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“... In Michael Korda’s Curtain a thinly disguised Laurence Olivier puts at risk his marriage to a thinly disguised Vivien Leigh by having an affair with (stop me if you’ve heard this one) a no less thinly disguised Danny Kaye. Well! Well? As a piece of writing, the novel is aimed with charming accuracy at the station bookstall trade, where it should thrive ...”

“... of an Actor is, unsurprisingly, more an impersonation than a real piece of writing. In it, Laurence Olivier acts writing – an uneasy mixture of the chatty (‘All right, I can hear you, reader dear’) and the belle-lettrist flourish (‘Fortunately for the restoration of my depleted coffers ... ’). What good bits of writing there are (not ...”

“... Anthony Holden’s is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the Sussex countryside, still swimming occasional lengths of his pool in the altogether and attending the first nights of the three children who have followed Joan Plowright and himself into the theatre ...”

“... and it goes with the tone of the voice, if not with what the voice is saying. Lateish in the film Laurence Olivier, as Maxim de Winter, who has married the narrator, says she no longer has the ‘lost, funny look’ she used to have, which may be true, but she has shed it only temporarily. The voice tells us – and in this it is quite unlike the voice ...”

“... and closing of the film are more comfortable than anything in it. We hear the uncredited voice of Laurence Olivier speaking the first words of the play’s chorus, telling us about star-crossed lovers and what is going to happen, and then at the end he borrows the words of the Prince of Verona. Olivier’s delivery ...”

“... Man as one of ‘the most unsettling moments in 20th-century cinema’. But I don’t need to cast Laurence Olivier as a Nazi torturer in order to wince – only summon up memories of Mrs Uren, the risibly named (to an English child’s puerile ear) French dentist who had to fill every single one of my milk teeth, such was my sugary lust. Etruscan ...”

“... skills of play directors are not those of performers (like his predecessor at the National, Lord Olivier). Play directors pride themselves on their ability to give what they call Notes. This sort of Note (scarcely recognised by dictionaries) is not the sort manual workers make, in notebooks or on notepaper: it is mouth work. Sometimes it is like the tuning ...”

“... child companion. ‘It would be nice,’ he remarked, ‘to stay on a few days.’ He telephoned Laurence Olivier, who had engaged Miss Bennett for a season at the St James. Would it be possible for Jill Bennett to be two days late for rehearsal? he asked, using his most charming manner. The answer was brief. No. Their last holiday together was spent in ...”

“... Tynan angry about the Cuban missile crisis; Tynan really upset about unemployment; Tynan lecturing Laurence Olivier on the social responsibility of the Theatre: ‘At a time when – as I Cassandra-like keep saying – audiences even for good theatre are dwindling all over Europe, we are doing nothing to remind them that the theatre is an independent ...”

“... his lady, I like to believe, were the Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of the day, if not the Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, with knobs on. Centuries pass. La maison is up for rent. Appears out of nowhere, circa 1909, exactly as in the central London of our own day, an American Amazon, chequebook in hand. Lady named Natalie Clifford Barney by no ...”

“... in his 1924 first-night review of Saint Joan (not an easy assignment) and in his review of Laurence Olivier as Macbeth in 1936. No italics for ‘Macbeth’. This is a report of ‘Olivier as Macbeth’, not ‘Olivier in Macbeth’. Agate wanted to remind readers of the ...”

“... once a Nazi film-maker, working for Dr Goebbels. He was employed to suborn or assassinate Laurence Olivier, while the actor was making the film Henry V in neutral Eire. It is claimed, on the dust-cover, that Purser met Friedrich Harris in California in 1979. This is, presumably, a blague, but the book is a plausible imitation of published memoirs ...”

“... his wild behaviour as a director, and the same difficult relations with the sometimes ungenerous Olivier, the invariably envious Wolfit and the amiable but rather straitlaced Richardson. And of course both books have to deal with the crisis of 1953. Gielgud was arrested for soliciting, and although Morley and his publishers claim to have dealt for the first ...”

“... story. He could have found it in himself to be someone else – even without self-deception. As Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman, ‘Why not just act, dear boy?’ It’s good advice. Somebody might be ...”

“... season in 1963 Michael Redgrave played Claudius to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Apart from Olivier, the theatre’s first director, Redgrave, then aged 55, was its greatest star. Known to the public from his many film roles, and having just been named actor of the year by the Evening Standard for his Uncle Vanya at Chichester, which one critic called ...”