LAURENCE OLIVIER--A LIFE REALIZED

Hollywood’s reaction to a RKO contract player named Laurence Olivier back in 1931 was that the position had already been filled by Ronald Colman. Olivier moped around town for two years, even doing a play (“The Rats of Norway”) at the Hollywood Playhouse. Then he went back to London, to become the greatest actor of the century.

Was Hollywood wrong? Not in Sir Laurence’s opinion. “I was a twerp,” he says of his early film self. Watching samples of those early talkies on the first part of “Laurence Olivier: A Life”--the second part airs at 9 p.m. Friday on KCET, Channel 28--the viewer tends to agree. One can see why Greta Garbo decided that Olivier wouldn’t do as her leading man in “Camille.” Too harmless.

Ten years later Olivier was back in Hollywood, not only a movie star himself, but the husband of a star, Vivien Leigh. Then he went back to England for war service and for the glorious film of “Henry V,” not only starring Laurence Olivier, but directed by Laurence Olivier.

That’s where Friday’s episode ended. Next week we’ll see the rest of the Olivier story. First, the astonishingly productive period from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, when every part that Olivier touched seemed to turn to gold--Richard III, Oedipus, Hamlet, Archie Rice in “The Entertainer.” Not so his private life. The marriage with Miss Leigh collapses. He marries his co-star in “The Entertainer,” Joan Plowright. He begins a second family.

In the ‘60s, Olivier takes on the leadership of the new National Theatre of Great Britain. After spending all day at his desk, he goes on stage to play “Othello” or the Captain in “Dance of Death” or, for fun, Tattle in “Love for Love.” Eventually he starts to blank out on stage. Then his health breaks--”a sort of general uproar in the cells,” as Plowright puts it.

The keen old gentleman answering interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s questions is obviously not as hale as the actor who once jumped 20 feet from a tree in “Henry V” in order to show the extras how to do it--spraining his ankle in the bargain. But he is still Laurence Olivier. When Bragg wants to film a rehearsal of his TV “King Lear,” his face ices over. “You have to pay money to see that,” he says. When he tells how Noel Coward bullied him out of giggling on stage, it is clear that Noel Coward played for keeps. So, still, does Olivier.

Given his enormous will power, Olivier’s “performance” on this documentary isn’t likely to be his last one. If film and TV come to be too much for him, there’s always radio. He also owes the public a book about his craft, which he didn’t much explore in his recently published autobiography, “Confessions of an Actor.”

But Bragg’s documentary does provide a useful summing-up of the Olivier career so far. Its range is awesome--even, I should think, to Olivier, looking back. Franco Zeffirelli once said that his “Othello” was an anthology of everything that had been discovered about acting over the last 300 years. It would be folly for a young actor to attempt to imitate Olivier. Yet there are lessons in his career.

For one thing, it gives the lie to the idea that there’s necessarily something passive about the actor’s life. As a very young actor, Olivier made the rounds like everyone else. But as early as the mid-1930s, he was using some of that lovely Hollywood and West End money to present his own productions, in the old tradition of the actor-manager.

Rather than waiting for the next part, he engineered the next part. In doing so, he came to learn as much about the business end of theater--and, later, of movies--as any producer. Which meant that he couldn’t be bamboozled by producers. He knew what you did for the glory of the theater, and what you did for money, and where the line was.

In a perfect world, artists wouldn’t have to provide their own support systems. Olivier, with his Anglo-Catholic belief in original sin, knew it wasn’t a perfect world. At that, he made it a little less imperfect by pushing the National Theatre into existence, the repertory theater that England had been talking about for 100 years.

The lesson here isn’t that every actor can change the world. But he can, perhaps, take the reins of his own career rather than lying supine before the system. If Olivier had stayed in Hollywood after ‘32, he might still be waiting for the phone to ring. If he had stayed in Hollywood after 1941, he might be doing cameos on “Dynasty.”

Yet this wasn’t a life dedicated to shrewd career moves. If it had been, Olivier wouldn’t have gone home to England just as the really big Hollywood money was rolling in with “Rebecca.” He simply had to help his country win the war, even if all they let him do was tow training planes around. They also sent him around the country making speeches, and Bragg has unearthed a vintage black-and-white newsreel where Olivier, in uniform, seems almost ready to explode with Churchillian bombast.

Bragg cuts to his “Once more into the breach” speech in “Henry V” (1945), and Olivier’s voice has exactly the same ring. Had he made “Henry V” on a Hollywood sound stage in, say, 1950, would it have as fervent a performance? Hardly. By plugging into his country’s public life at a crucial moment, Olivier had enriched himself immeasurably as an artist.

The message here isn’t just that actors should take risks. It’s that they should have some star to steer by beyond personal stardom. Olivier is not a humble man--don’t be fooled by the quiet manner and the downcast eyes--and he claims not to be a religious one. But from his days as a choirboy he has been trained to regard performance as a ritual that the performer must measure up to, as an athlete must measure up to his sport.

Take Shakespeare. “You must reach the sense through the verse ,” he tells Bragg. Which is to say that no amount of personality, sincerity or sexiness absolves the actor from the first task of getting the notes right. In the 1930s, Shakespeare at the Old Vic gave Olivier something to push against--helped to rescue him from twerpiness. Shakespeare also showed him the pleasures of exploring all sorts of parts, not merely the ones that were “right” for him. It was a particular relief for an actor who didn’t put all that much stock in his “real” self in the first place.

In a time that believed in faces, Olivier went back to the mask. He was accused of taking the tradition too far; of trying too hard to devise a new nose and hairline for every new characterization; of watching himself as he performed.

“Too technical,” people said. Olivier stiffens when Bragg brings up the very word technique. It’s nobody’s business how an actor goes about molding a part, he says. He admits to working from the outside in, but by opening night he is indeed feeling what the character feels. But not to the point where it would blur the performance.

Glynis Johns provides perhaps the best description of the Olivier process. “There’s a part of him that’s watching what he’s doing. But it’s not that, that’s doing it.” In an era that appreciates the duality of left-brain and right-brain thinking, this makes sense. The conductor has his hand on the throttle, but the power is coming from somewhere else.

Olivier’s powers partly come from a famous sense of observation. But underneath he is a confessional actor, acknowledging the most devastating things about the state of his soul and, probably, yours. In “Richard III,” for instance--we only see snippets on the documentary, but enough to remind us--he treats the viewer as a sympathetic cousin who, given this opportunity for political advancement, would naturally behave exactly as he is doing, considering the general naughtiness of the world.

Olivier says that he based his Richard on the meanest man he ever knew, the American director Jed Harris. But surely the actor was also looking to some crabbed and cynical place within himself, just as Shakespeare did when he wrote the character, and as the viewer does when he sees the movie. We laugh at Richard’s outrageous non-regard for his victims, but he is more familiar than we care to admit.

Bragg doesn’t show anything of Olivier’s “Dance of Death”--a more shattering performance, for my money, than his “Othello.” Still, the film exists. There’s also a film of his performance as the doctor in the National’s “Three Sisters,” Olivier at his most tender and most playful. There’s nothing, apparently, on his last performance at the National in ’74 in Trevor Griffiths’ “The Party,” where Olivier as an old Trotskyite held the house spellbound with a 20-minute sit-down monologue on Marxism--the least flashy and most astounding stage feat I’ve ever seen.

The last lesson of this great career is how often Olivier has been defeated, starting with his first flop in Hollywood, extending to his inability to raise the money for a projected “Macbeth” film, including a marriage that became a nightmare, and ending with his ousting by Peter Hall before he could take over at the National Theatre’s new building on the South Bank--an affront he was too worn out, he says, to feel.

Always Olivier has got off the floor. Perhaps he got into the habit when his adored mother died while he was still a schoolboy. It may not be too bad a thing for an actor to have his heart broken young, he tells Bragg. “You can’t say that your mother’s death ‘paid off,’ but you know what I mean,” he says. Oddly, we do.