It occurs to me that not everyone may remember who Olivier is. I often fall victim to this problem--as one of the great actors of the 20th century, Olivier looms as large in my awareness as, let's say, the Pope does for Catholics. (Plus I'm a bit of an Anglophile, and I've always loved British actors--even today, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Hopkins and the impossibly brilliant Ian Holm are among my favorite actors, while the Australians have lately become a force unto themselves.)
Since I have often acted in Shakespeare's plays, and I've read everything at least once, it was by no means the first time I had seen these three films. But it was interesting nonetheless to see them in order like that--and in the Richard III film, there is the particular opportunity to compare Olivier's approach to Shakespeare with that of his great rival, John Gielgud, who plays the Duke of Clarence in that film.
Acting styles come and go like clothing fashions, and if you doubt me, just find a recording of John Barrymore doing soliloquies from Hamlet. In 1936, Gielgud directed a production of Romeo and Juliet in which he had the unusual idea of casting himself as Romeo and Olivier as Mercutio; then after six weeks, they switched roles. The production has become legendary as one of those moments when acting styles seemed to turn on a dime, because Gielgud's Romeo was all beauty and grace, while Olivier stressed the physical and the dynamic. There are no recordings of these performances; but in Richard III, you can watch Gielgud performing (very beautifully) Clarence's long dream speech, and then watch any of Olivier's speeches as Richard, and get a very clear sense of the difference between the two styles.
When I was younger, I appreciated Gielgud but I adored Olivier. Lately, those impressions have switched places. It makes sense: as a young man, Olivier's vigorous, youthful approach was thrilling, while Gielgud's more refined performances didn't have the same immediate, visceral impact. But in Olivier's autobiography, he wrote something that I found particularly interesting (sorry, I don't have the book in front of me so I can't quote it directly): he said that in his approach to the soliloquies, he often picked certain specific lines and really hammered away at them while, in a sense, glossing over the rest of the speech. He cited one of Lear's speeches, writing that in his own head, the speech was essentially "Dad-dah dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah dah-dah / How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!"
It may be the most honest thing he ever wrote about his own work--because with that in mind, suddenly I can see this approach in just about every aspect of these films. They are all collections of great moments, with somewhat loose connections between them. And those great moments are usually designed to showcase Olivier himself to great advantage, and are usually announced by a particular stentorian yell that is essentially identical from production to production. It became the chief weapon in his arsenal of acting tricks, and after hearing it a few times, I have to admit, I began to dread its appearance.
Gielgud, on the other hand, was the most beautiful speaker of verse in the twentieth century, with a velvet voice and a subtlety of approach that I have never seen equaled. He was a member of the great Terry family (Ellen Terry was his great-aunt), and as such represents perhaps the apotheosis of that late-19th century style: forceful but never florid, refined but never precious, and with a complete command of his craft so that every line received its due weight rather than rushing on to the next big moment.
It's interesting that Olivier's reputation is as a very natural, realistic actor of Shakespeare (at least compared to Gielgud), because now I find his work particularly mannered. Maybe that's because Kenneth Branagh's recent performances have been quite a bit more realistic and natural than Olivier's ever were, as I think anyone could see by comparing his 1989 Henry V to Olivier's in 1944. Speaking as a child of the Vietnam generation, as Branagh is as well, I find his anti-war interpretation of the play considerably more interesting than Olivier's rah-rah rouse the troops version, and I love the fact that when he filmed Hamlet he did the whole thing, leaving the script essentially uncut. (Yes, I know, it's a long script, which is why most directors cut it from four and a half hours down to about three; but there have been any number of uncut productions that have demonstrated, over and over again, that the play in its entirety works brilliantly, beginning with Maurice Evans's reportedly-sensational production in 1938.)
But what's particularly interesting, to me at least, is that if you look at Branagh's as the third great interpretive style of Shakespeare performance, it is almost full circle back to Gielgud--or maybe it's more accurate to say that his work represents a successful melding of both Gielgud and Olivier: frequently thrilling like Olivier, but with the yearning and the beauty of a Gielgud performance. Alas, as a director, Branagh suffers in comparison to Olivier, largely because of an unfortunate fondness for too-low comedy (witness Michael Keaton's awful Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing).
The cycle will spin on, of course. One day, Branagh's performances will seem mannered and unrealistic just as Olivier's are beginning to now; and what I think magical in my forties may seem tired when I have reached my sixties (and am, perhaps, more than a little tired myself). It is all, as Shakespeare said, a part of the very purpose of theatre, "...whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." And that's why this stuff matters, not just to me: an acting style is as much a reflection of its time as anything else; it hints at who we are at a given moment. Once upon a time, the value of a beautiful Gielgud performance was self-evident; then, during World War II and immediately after, we valued a man of action such as Olivier, even in the refined setting of a Shakespeare play; and now we appreciate a natural, unmannered performance like Branagh's, in this time when mannerism and affectation are so out of favor and "authenticity" is all. (Never mind that much of what we think of as authentic is in fact exactly the opposite--Eminem is not Marshall Mathers, no matter what he says.) What's unfortunate is that Branagh's Shakespeare work, while popular, doesn't matter in the way a Shakespeare performance once mattered--now we want the overheated bang-bang of What's-his-name's Romeo + Juliet, with action and guns substituting for the text. That's a damn shame, but it is, again, a reflection of its time. A movie may seem fixed and immovable, but as one's own perceptions shift with time and age, one realizes that even a movie is malleable, a constantly shifting mirror reflecting not only its own age but ours as well.
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