Why Joan Plowright is always Bitter about Laurence Olivier?!

Plowright wasn't well-regarded by the Vivien Leigh/Binkie Beaumont/Old Queen Set.

They said she was 'a port in a storm' for Larry after all the frightful drama with psychopathic Vivien.

They said she was common. They said she was 'crumpet'. She was even worse than the alleged liaisons Larry had with Dorothy Tutin and Janette Scott.

They said she was a frump. They said she satisfactory at the time when everyone was determined to be as self-hateful as possible saying England was doomed and we must celebrate The Kitchen Sink.

I believe Joan Plowright is in quite poor health herself these days and is nearly blind .She has given up her stage work as of about three years ago .

Maybe Lord Larry wasn't exactly a walk in the park...?

I doubt she was either.

What goes around comes around.

R5 STFU, Vivien

Her husband was in considerable poor health for quite a long time.

His voice shrivelled to a falsetto. He wrote that there was 'a riot in his cells'. His body was fighting his mind.

He had the staff BURN his personal archives (as you know, Vivien's archive sold for a million a few years back.

Plowright described his manic behaviour at the time as something like a 'purgative'.

Joan Plowright abandoned him in his time of need, she left him alone with nurses

I'm sure Lord Olivier's third wife was recompensed in the will for all times of pain and suffering.

She would have been well forgotten by now if he had not bestowed himself on her.

She was so unattractive. I know Vivienne was crazy, but to go from her to that Plowright woman was unbelievable

R9 what suffering? It's not like she locked herself besides him, she lived her life and he was left alone most of the time.

He probably slept around on her.

Olivier apparently wanted to divorce Joan :

"Olivier had begun an on-and-off affair with Sarah Miles, whom he had met during the filming of Term of Trial 'in late 1961 and early 1962. The first ten weeks of shooting were in studios near Dublin, and then there were two weeks in Paris, during which Olivier asked her, "Will you lay with me?" She would. She was eighteen. Later they used to meet in a studio apartment he had taken near the Old Vic. which she recalled as a grim pad with no hot water. He asked her to call him Lionel Kerr, a variation on the old Andrew Kerr he had used with Vivien. He said the Lionel was for Lionheart.

"Sarah said that Olivier told her he had been bisexual. But she says he might easily have done that to "turn her on," knowing that she had herself been bisexual as a girl"

Miles proved to be one of the most serious of his casual affairs. According to Derek Granger he at one point even went so far as to consult his agent, Laurence Evans, about the possibility of securing a divorce so as to marry Miles. It does not seem likely that he did more than play with the idea and when Evans pointed out that it would seriously damage if not destroy his career, he quickly dropped it.

Sarah Miles was in the National Theatre company in 1963 but left suddenly in March 1965 after Noel Coward breezed into Olivier's dressing room one day while they were engaged in a rather 'indelicate' situation. Miss Miles said that Mr Coward refused to speak or have anything to do with her after that

"According to Sarah Miles he was at his most vulnerable emotionally and claimed he was anxious to divorce Joan Plowright and marry her ” He told Miles’s parents that there was nothing he wanted more than to marry their daughter but that his wife had made him realize that “the scandal would be too much for the children to bear”. Miles was hurt that her lover had elected to make this revelation to her parents rather than to her, but the affair flickered on..."

Nobody would have heard of Joan Plowright but for Laurence Olivier.

Vivien wasn't psychotic. She had Bipolar Disorder.

Apparently Laurence Oliver in his old age still pursued women to bed :

" According to Marcella Markham, an actress who coached Olivier in his Viennese accent for “The Boys from Brazil”, he conceived a maudlin passion for her. When the production moved to London he arrived at her home with a gardenia and a diamond-studded ring. She told him she was on the point of becoming engaged and he was “visibly angry”. “Well,” he said, “it’ll be over in a few years – sex, the relationship, everything. It doesn’t last. Why do you bother?”

Tarquin olivier interview :

"At this point I gingerly bring up the subject of the actress Sarah Miles, who, in three autobiographies, details her affair with Olivier, which she said spanned decades and took place during his marriage to Joan Plowright. According to her, Olivier told her: “Jill Esmond gave me my son Tarquin as well as my first leg up the showbiz ladder. I suppose, unconsciously, I used all my wives to further my journey up the ladder.” Tarquin acknowledges that his father told him about Sarah Miles, but says, unwaveringly: “I don’t want to talk about it. After all, it isn’t a nice thing to talk about somebody who is alleged to have had an affair with my father, because Joan is still alive and very loyal to his memory and I wouldn’t like to be associated with that kind of conversation.”

Plowright really was such a mediocrity. I saw her on stage in London at the supposed height of her powers in "The Cherry Orchard" and she couldn't even manage the last scene with anything approaching competence. And only a cluck could fuck that scene up.

She always seemed to be embittered because she never stepped into the light the way she seemed to expect, being Mrs. Olivier. She did the childbearing, the support of the self-ascribed genius, she put up with the ego and flare-ups, but in the end she always looked like a toadstool growing in his rose garden.

[quote] Vivien wasn't psychotic. She had Bipolar Disorder.

Psychosis can be a symptom of severe bipolar disorder.

R13 I hope this extract isn't from the Abominable Spoto.

I don't know who started this thread but I can't help but notice that the OP has included a VERY unflattering picture advertising a play staged by the subject of another thread—

Vivien Leigh, bipolarity and all, would be a tough act to follow.

Its "Tony Award winning, Academy Award nominated Dame Joan Plowright" to you bitches.

[quote]R14 Vivien wasn't psychotic. She had Bipolar Disorder.

Well, she had incidents where she'd hallucinate. That's a bit beyond...

I think that picture is from the late 50s which is when Larry was getting jack of her.

I had one overriding need: I wanted a man who could plow right.

Laurence Olivier always sounds so tiresome and insufferable. His work never grabs me.

Who the fuck names a child Tarquin?

A bad manic episode (or, more rarely, a depressive one) can look like schizophrenia. Hallucinations, delusions, ideas of reference.

I thought she died a decade or two ago!

[quote] Its "Tony Award winning, Academy Award nominated Dame Joan Plowright" to you bitches.

Please. They'll make anyone a dame these days.

Is Tarquin a man?

R26 A man exhilarated at creating life for the first time names his son Tarquin.

Have you done it?

[quote]Is Tarquin a man?

The's a royal name referenced in either [italic] Romeo & Juliet [/italic] or [italic] Macbeth. [/italic] Or maybe both. I forget.

Maybe his first wife Jill Esmond picked it out.

IT'S...not the's (whatever that means!)

R32 I think Larry was playing Romeo (with Johnny and Peggy) when Tarquin was born.

R33 I like to insert a space before and after my ellipsis, viz ' … '. But Shakespeare did say 'As You Like It'.

He was a common or garden misogynist. He hated being out-shone by any of his female co stars. It's why he laid into Marilyn Monroe and called her a b****. He made her life a misery on set.

I wouldn't say he was a misogynist.

I'd agree that he hated being out-shone (in fact the late Alan Webb told an anecdote of how Larry hissed at him ('sotto voce') during a performance to keep out HIS spotlight). That is fair enough because the audience paid to Larry not the support cast.

Everyone else says that Marilyn made everyone else's life a misery on set.

He must have been blind to be attracted to Sarah bloody Miles.

R19 No, It's from Olivier book by Terry Coleman - 2005

R35, as R36 points out, Olivier hated being upstaged by anyone, but he was far more competitive with other men than with women. In his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, he is hilariously bitchy about Ralph Richardson and especially John Gielgud. IIRC he spends a whole page tearing down Gielgud's Hamlet from the 1930s (the book was written 50 years later!), so you just have to know that the young Gielgud must have been extraordinary in the role.

That competitiveness is part of the reason he married Plowright, of course. She was plain and only moderately talented - there was no danger of her outshining him, unlike with Leigh, who was both a dazzling beauty and a great film actress.

A gossip thread about people who've been dead for decades and a woman now in her 90s. Oh yeah, and another old woman in her 70s.

How fascinating.

My father Laurence Olivier - by Tarquin Olivier 1992

"Olivier, with typical insensitivity, took his new love, Vivien Leigh, to visit mother and baby in hospital (and later asked Jill Esmond if he could have Tarquin's pram back, for the baby Vivien was briefly, unsuccessfully, expecting). Tarquin's childhood knowledge of his father was therefore confined to occasional weekends, and even more occasional parental visits to school.

Most of Olivier's paternal advice, such as it was, seems to have been about sex - the snares and dangers and delusions thereof: 'Just recognise that all the romantic ecstasies, all the rosie reveries . . . are basically, simply and solely wicked Old Nature's cold-blooded calculated bribe, to bring children into the world.' Not surprisingly, he worried that Tarquin would become gay: he insisted on urinating beside him, presumably to check appearances.

According to Tarquin, Olivier also had an obsessive interest in the female genitalia and 'seeing over and over again the designs of nature which were dedicated, among other things, to the enjoyment of men. His enthusiastic exposure to matters which his conscience had denied ever existed replaced his unnatural dread with a healthy deference.'

Later, when Tarquin was 20 and Olivier's marriage to Leigh was breaking down, they went on holiday together (the only time they ever did) and on the way back, Olivier watched a middle-aged woman crossing the road: 'See her?' he exclaimed, 'That woman? She's my age to the very day. Fifty: and who wants her? Where's the sex in her?'

Olivier said in his autobiography that he was always embarrassed by Tarquin and one can appreciate why: his son's adoration must have seemed a constant reproach. Even as an adult, Tarquin burst into tears when he learned that Joan Plowright was expecting a baby which would deprive him of his exclusive filial role, meagre though that had been. Thereafter he saw even less of his father than before, and Olivier even refused to read a travel book he wrote on the grounds that he was 'too busy'.

Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright inerview - Dick Cavett show 1980

I've never found him the least bit interesting. I'm glad I didn't live in his era.

But of course I had to suffer Julia Roberts. So there's no escape really.

R40 = dumb millennial STEM major who can't understand why his university still has a Classics department.

He was GAY and mostly fucked men. His “relationships” with women were purely for show. He basically acted his entire life. You don’t think that would drive his spouse insane? He didn’t give a shit about Plowright or Vivien Leigh, just the security it brought his career. He was also a HUGE ASSHOLE. How Plowright treated him at the end of his life is not surprising.

I don’t want to reinforce the ‘another gay actor’ blurb, but Olivier is now well documented as having gay affairs. He and Leigh would entertain guests in their home which had a pool. People commented that Leigh would get drunk and go to bed and Larry would always end up (somehow) swimming nude in the pool with whatever attractive Male was a guest in the house.

Homosexuality was illegal in Britain until 1967. It would never have been an option for Olivier to be a gay man when young. He was obviously highly sexed and just went with women initially. But as his success grew and he gained private and safe access to men, he would have started Male affairs. Most men would never have been brave enough to go out cruising and would have gone without or gone with women.

Joan Plowright and Richard Burton :

"In 1983 Joan had another success in the West End, as Madame Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard. That same year she met Richard Burton again. Elizabeth Taylor had gone, so had her successor, and he was alone.

"We had a glass of wine," Joan later recalled, "and after mutual confessions of certain traumatic events in both our lives, he suggested, half-jokingly, that we might set up house together . .. We laughed about what people would say, and I said, also half-jokingly, that for me it would be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. Anyway, I told him, I had a commitment for life, however difficult it might be."

Olivier was such a ham, most notably to me in REBECCA. Also in some of his other films, he plays to the cheap seats...he was mean to both Merle Oberon and Joan Fontaine, his leading ladies in two of his most important American films, because he wanted Viv as his leading lady instead. Entitled and petulant.

Olivier' younger son Richard (from Joan Plowright) treated him his father shit as well :

"Richard then came with his new wife to live at the Malthouse. Joan was often away working. As a teenager, Richard had seen his father only as a frail old man, and his example of strength had been his mother. He remembered endless silent dinner tables. Later, when his father was too frail to decide how to spend his time, he and Joan would decide for him.

"She would ask my advice, we would consult together at one end of the dining table, while my father became the child, helplessly looking on from the other. I remembered . . . the flashes of bitter resentment that would pass across his face as he struggled even to hear the plans we were making for him. And I remembered [added Richard, with the same instinct for guilt and remorse that had been such a curse to his father] the sadistic pleasure I had felt in not repeating them louder so he could participate, or dare to refuse.

" I had revelled in the opportunity to punish him, for being away, for being ill whatever it was." Tamsin had seen the same thing. "He admired my mother as an actress and he loved her, but that was very difficult for her. It meant she went to work and couldn't look after him. He was furious with her about that. There was a sense of Mum taking power, and he loathed that. He could be vitriolic, use vile language, and say we were ganging up against him."

I meant, treated his father like shit....

[quote]Who the fuck names a child Tarquin?

My son Sheridan's roommate is named Tarquin!

R49 So Richard was punishing his father for being ill??!! WTF?

I checked her IMDB filmography and the only things I've seen her in are [italic]Avalon[/italic] and [italic]I Love You to Death[/italic]. Am I missing out on a great talent?

R43 is my favorite post on DL in ages.

R53 Plowright is very good at playing certain types (like most known performers.) Look at [italic] Enchanted April [/italic] (1992). It has a divine cast, including a young Polly Walker, who was later deliciously evil in [italic] Rome. [/italic]

An interesting thing about it is it was made for British TV, then released in theaters as a film. But it looks GREAT....not cheaply done at all.

[italic]Howard's End [/italic] (1992) is another great film Plowright is in, though she has a small role.

This is one of her scenes from [italic] Enchanted April. [/italic]

Vivien Leigh Humiliated Olivier

Thanks, R55 & R56.

Plowright isn't in HOWARD'S END. That's Vanessa Redgrave.

Are you people aware that Sarah Miles is CRAZY? Must be his type.

And it's Howards End, without the apostrophe. Like Finnegans Wake.

[quote]r57 Vivien Leigh Humiliated Olivier

By having an affair with costar Peter Finch? Olivier was busy fucking Danny Kaye for years, and they weren't even acting together.

And how "humiliating" is it to have your husband sell your home out from under you, while you're still living in it, no less? Or to not have a spouse pay adequate.sexual attention to you?

Leigh sounds like a real handful, but Olivier didn't even have the excuse of a manic depression diagnosis to fall back on.

"Rosalie, please... Don't think of them as drug addicts; think of them as killers."

Sorry, bitches, but if even this was all Joan ever did, it's enough for me.

[quote]R59 Plowright isn't in HOWARD'S END.

Oh dearie, dearie me....you're absolutely [italic] right [/italic] [bold] : ( [/bold]

I was mixing her up with Prunella Scales, who plays Aunt Juley (!!)

Joan Plowright was an ugly old ham of an actress who looked 60 when she was 30. She was thoroughly terrible in Enchanted April, with her endless mugging.

Howard's End was such boring crap.

I don't miss that sort of rubbish AT ALL.

R62 Is it a FACT that Olivier and Danny Kaye were fucking?!

Also, Vivien was a sex addict (probably due to her Manic depressive illness), it was Not normal to want your husband to fuck you all the time.

Even Peter Finch said "'Sex was a sickness with her. It was not only a powerful stimulant for her, but as addictive as any drug. I was a young man then, and it was like Christmas every day - but poor Larry. Poor Larry. She must have been killing him.'

If Olivier fucked women for show, why the long secret affair with Sarah Miles?

The queens on here never seem to grasp BISEXUALITY. I've had to deal with this for years and it's getting old.

Vivien Leigh Tormented Olivier

Sarah Miles wrote a three part autobiography. The second book was almost entirely IN BED WITH OLIVIER. Fine if you find him fascinating, which she seemed to think everyone would.

R70 No wonder Joan Plowright is bitter, to have your husband' mistress write a book about her time with him.

God knows what she thought, R71.

blurb for the second part of her memoir:

[quote]While she was at RADA - she made a list of dreams and to her amazement found them coming true. Not only did she become a film star first time around with TERM OF TRIAL, but she was acting opposite the very man she'd adored since her childhood memories of WUTHERING HEIGHTS, Laurence Olivier. During filming in Paris, Sarah finally became Heathcliff's Cathy. But the stress of keeping their relationship a secret finally took its toll, until her agent, frustrated because she was becoming a recluse, took her to a party where she met her knight in shining armor, Robert Bolt.

He's a revelation in "Carrie" (1952, based on the Dreiser novel). Just about his best film work.

R73 Yes, he is very alive in that. And I think the usually somewhat stilted Jennifer Jones was better than usual in it, too (though not necessarily in this clip.)

They should remake that as a miniseries for Hulu or something.

She was maudlin and full of self-pity. She was magnificent.

R68, That's a STRETCH even for your meager mind.

R75 Are you referring to the character of Cleopatra in Shaw's play (and Vivien's not-very-successful movie version of it?

R72 That wacky, urine-drinking minx deserves a thread of her own. She destroyed two potentially-great British movies.

R43 are you the same anonymous, single-thought griper who's at R26?

R50 Please! Leave your excrement in your own toilet and keep it out of DL!

Oh my sides! R44, I'm about 20 years too be old to be a millennial, thanks anyway for that. It's just that I don't consider this topic to be a scintillating subjectfor gossip.

Now do you perhaps need your colostomy bag changed?

Who drinks piss?

Sarah Kilometres?

Didn't she fuck Lord Snowdon?

Sarah Miles is a nutjob who has turned into another Shirley Maclaine with her psychic healing crap. She had a small window in the early 70s where she was the Bright Young Thing, appearing in all sorts of new wave crap that no one watches anymore; her big studio role was in the execrable Ryan's Daughter, easily Lean's worst movie. She's an attention whore and not to be believed.

[quote] Most men would never have been brave enough to go out cruising

Ahem.

R82 John Gielgud was rather foolish (and so was Alec Guinness, to a milder degree) but Johnny should have kept to the private-party circuit.

But all of these is peripheral to the great Lord Olivier and his contribution to films, theatre, Shakespeare, British patriotism to which he have his priorities.

People of his generation weren't as obsessed with sex as we are.

Olivier was a ham. I see nothing 'great' in his film performances, at least. Maybe it is because he belongs to another time but he pretty much chewed every bit of scenery he came across.

R84 Which films are you talking about?

Some of the characters he played are 'larger than life' and supposed to 'chew the scenery'. Have you seen 'Carrie' mentioned at R73 and R74? It is a very low-key, poignant American story.

Were you forced to study Shakespeare in school? That's OK. But later on you could try 'Richard III' from 1955 because it's in color and his character is quite entertaining and funny.

I could tell you that he was very beautiful in the 1930s but It sounds like you've made your mind up and you're too masculine to try and open your mind to different experiences.

He was definitely beautiful, even into middle age.

Stunning in Wuthering Heights.

"Joan Plowright abandoned him in his time of need, she left him alone with nurses."

Oh shut up, you stupid twat. What was she supposed to do, spend 24 hours of every day with him? She had a life to lead. I suppose you think she should have single–handedly cared for his every need and never left his bedside for even a moment. No one could do that. He had nurses, but then every person as ill as he was would have to have had nurses. Enough with the stupid hate towards Joan.

Put the words "laurence olivier young" into Google Images and you'll see two fantastic pictures of him wearing a hipster beard and striped T-shirt in a sunny garden with a dog.

He's as pretty as sucking Griffin Barrows

"He was GAY and mostly fucked men. His “relationships” with women were purely for show."

You are insane. Olivier was VERY into women, well into old age. In fact, when he was with Vivien Leigh they were quite demonstrative and people would comment on their "sexual greediness" for each other. Here's an example of their lust for each other from a Vivien Leigh biography:

Olivier often took a 15 hour flight just to spend one day with Vivien. Once, due to a delay, he was unable to return on time to the theater for a performance, so Selznick (David) allowed the lovers to meet halfway at the Hotel Meulbach in Kansas City. "Oh, David, I'm so grateful," she said to him on her return. "Larry met me in the hotel lobby, and we went upstairs and we fucked and we fucked and we fucked the whole weekend."

Larry and some unknown dame

R2 Joan Plowright (aged 88) is nearly blind; and so is Dame Judi (aged 83). Prunella Scales (mentioned in R64) is 85 and has dementia. None of them can work on stage anymore.

R67 No, No! They were rehearsing the song ‘Three Juvenile Delinquents' at the London Palladium in a charity show 'Night of 100 Stars' for the Actors Orphanage in January 1955.

Olivier was a Promethean actor who loved all kinds of theatre from High Culture to vulgar music hall.

"Macbeth," r32. "With Tarquin's ravishing strides,..."

"Odd fact" I once read about Olivier: In no movie did he show his real and hated nose. Always altered.

^ The same with Orson Welles.

r73 [quote]He's a revelation in "Carrie" (1952, based on the Dreiser novel). Just about his best film work.

Agreed, CARRIE is a rare low-key, soulful performance from him, dipping into the self-loathing of THE ENTERTAINER without it becoming a crutch to his performance.

But really, performances of that level are few and far between from Larry. Ralph Richardson was a far more natural screen actor.

Olivier was considered the greatest English speaking Stage Actor. On screen, he could be hammy, to say the least, if he didn't have a stronger director (Wyler/Hitchcock) to tone him down.

There was a film clip I saw here on DL. Some kind of home movie with but the color was very good. It featured many actors and there was the briefest scene of him and Vivien in a marvelous close-up and they looked so fucking beautiful. I mean just stunning. It was young times, a time they had the world by the tit (I always remember that line from "Frances"). That is the way I like to think of them.

I fervently adore Vivien Leigh. I'm so-so on Olivier but agree with others that he was fabulous in the Sister Carrie movie. I don't know why but I really love that film.

I LOVED her in Avalon. She was adorable as the matriarchal Jewish mother.

But, boy - the woman in the middle was AWFUL. Worst thing in the whole movie.

I remember reading that Viv had a steady supply of hunky workmen to choose from as they did renovations around her house. In a phase from her mental illness, she would give the man she fancied for that day a high sign and he would drop his tool belt and pants and go running.

R100 Anecdotes like that are more credible if you can give a name or a date or some kind of motivation— because people in 1940s Britain had different morals to people like us.

I alwys heard he was gay....wtf?

Lesbianism Most Foul!

Only a cunt would name his son Tarquin.

The film R97 is referring to. Viv and Larry are at 3:27.

Larry was a homosexual who also fucked fish.

her marriage to sir lawrence was eclipsed by his former marriage to scarlet o'hara. id be bitter too under these circumstances.

She was plain for sure, but I don’t think Vivian Leigh was a great beauty, actually.

Tarquin is a horrible name to inflict on a child. In legend, he was the son of the last King of Rome (also named Tarquin). He raped a maiden named Lucretia, who denounced him and committed suicide. The populace rose up, overthrew the king, and established the Roman Republic. Whether he was named after the father or the son, it’s a hateful name to give to a child - says a lot about Sir Lawrence, I think.

Plowright gave a fine performance in Jonathan Miller's(?) production of "The Merchant of Venice." She went toe-to-toe against Olivier in the scene where "a pound of flesh" is waiting to be taken.