Olivier, by Philip Ziegler – review

Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty  and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward VIII and Louis Mountbatten, whose correspondence he also edited. What has driven him to write about an actor — and one whose life has been fully covered in so many biographies, the most recent being Terry Coleman’s in 2005?

I take it he knows little of theatre on the inside and has had to base his book on the notoriously unreliable gossip of actors, not the least of whom was Olivier himself, a supreme fantasist. I am not even sure that Ziegler is a theatre buff. But there must be something which draws him to the subject, and it is gradually revealed in the course of the book: his approach is to treat Olivier as if he were a soldier or politician and not as an actor at all.

To this end he concentrates on Olivier’s time as director of the National Theatre. He is very selective of the performances he chooses to focus on — ignoring Olivier’s wonderful 1959 Coriolanus, for instance — but his approach keeps the narrative going.  The underlying purpose of the story turns out to be not the deification of an actor but the honouring of a leader. In an afterword he draws a detailed comparison between Olivier and Mountbatten and sees them both, like Noël Coward’s captain in his wartime epic In Which We Serve, as the epitome of the stiff upper lip: ‘A tight ship is a happy ship.’

You realise this is where he has been going from the beginning. He has not drawn back from the many flaws in his subject — the vanity, the self-centredness —and indeed has used them to highlight the heroic figure that eventually emerges.