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“... Russian) reading ‘Long Live the Red Army! Greetings from the British People.’ In 1943, Laurence Olivier, who was something of a one-man propaganda machine in these years, helped out by starring as a Russian engineer called Ivan Kouznetsoff in the film Demi-Paradise, in which Kouznetsoff comes to Britain and soon settles down and makes ...”

“... a rival), there isn’t a single straight line. There is no flattening wash over this face. Even Laurence Olivier, who mostly couldn’t stand her, had to concede that every time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes ...”

“... even to the point of being able to identify with the gloriously ‘tragic and fated’ love of a Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, enacted in the film of the book. But the real book is a kind of bible of arrested development, as must have been perceived by L.P. Hartley, no grown-up himself. Love, sex and adult tenderness are despised as rubbish in ...”

“... cranked out his own version of the Royal thousand-year thing, and everyone remarked how unlike Laurence Olivier he sounded. This was actually rather unfair. It is the whole echo-chamber of Anglo-Brit imagined community which has fallen away; today, I doubt whether even the greatest of hams could successfully replace it. Fintan O’Toole posed the ...”

“... the courage, as he certainly had the skill, he might have created a classic play, and a part which Laurence Olivier or Ralph Richardson could later have made their own. A dramatised version of The Egoist was written by Sutro, but by then time and fashion had moved on. The turn of the century was the moment either for Ibsen’s realism or Maeterlinck’s ...”

“... ambition in Bragg’s writing. Such grandiloquent gusto doesn’t always escape absurdity (from Laurence Olivier (1984): ‘Brutally given the Garbo heave-ho, he went to New York and repaired some of his hacked-down ego with what was widely regarded as a blindingly brilliant performance’). Yet this ‘constant stampede for effect’ can build an ...”

“... not the only story of celebrity. Brook is both engaging and perceptive about his relationship with Laurence Olivier, whose brilliance and speed in performance masked a peasant doggedness in rehearsal (‘The dazzling virtuosity of his acting came from a painstakingly composed mosaic of tiny details, which when finally assembled could flash by in sequence ...”

“... of Heavenly Creatures as ‘the most hideous man alive’, matches wits with Kenneth Tynan and Laurence Olivier in Austin Pendleton’s play Orson’s Shadow, and has even been fingered posthumously as a suspect in the 1947 Black Dahlia murder. Welles appears, larger than life, in documentaries and dramatisations, of both his own story – or rather ...”

“... theatre censorship office, so as to deny any desublimated sexual portrayals to the rest of us, Laurence Olivier wrote a magnificent essay which demonstrated that he had, from early youth, grasped by instinct what lay behind the beating business. He was writing in defence of Edward Bond’s censored play Saved:The first time a schoolmaster ordered me ...”

“... of Pol Roger he forgot to be so old and old Adam began to appear.’ Chandos hadn’t wanted Laurence Olivier as director of the National Theatre; when it became inevitable he made the mistake of trying to balance him by appointing alongside him the epitome of 1960s chic, Kenneth Tynan – who then tried to get rid of his Tory boss by staging plays ...”

“... National Service Association, which brought stars from Spike Milligan and Vera Lynn to Laurence Olivier and Mantovani to entertain troops all over the world, and Workers’ Playtime, where I first heard Peter Sellers do his funny voices (Bevin himself occasionally appeared on the show to egg on the troops), not to mention the introduction of ...”

“... looked nothing like the potential presidential assassins played by Frank Sinatra (in Suddenly) or Laurence Harvey (in The Manchurian Candidate), slid ticketless into the Texas Theatre in Dallas, for a double bill that would otherwise have drifted beyond record: Cry of Battle, set in the Philippines, and War is Hell!, a Korean War quickie narrated by the much ...”

“... its origin in letters which have emerged from private collections, like those to Strachey or Noel Olivier, or from under time-seals, like those to Phyllis Gardner, but these ones seem to show a man who was ‘jealous, moody, ill-balanced’, as Woolf had said, and who renounced the unconventionality of his youth to revert to philistine type: ‘the Rugby ...”

“... Miller, and went to England to make a film she financed herself: The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier. The problem with telling these events is that even Mailer’s probing and speculative mind finds it hard to make them into much of a story. Marilyn at this point was given to shifting identities as capriciously as a child flipping channels ...”

“... I went through the door.’ The same year saw the release of MGM’s Pride and Prejudice with Laurence Olivier as Darcy. Its success was not hampered by its complete lack of regard for historical accuracy and plot (Lady Catherine confides in Elizabeth that she admires her bluntness and is sick of everyone being so polite to her). Audiences found that ...”