LORD OLIVIER AT 80 : A REMEMBRANCE OF FILM HEROES

Every time we single out the feature that makes Olivier a marvel--his lion eyes or the voice or the way it seizes on a phrase--he alters it or casts it off in some new role and is greater than ever. It is no special asset, it is the devilish audacity and courage of this man.... What is extraordinary is inside and what is even more extraordinary is his determination to give it outer force. He has never leveled off; he goes on soaring. --Critic Pauline Kael on

Laurence Olivier’s “Othello”

Laurence Olivier turned 80 on Friday, the occasion in England for yet another biography and a celebration in book form by such colleagues as Jonathan Miller, Michael Caine, John Osborne, Simon Callow and others. But those of us who learned about him first from movies might wish him the thunder of cannons, the flights of arrows or armloads of heather from Pennistone Craig. Those images, which he lodged so deeply in our film subconscious, seem forever connected with Olivier, who reportedly says he will make no more films.

You can almost feel sorry for the audiences who have had to learn Olivier backwards, from his old screen men to his young--they cannot understand what Olivier meant to those of us who grew up on him: that he was nobility and heroism and mystery and romance and sensuality and intelligence. And that the screen had never held such a man before, and has been entirely bereft of one since.

His first American film heroes--his Heathcliffe, his Darcy, his Maxim de Winter--were dark or insufferable or mysterious men, played by a cryptic, dominating actor entirely unneedful of our love. And so, of course, he had it, unstintingly.

Soon after, the war arrived and midway through it, Olivier, as actor, director, producer, made “Henry V,” so sweet and lucid and stirring a vision of the heroism of the plain British soldier and their noble young king that the film itself became a rallying point on both sides of the Atlantic. It was “Henry V” that launched the whirring flight of the arrows straight into our memories and it may have been entirely understandable if the lines between Henry and Larry blurred in the minds of a lot of American moviegoers, especially the young ones.

And after that came the Olivier “Hamlet,” and our capitulation was complete. I cannot tell you how the film’s interpretation holds up now (although I suspect that it may seem the best film overall--if it can be saved from “colorizing”); it is still impossible to separate it from the drama of its opening, and the entire American cultural ferment that attended it. I can say that by this time, Olivier had done more to make Shakespeare vital and even necessary than the most charismatic and dedicated Shakespearean scholar working, and that included Dr. Frank Baxter and Lily Bess Campbell. And “Richard III” was still to come.

However, after “Carrie,” virtually all of Olivier’s full-throttle romantic roles were played on the stage. The stage would see him (and Vivien Leigh) as Antony and Cleopatra. The screen began to adjust to Olivier in the character roles with which he had always felt more comfortable. We had a few wonders ahead of us: the ineffable vulgarity of Archie Rice in “The Entertainer”; the horror of his Dr. Szell in “Marathon Man.” But Olivier began to be lost in cameos and casts of thousands--or was it millions?

Actually, it was television that got the best of the middle and late Olivier: his James Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” his Harry Kane in Pinter’s “The Collection,” his Lord Marchmain in “Brideshead Revisited,” his Lear.

But there was one tiny moment entrusted to Olivier that seems to link him with the motion picture screen forever: “The Magic Box.”

In it, Robert Donat as William Friese-Greene, desperate for an audience for his newly invented movie camera, drags a plain, bewhiskered Holborn policeman off his beat in the middle of the night to witness his “moving pictures.” Without inching a millimeter out of character as a stolid and bewildered bobby, Olivier’s face, watching these apparently magical, flickering images of Hyde Park on the laboratory wall, floods with the wonder and celebration of that ineffable moment.

It is the perfect closure between one of the screen’s great film maker/actors and the cinema itself.

A warm, a respectful but most of all, a loving birthday wish, Lord Olivier, for all the wonders you have given us. And please, go on soaring.