without diminution to lord God and San Paulo de Vallsol all the village of Mauri with all of its appurtenances so that he shall be a vassal for all these things to lord God and Saint Paul and the aforesaid Count and his son who will be the Count of Besalú and his inhabitants of San Paulo without any deceit to him or theirs.

It is possible that the last independent count of Besalú, the Bernard who married Ximena, daughter of Raymond Berengar III, Count of Barcelona, with the acknowledgement that if he died without heirs his county would pass to Raymond, was Bernard II. The very existence of a third count Bernard, succeeding Bernard II, has been called into question.

Notes

11th-century births
1100 deaths
Counts of Besalú
Christians of the First Crusade
11th-century Catalan people

Bernard II, Count of Besalú


Evliya Çelebi, (March 25, 1611, Istanbul – 1684,  Istanbul or Cairo) was an Ottoman Turkish traveler and geographer, son of the palace goldsmith Derviş Mehmed Zilli. He traveled through the Ottoman Empire and other territories, and left narratives with many details of the places visited where he took notes of what he saw, about buildings, markets, customs, and culture. He made his first trip abroad in 1640, and continued for forty years. The account of his travels formed a work in ten volumes called Seyahatname ('Book of Travels'). The work is considered a good guide to learn about the social aspects of the empire in the 17th century.

References

Geographers

Evliya Çelebi


The Great Lakes Bantu languages, also known as Lacustrine Bantu and Bantu zone J, are a group of Bantu languages of East Africa. They were recognized as a group by the Tervuren team, who posited them as an additional zone (zone J) to Guthrie's largely geographic classification of Bantu.

History
By 500BC, proto-Great Lakes Bantu speakers initially settled between Lakes Kivu and Rweru in Rwanda, before rapidly spreading as far east as Kenya.

Languages
The languages are, according to Bastin, Coupez, & Mann (1999), with Sumbwa added per Nurse (2003):

Gungu (E10)
Bwari (Kabwari) (D50)
Konzo (D40): Konjo, Nande, ? Kobo
Shi–Havu (D50): Hunde, Havu, Shi, Tembo, Nyindu, Fuliiru
Rwanda-Rundi (D60): Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Shubi, Hangaza, Ha, Vinza
Nyoro–Ganda (E10): Ganda, Nyankore, Nyoro, Tooro, Hema, Chiga, Soga, Gwere, West Nyala, Ruli
(See also Rutara languages, Runyakitara language, Nkore-Kiga)
Haya–Jita (E20): Haya–Rashi, Talinga-Bwisi, Zinza, Kerebe (Kerewe), Jita–Kara–Kwaya–Ruri, Nyambo, Subi
Masaba–Luhya (E30): Masaba (incl. Bukusu), Luhya proper, Nyore (or Nyole in Kenya), Nyole (or Olunyole in Uganda), Samia–Songa, Marachi, Khayo
Logooli–Kuria (E40): Logooli (Luhya), Ngurimi, Ikizu–Sizaki/Shashi, Suba, Suba-Simbiti, Kabwa, Singa, Idaxo-Isuxa-Tiriki (Luhya), Gusii (Kisii), Kuria (Simbiti, Hacha, Surwa, Sweta), Zanaki, Ikoma, ?Ware
Sumbwa (F20)
The codes in parentheses are Guthrie's original geographic classification.

Maho (2009) adds Yaka. Kobo was recognized later. It's said to be about equidistant between Nande and Hunde, so it's not clear where it should be in the tree above.

Glottolog (2022) separates Nyole in Uganda (and its dialects: Hadyo or Luhadyo, Menya, Sabi or Lusabi, and Wesa or Luwesa) from the E30 group (Masaba-Luhya) into an unclassified subgroup within a "Greater Luyia" group containing the Logoo-Kuria (E40) group. Beside this, it does not consider this older geographic classification relevant for its ongoing classification based on more recent linguistic studies, and uses four different subgroups (Greater Luhya, West Nyanza, East Nyanza, and Western Lakes Bantu), keeping Gungu (E10) separate from them.

Notes

Great Lakes Bantu languages


James Franklin Clay (October 29, 1840 – August 17, 1921) was a U.S. Representative from Kentucky.

Born in Henderson, Kentucky, Clay attended public and private schools at Henderson. He graduated from Georgetown College, Kentucky, in June 1860. He studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1862, commencing practice in Henderson.

He served as member of the State senate in 1870.

Clay was elected as a Democrat to the 48th Congress and served March 4, 1883 – March 3, 1885.

He was an unsuccessful candidate for renomination in 1884 and resumed law practice in Henderson.

He served as city attorney and as attorney for the St. Louis & Southern Railroad and the Ohio Valley Railway Co.

He died in Henderson, Kentucky, on August 17, 1921, and was interred in Fernwood Cemetery.

References

1840 births
1921 deaths
People from Henderson, Kentucky
Democratic Party members of the United States House of Representatives from Kentucky
Democratic Party Kentucky state senators

James F. Clay


Castoreum  is a yellowish exudate from the castor sacs of mature beavers. Beavers use castoreum in combination with urine to scent mark their territory. Both beaver sexes have a pair of castor sacs and a pair of anal glands, located in two cavities under the skin between the pelvis and the base of the tail. The castor sacs are not true glands (endocrine or exocrine) on a cellular  level, hence references to these structures as preputial glands, castor glands, or scent glands are misnomers.

It is used as a tincture in some perfumes and, rarely, as a food additive.

Chemical composition
At least 24 compounds are known constituents of beaver castoreum. Several of these have pheromonal activity, of which the phenols 4-ethylphenol and catechol and the ketones acetophenone and 3-hydroxyacetophenone are strongest. Five additional compounds elicit a weaker response: 4-methylcatechol, 4-methoxyacetophenone, 5-methoxysalicylic acid, salicylaldehyde, and 3-hydroxybenzoic acid. There are also oxygen-containing monoterpenes such as 6-methyl-l-heptanol, 4,6-dimethyl-l-heptanol, isopinocamphone, pinocamphone, and two linalool oxides and their acetates. Other compounds are: benzoic acid, benzyl alcohol, borneol, o-cresol, 4-(4'-hydroxyphenyl)-2-butanone, hydroquinone, phenol. All those compounds are gathered from plant food. It also contains nupharamine alkaloids and castoramine, and cis-cyclohexane-1,2-diol.

Uses

In perfume

In perfumery, the term castoreum refers to the resinoid extract resulting from the dried and alcohol tinctured beaver castor. The dried beaver castor sacs are generally aged for two or more years to mellow.

Castoreum is largely used for its note suggesting leather, typically compounded with other ingredients including top, middle, and base notes. Some classic perfumes incorporating castor are Emeraude, Chanel Antaeus, Cuir de Russie, Magie Noire, Lancôme Caractère, Hechter Madame, Givenchy III, Shalimar, and many "leather" themed compositions.

In food
In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration lists castoreum extract as a generally recognized as safe (GRAS) food additive. In 1965, the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association's GRAS program (FEMA 2261 and 2262) added castoreum extract and castoreum liquid. The annual industry consumption is very low, around , whereas vanillin is over  annually.

Castoreum has been traditionally used in Sweden for flavoring a variety of schnapps commonly referred to as  ().

Other
Castoreum was also considered for use to contribute to the flavor and odor of cigarettes.

Medieval beekeepers used castoreum to increase honey production.

Related animal products
 Taxea, a secretion of the badger's subcaudal glands comparable in its medicinal use to the better-known castoreum
 Hyraceum, the petrified and rock-like excrement composed of urine and feces excreted by the Cape hyrax (Procavia capensis), and a sought-after material that has been used in traditional South African medicine and perfumery

See also
 Musk
 Ambergris
 Perfume - Animal sources
 Violet gland

References

External links
The International Perfume Museum: Castoreum

Animal glandular products
Beavers

Castoreum


Bob Anderson (born December 28, 1947 in Manhattan, Kansas) is an American runner, photographer, publisher, film producer and businessman. He started running on February 16, 1962 and has been running since then. He currently logs on average 50 miles per week of running and walking.  In 2012 he ran 50 races (350.8 miles) to celebrate 50 years of running.  He averaged 6:59/mile.  A movie called A Long Run covers the event. He was the founder of Runner's World magazine. A desire to find information about running and racing led him to a career in magazine and book publishing for more than twenty years.

After selling Runner's World to Rodale, Inc. in Emmaus, Pennsylvania in 1984, he founded Ujena Swimwear, and Around Town Productions. In 2012 he founded a new sport called Double Racing [a two-stage running race with a halftime recovery break between the legs].  His Double Road Race Federation was established to promote this new sport. in 2014 he started a website called My Best Runs that features and follows the best, most interesting and unique races in the world.  On that site he is the editor of the popular column called Running News Daily. He says it reminds him of the days he started Distance Running News (1966) that he renamed Runner's World in 1970.

In 2014 he and his wife Catherine traveled to Kenya to produce a Double Racing event.  They returned in 2015 and produced another successful event.  It was on that trip, Bob decided to set up a running related business in Thika Kenya.  Today the Kenyan Athletics Training Academy (KATA) is a going concern.  Athletes live and train there.

Life and work
In 1966, as a high school senior in Overland Park, Kansas, Bob Anderson was interested in running. He was a 4:41-miler with a passion for the sport. He wanted to learn how to train for a marathon. He searched for information about training and racing and discovered there was little information available so, at age 17, he started his publication.

Anderson started a black and white magazine titled "Distance Running News" and began selling subscriptions. The publication came out twice per year and by its second year, the magazine had 850 subscribers. The circulation grew to 3000 and the publication developed into a magazine published six times per year. Anderson published the magazine by himself for several years.

In 1970, Anderson brought on runner and writer Joe Henderson as chief editor. Henderson was a young newspaper reporter and former Iowa State cross-country champion who had worked for Track and Field News. In that same year, Anderson moved the operations from Kansas to Mountain View, California, and the name of the magazine changed to Runners World. Runner and cardiologist George Sheehan came on board as the magazine's featured columnist and medical editor.

In 1973, the magazine went monthly and added color to the pages. As the popularity of running grew in the United States, the circulation of the magazine increased. Runner's World thrived during the "running boom". According to an article in the Oakland Tribune, the circulation of Runner's World increased from 50,000 in 1975 to 250,000 in 1977. In that same year Henderson left to pursue other writing and editing opportunities.

In 1980, the Daily Herald (Chicago) published a San Francisco (AP) article titled: "Running: Sport of the '70s." The article highlighted comments by Bob Anderson. In that article, Anderson said that in 1970 the number of people who considered themselves runners was 2 million. He also said that according to a national survey of one independent polling company, the number of people who considered themselves runners was 30 million.

Bob Anderson's contributions captured the attention of President Ronald Reagan. He was invited to the White House and acknowledged for his contributions to health and wellness in the United States. Writers and columnists for Runner's World included Richard Benyo, John Brant, Ambrose Burfoot, Bob Cooper, Joe Henderson, Hal Higdon, Don Kardong, Kenny Moore, George Sheehan, and Joan Ullyot.

Publishing
Bob Anderson expanded his publishing ventures beyond Runner's World magazine. He founded Anderson World Books, Inc. and began publishing books and other magazines related to health and wellness. Author and running expert Richard Benyo acted as vice president and editor of Anderson's publications.

He produced the Runner's World Book Series, which included books related to exercise, stretching, aerobics, bodybuilding, yoga, and nutrition. He also published numerous books on running, including The Complete Woman Runner, and The Complete Runner.

Anderson published magazines including Bike World, Nordic World, Soccer World, Self-Defense World, and Aquatics World. He also published FIT magazine, a high-gloss women's fitness magazine that was widely circulated during the 1980s. Many celebrities appeared on FIT magazine covers including Donna Dixon, Jane Fonda, Lisa Hartman, Kymberly Herrin, Donna Mills, Connie Sellecca and Raquel Welch. Writers and contributing editors for FIT included Denise Austin, Catherine Cassidy, Joanie Greggains, Jenilee Harrison, and DeBarra Mayo.

As a spin-off of FIT magazine, Anderson published a book series titled The Fit Self-Improvement Series, which covered a myriad of topics including skin and hair care. He also published the Get Fit Book, which featured actress Priscilla Presley on the cover, and he published FIT Magazine presents Your Healthy Pregnancy '84: Jane Fonda's Program for Staying Fit While Pregnant, which featured a cover photo of Jane Fonda holding a baby.

Expanding his publishing pursuits, Anderson put out The Home Medical Book Series; published in cooperation with the Palo Alto Medical Foundation for Health Care, Research and Education.

Career change
In 1984, Bob Anderson sold Runner's World to Robert Rodale of Rodale, Inc., who moved the editorial offices to Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

Anderson then began working with swimwear and fashion photographer Steve Harvey.  After teaming up with a swimwear fashion designer, Anderson founded Ujena Swimwear and Swimwear Illustrated magazine. Anderson acts as CEO and his daughter, Lisa Anderson-Wall, has acted as president of the company for more than twelve years.

For more than 20 years, Anderson produced "The Ujena Jam Talent Search Week", an event for swimwear models and photographers, which has been expanded to include lifestyle events, fashion photography, casting, workshops and theme parties. A golf, fishing and soccer tournament has been added.

Anderson has created a sister company, Around Town Productions, which has produced four films, including the drama What about Cuba!.

Anderson remains dedicated to photography. His preference for many years was 35mm slide film because he loved the natural skin tones and color saturation the film provided, but he now shoots 100% digital. "I love to shoot in places like Cabo San Lucas.  The light is perfect, the weather is awesome and the backdrops are great. All I need is a couple of days, four models and some great suits and I can shoot an entire catalog."

Anderson promotes health and wellness by sponsoring 5km races, and he recently started a weekly fitness column titled "Bikini Body Fitness" by DeBarra Mayo.

Bob Anderson has photographed over 600 models at more than 350 locations around the world. His mate, Catherine Cross, is the public relations director for Ujena and she is the director for Around Town Productions. He still runs 40 miles per week and participates in road races up to 10 miles. He has lived in Los Altos, California, since 1969.

Double Road Race

In 2012, Anderson founded a new race series called the Double Race series Double Road Race.

See also
 Running

References

External links
A Long Run
Ujena Swimwear
Ujena Fit Club
Double Road Race Accessed 12/07/06

1947 births
Living people
Sportspeople from Manhattan, Kansas
American photographers
American sportswriters
Rodale, Inc.
Writers from Manhattan, Kansas

Bob Anderson (runner)


Alex Shapiro (b. January 11, 1962) is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music favoring combinations of modal harmonies with chromatic ones, and often emphasizing strong pulse and rhythm.

Shapiro was born in New York City. She was educated at the Juilliard School and Manhattan School of Music as a student of Ursula Mamlok and John Corigliano.

The majority of Shapiro's catalog is chamber works, and since 2008 she has also composed several commissions for symphonic wind band, several of which include the use of prerecorded electronics. Performance highlights include Shapiro's Sonata for Piano at the Beijing Modern Music Festival in China, For My Father from her Piano Suite No. 1: The Resonance of Childhood on the MoMA of New York series The American Season in Berlin, Desert Tide premiered at the Stellenbosch New Music and Art Festival in South Africa, Trio for Clarinet, Violin and Piano at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and At the Abyss performed at Carnegie Hall in New York. Other notable works in her catalog include Deep, a work for contrabassoon and electronics; a flute quartet, Bioplasm;  a string quintet, Current Events, and Paper Cut, for wind band, electronics and printer paper, commissioned by the American Composers Forum BandQuest series in 2010.

Shapiro is an active participant in the U.S. art music community. She currently serves on the board of directors of the American Music Center and the MacDowell Colony and sits on the ASCAP Symphony & Concert Committee; in 2010 she was elected as the concert music composer representative to the ASCAP Board of Review. She is the recent president of the board of directors of The American Composers Forum of Los Angeles and Moderator of the  Los Angeles Composers Salon series from 2000 to the present, for which she has interviewed over 100 composers. Shapiro testified in September 2009 on a Federal Communications Commission panel hearing in Washington, D.C., about broadband access and digital rights issues.

Shapiro served on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California from 1990 to 1996, including a term as the 30,000-member affiliate's vice president. She is the recipient of three awards from the ACLU honoring her activism, including being named the 1993 Chapter Activist of the Year.

Articles and reviews
"American Composer: Alex Shapiro", Kyle Gann, Chamber Music, May/June, 2008

External links
Alex Shapiro website
ASCAP Audio Portrait, September 2008  (interview)
New Music Box: The Economy of Exposure (article)
New Music Box: As Important as the Printing Press (article)
New Music Box: Composing Your Happiness (article)
New Music Box: Neo-Romanticism (article)
Kalvos and Damian's New Music Bazaar (radio interview)
All in Good Measure: New Music, New Thoughts (podcast interview)

Manhattan School of Music alumni
20th-century classical composers
21st-century classical composers
American women classical composers
American classical composers
1962 births
Living people
21st-century American composers
20th-century American women musicians
20th-century American composers
21st-century American women musicians
20th-century women composers
21st-century women composers

Alex Shapiro


E.M.G. Hand-Made Gramophones Limited was founded in 1923 by Ellis Michael Ginn (whose initials gave the firm its name). Its object was to build and sell high class acoustical gramophones. E.M.G.'s first model was the Magnaphone, demonstrated and sold in Brighton in March 1924.

Following the Brighton success, the firm moved to London. In the Steinway Hall Gramophone Tests of June 14, 1924, sponsored by Gramophone Magazine, E.M.G.'s Magnaphone was awarded the Silver Medal. Following these Tests, Compton Mackenzie, editor of the Gramophone Magazine wrote that "it is an instrument with a very big future before it".

At the Gramophone Congress of 1925 held in Caxton Hall, E.M.G. won the  Bronze Medal.

In 1928, Frederick Delius wrote to Ginn to congratulate him on the E.M.G. Wilson Horn model: "I often use it to play records of my own works to musicians who come to see me, and they all think it splendid."

In the wake of financial difficulties experienced in 1929, control of the company passed out of the hands of Ginn, who subsequently set up in competition to E.M.G., producing hand-made gramophones under the 'Expert' brand.

Although by 1933, E.M.G. was also offering electric gramophones, its acoustic models still enjoyed a buoyant market. Compton Mackenzie offered an explanation in his April 1933 Gramophone editorial: "[T]here are still many people living in remote parts of this Earth for whom a radio-gramophone is an impossibility. For those, instruments like the Expert, the E.M.G. and the Cascade are a wonderful substitute for the electric wonders of today." Francis James expands this explanation: "[W]hat could be more nostalgic [for British colonial officers] than an E.M.G. playing Elgar under the black velvet of a night on the African Veldt? It was not just colonial officers who ordered them, of course. Wherever there was a regimental mess, an embassy or diplomatic mission, a wealthy merchant or a religious mission, in short, wherever there were islands of British culture in a foreign land, there these acoustic machines would be found. The whole British Empire resounded to their beautiful voices."

Between 1928 and 1954, E.M.G. was awarded 16 patents relating to sound reproduction.

The firm went into voluntary liquidation in 1980, having produced and sold around 1500 made-to-order acoustical gramophones. More than 80 of the Mark IX, X, Xa and Xb EMG 'Large Horn' gramophones are known to still survive.

Sources

James, Francis (1998). The E.M.G Story. London: Old Bakehouse Publications. .

Wimbush, Roger ed. (1973). "The Gramophone" Jubilee Book 1923-1973. Harrow: General Gramophone Publications Ltd..

References

Audio equipment manufacturers of the United Kingdom
Phonograph manufacturers
British companies established in 1923

E.M.G. Hand-Made Gramophones


Privacy is a 2014 play by James Graham. The play looks at how the personal information we share is used by the government and other corporations, and how this affects our security. It was inspired by revelations by Edward Snowden regarding government surveillance.

Productions

Privacy had its world premiere production at the  Donmar Warehouse, London with an official opening night on 22 April 2014, following previews from 10 April. Its limited run concluded on 31 May 2014. Directed by Josie Rourke, the cast consisted of Paul Chahidi, Gunnar Cauthery, Jonathan Coy, Joshua McGuire, Nina Sosanya and Michelle Terry.

The play had its New York premiere in 2016 at the Public Theatre, running from 18 July to 7 August. The production was again directed by Josie Rourke. The cast consisted of De'Adre Aziza, Raffi Barsoumian, Michael Countryman, Rachel Dratch, Daniel Radcliffe and Reg Rogers

Critical reception

The play received mixed reviews. In his 3 star review for The Guardian, Michael Billington stated that "for all its urgent topicality, I felt the play short-circuited the crucial debate about how we guarantee a measure of privacy in the digital age". In his 4 star review for The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer described the play as being "entertaining" despite addressing some "serious and urgent themes".

In his review of the New York production for The New York Times, Ben Brantley said that the play "doesn't provide much material that hasn't been rehashed many times in newspaper and magazine (and blog and vlog) essays. It can feel rather like one of those middle school instructional films that use a likable animated creature (a talking dinosaur or skeleton, maybe) to keep its distractible young viewers hooked."

References

(

External links
 Public Theatre Listing

2014 plays
Plays by James Graham

Privacy (play)


Innocent Records was a pop record label created to cater to for EMI's Virgin Records more pop oriented acts. Following the success of the Spice Girls, Virgin Records decided to delve into the pop market. In doing so they poached Hugh Goldsmith from RCA Records (famous for steering Take That's initial flagging sales, to a multi-platinum act). They let him launch his own Virgin Records offshoot. His first signing was Billie Piper, followed by Martine McCutcheon, along with several dance acts. The label continued to thrive well into the mid-2000s with Atomic Kitten and Blue achieving Platinum sales.

In early 2005, Goldsmith returned to Sony BMG (parent company of RCA Records) to set up Brightside Records. Not long after Goldsmith's departure, Innocent Records was shifted from Virgin Records to the newly formed Angel Music Group, EMI's newly created commercial division, which also handles EMI Classics. For a time in the mid-2000s Angel Music Group also licensed Hollywood Records for the UK.

Innocent Records' most notable success during this period was Blue's Simon Webbe's double platinum solo album Sanctuary. The Innocent Records imprint seemed to have vanished by the late 2000s (decade) being replaced by the revived Charisma Records label, itself disappeared after limited success with pop acts such as Alphabeat.

Former artists
 Atomic Kitten (1999–2004)
 Blue (2001–2005)
 Billie Piper (1998–2001)
 Geri Halliwell (2004–2005) (shifted from EMI)
 Speedway (2002–2004)
 Martine McCutcheon (1999–2003)
 Duncan James (Solo) (2004–2007)
 Simon Webbe (Solo) (2005–2008)
 Javine Hylton (2003–2004)
 VS (2004–2005)

See also
 List of record labels

References

British record labels
EMI
Virgin Records
Pop record labels
Record labels established in 1997
Record labels disestablished in 2007
1997 establishments in the United Kingdom
2007 disestablishments in the United Kingdom

Innocent Records