A endlessly watchable interview with Laurence Olivier which seems useful and inspirational for anyone in any art. Intelligence, precision, intuition, discipline, ambition. I only saw him once on stage, playing Shylock in Merchant of Venice at the Edinburgh Festival in 1970. He was getting on by then. That same Festival season I saw Prokofieff’s The Fiery Angel (see the bottom of the post)at the King’s Theatre. In the finale two dozen nuns bared their breasts on stage. It says something about my hormonal imbalance that at the time the two dozen bare-breasted nuns had a larger effect on my imagination than Laurence Olivier. (Okay, I know, not very bright.)
I think I have the whole interview. It’s a bit scattered about and not in a numbered order.
dg
The following is not the version of The Fiery Angel I saw in Edinburgh. In Edinburgh, it was bare breasts. Here it’s panties and garters, not the same effect at all. But you get the picture. Something about this opera got under my skin. It explains a lot (when you think about how I write).
But not to go on…
dg