An Ode to Impostors

Were it not for the impostors among us, our lives would be poor things indeed.

That, after all, is what actors are: people who pretend to be what they are not. And who among us has not been thrilled or changed or merely entertained because they do?

Laurence Olivier, who died Tuesday at the age of 82, was this century’s greatest pretender. “What is acting,” he once asked, “but lying?” That is half the paradox, for when it is practiced by a deceiver such as Olivier, acting is deceit in the service of art’s profound truth. His many definitive and revealing Shakespearean characterizations are testimony to that. So, too, was the way in which Olivier so often appropriated the persona of a character you felt you already knew from literature. Generations of us now are unable to envision Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights,” Mr. Darcy of “Pride and Prejudice,” Lord Marchmain of”Brideshead Revisited” or Henry Beasley, the aging artist in “The Ebony Tower,” without seeing Olivier in one of his disguises.

As a man steeped in the theater’s craft, Olivier certainly would have agreed with his Victorian colleague, who in his final moment mused, “Dying is easy . . . Now, comedy is hard.”

For that reason, we trust Lord Olivier would not mind sharing billing in this brief remembrance with Mel Blanc, who died Monday at the age of 81. His gifts were an astonishingly flexible voice and a flair for characterization that breathed a vivid life into dozens of the most beloved figures in the relatively new comedic art of animated cartoons.

Their achievements, of course, were of different magnitudes. But affection is a random and impetuous emotion, and Laurence Olivier and Mel Blanc were so many people to so many people.