Laurence Kerr Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England on May 22, 1907. His parents were Agnes Louise and Gerard Kerr Olivier. In 1935, he played "Romeo" and "Mercutio" in alternate performances of "Romeo and Juliet" with John Gielgud, which is known as one of his earliest successes as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage. A young Englishwoman just beginning of her career on the stage fell in love with his Romeo. In 1937, she was "Ophelia" to his "Hamlet" in a special performance at Kronberg Castle, Elsinore, Denmark. In 1940, she became his second wife after both returned from making films in America that were major box office hits of 1939. He performed in Wuthering Heights (1939) and her film was Gone with the Wind (1939). Vivien Leigh and Olivier both were screen lovers in the films Fire Over England (1937), 21 Days Together (1940) and That Hamilton Woman (1941). In 1944, he alongwith Leigh traveled to Scotland with Charles C. Bennett to research the real-life story of a Scottish girl accused of murdering her French lover, It was almost their fourth film together. Bennett recalled that Olivier researched the story "with all the thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes" and "we unearthed evidence, never known or produced at the trial, which would most certainly have sent the young lady to the gallows". The film was abandoned. They both appeared on the stage in England and America and made films whenever they really needed to make some money during their two decades. In 1951, he was working on a screen adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie" while Leigh was completing work on the film version of the Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). She won her second Oscar for bringing "Blanche DuBois" to the screen. He worked in film Carrie in 1952, which was never talked about by him. George Hurstwood, a middle-aged married man from Chicago who tricked a young woman into leaving a younger man about to marry her, became a New York street person in the novel. A PBS documentary on his career broadcast in 1987, covered his first sojourn in Hollywood in the early 1930s with his first wife, Jill Esmond and noted that her star was higher than his at that time. On film, he was appeared by his second wife, too, even though the list of films he made is four times as long as hers. More than half of his film credits come after The Entertainer (1960), which started out as a play in London in 1957. When the play moved across the Atlantic to Broadway in 1958, the role of Archie Rice's daughter was taken over by Joan Plowright, who was also in the film. They married soon after the release of The Entertainer (1960). In 1969, he appeared in two war films. He played Field Marshal French in the First World War film Oh! What a Lovely War, for which he won another BAFTA award and as Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding in Battle of Britain. After being ill for the last 22 years of his life, he died of renal failure on 11th July, 1989 at his home near Steyning, West Sussex.