Laurence Olivier - Post-war Years

Post-war Years

In 1947 Olivier was made a Knight Bachelor, and by 1948 he was on the Board of Directors for the Old Vic Theatre, and he and Leigh embarked on a tour of Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the theatre. During their six-month tour, Olivier performed Richard III and also performed with Leigh in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal and Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth. The tour was an outstanding success, and although Leigh was plagued with insomnia and allowed her understudy to replace her for a week while she was ill, she generally withstood the demands placed upon her, with Olivier noting her ability to "charm the press". Members of the company later recalled several quarrels between the couple, with the most dramatic of these occurring in Christchurch when Leigh refused to go on stage. Olivier slapped her face, and Leigh slapped him in return and swore at him before she made her way to the stage.

By the end of the tour, both were exhausted and ill, and Olivier told a journalist, "You may not know it, but you are talking to a couple of walking corpses." Later he would comment that he "lost Vivien" in Australia. This may be a reference to Leigh's affair with Australian actor Peter Finch, whom Olivier met during the tour and invited to come to England. Once Finch made the move, Olivier became his mentor and put him under a long-term contract. Finch began an affair with Leigh in 1948, which continued on and off for several years, ultimately falling apart due to her deteriorating mental condition.

The success of the Australian tour encouraged the Oliviers to make their first West End appearance together, performing the same works with one addition, Antigone, included at Leigh's insistence because she wished to play a role in a tragedy. Leigh next sought the role of Blanche DuBois in the West End stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and was cast after Williams and the play's producer, Irene Mayer Selznick, saw her in The School for Scandal and Antigone, and Olivier was contracted to direct.

Leigh would go on to star as Blanche in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire, which was directed by Elia Kazan. Olivier accepted a starring role in Carrie, director William Wyler's adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie, in order to accompany her to Hollywood and look after her as her mental health was already fragile. During the filming of Streetcar, Kazan had to wean her away from the interpretation she had developed in London under Olivier's direction.

In 1951, as their contribution to the Festival of Britain celebrations, Leigh and Olivier performed two plays about Cleopatra, Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra and Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra, alternating the play each night and winning good reviews. They took the productions to New York, where they performed a season at the Ziegfeld Theatre into 1952. The reviews there were also mostly positive, but the critic Kenneth Tynan angered them when he suggested that Leigh's was a mediocre talent which forced Olivier to compromise his own. Tynan's diatribe almost precipitated another collapse; Leigh, terrified of failure and intent on achieving greatness, dwelt on his comments, while ignoring the positive reviews of other critics. She was performing on Broadway when she got news that she had won her second Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in A Streetcar Named Desire.

In January 1953, Leigh traveled to Ceylon to film Elephant Walk with Peter Finch. Shortly after filming commenced, she suffered a breakdown, and Paramount Pictures replaced her with Elizabeth Taylor. Olivier returned her to their home in England, where between periods of incoherence, Leigh told him that she was in love with Finch, and had been having an affair with him. She gradually recovered over a period of several months. As a result of this episode, many of the Oliviers' friends learned of her problems. David Niven said she had been "quite, quite mad", and in his diary, Noël Coward expressed the view that "things had been bad and getting worse since 1948 or thereabouts."

Leigh recovered sufficiently to play The Sleeping Prince with Olivier in 1953, and in 1955 they performed a season at Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Titus Andronicus. They played to capacity houses and attracted generally good reviews, Leigh's health seemingly stable. Noël Coward was enjoying success with the play South Sea Bubble, with Leigh in the lead role, but she became pregnant and withdrew from the production. Several weeks later, she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. She joined Olivier for a European tour with Titus Andronicus, but the tour was marred by Leigh's frequent outbursts against Olivier and other members of the company. After their return to London, her former husband Leigh Holman, who continued to exert a strong influence over her, stayed with the Oliviers and helped calm her.

During the 1950s, Olivier had affairs with other actresses, including Claire Bloom, who was his co-star in Richard III.

In 1958, considering her marriage to be over, Leigh began a relationship with the actor Jack Merivale, who knew of her medical condition and assured Olivier he would care for her. She achieved a success in 1959 with the Noël Coward comedy Look After Lulu, with The Times critic describing her as "beautiful, delectably cool and matter of fact, she is mistress of every situation."

In December 1960 she and Olivier divorced, enabling Olivier to marry the actress Joan Plowright, his co-star in John Osborne's The Entertainer on both stage and screen. Olivier and Plowright would have three children: Richard Kerr (b. 1961), Tamsin Agnes Margaret (b. 1963), and Julie-Kate (b. 1966).

In his autobiography he discussed the years of problems they had experienced because of Leigh's illness, writing, "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness—an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me, for whom she could hardly be expected to take the trouble."