page_title: Laurence Olivier
section_title: Last years with Leigh (1955–1956)
hierarchical_section_title: Laurence Olivier / Life and career / Last years with Leigh (1955–1956)
caption_attribution_description: English: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier on a train in Maribor. Slovenščina: Vivien Leigh in Laurence Olivier na brzovlaku v Mariboru.
context_page_description: Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor and director who, along with his contemporaries Ralph Richardson, Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He also worked in films throughout his career, playing more than fifty cinema roles. Late in his career, he had considerable success in television roles.
  His family had no theatrical connections, but Olivier's father, a clergyman, decided that his son should become an actor. After attending a drama school in London, Olivier learned his craft in a succession of acting jobs during the late 1920s. In 1930 he had his first important West End success in Noël Coward's Private Lives, and he appeared in his first film. In 1935 he played in a celebrated production of Romeo and Juliet alongside Gielgud and Ashcroft, and by the end of the decade he was an established star. In the 1940s, together with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier was the co-director of the Old Vic, building it into a highly respected company. There his most celebrated roles included Shakespeare's Richard III and Sophocles's Oedipus.
context_section_description: In 1955 Olivier and Leigh were invited to play leading roles in three plays at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford. They began with Twelfth Night, directed by Gielgud, with Olivier as Malvolio and Leigh as Viola. Rehearsals were difficult, with Olivier determined to play his conception of the role despite the director's view that it was vulgar. Gielgud later commented:
  Somehow the production did not work. Olivier was set on playing Malvolio in his own particular rather extravagant way. He was extremely moving at the end, but he played the earlier scenes like a Jewish hairdresser, with a lisp and an extraordinary accent, and he insisted on falling backwards off a bench in the garden scene, though I begged him not to do it. ... But then Malvolio is a very difficult part.
  The next production was Macbeth. Reviewers were lukewarm about the direction by Glen Byam Shaw and the designs by Roger Furse, but Olivier's performance in the title role attracted superlatives. To J. C. Trewin, Olivier's was "the finest Macbeth of our day"; to Darlington it was "the best Macbeth of our time". Leigh's Lady Macbeth received mixed but generally polite notices, although to the end of his life Olivier believed it to have been the best Lady Macbeth he ever saw.
  In their third production of the 1955 Stratford season, Olivier played the title role in Titus Andronicus, with Leigh as Lavinia. Her notices in the part were damning, but the production by Peter Brook and Olivier's performance as Titus received the greatest ovation in Stratford history from the first-night audience, and the critics hailed the production as a landmark in post-war British theatre. Olivier and Brook revived the production for a continental tour in June 1957; its final performance, which closed the old Stoll Theatre in London, was the last time Leigh and Olivier acted together.
  Leigh became pregnant in 1956 and withdrew from the production of Coward's comedy South Sea Bubble. The day after her final performance in the play she miscarried and entered a period of depression that lasted for months. The same year Olivier decided to direct and produce a film version of The Sleeping Prince, retitled The Prince and the Showgirl. Instead of appearing with Leigh, he cast Marilyn Monroe as the showgirl. Although the filming was challenging because of Monroe's behaviour, the film was appreciated by the critics.
caption: Olivier and Leigh in 1957
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