My Father Laurence Olivier - Hardcover

Olivier, Tarquin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747206112 ISBN 13: 9780747206118

Publisher: Trafalgar Square, 1993

Synopsis

Book by Olivier, Tarquin

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Tarquin Olivier's second book, first published in Great Britain, follows his The Eye of the Day (1964--not reviewed). Here, he hopes to set the record straight, especially about canards passed on by Donald Spoto, Thomas Kiernan, and a round dozen Olivier biographers whose works succeed and add to each other, Tarquin says, with ever more rarified but unforgivable garbage--such as the notion that Olivier had homosexual ties with Kenneth Tynan and Danny Kaye (a tale for which Spoto gave no references), or that the lesbianism of Olivier's first wife and Tarquin's mother, Jill Esmond, occasioned her distancing herself from Larry. ``This is a book mainly about Jill, Larry, Vivien and what it was like to grow up among them,'' Tarquin tells us at the start of his very personal memoir. It's not a full-fledged biography--and leaves out most of Olivier's marriage with Joan Plowright and many of the works of his later years--because Tarquin and his father (rarely close) really became friends only in Olivier's middle age; then when Tarquin married and Olivier remarried, they parted for 17 years, coming together again only when Olivier needed his son in America during the filming of The Betsy. All told, it's a rather sad book that never fudges about Olivier's pathetic self-involvement and general lack of love and givingness. His big love was Vivien Leigh, while his autobiography, written in choleric old age, draws a veil over the actor's heartlessness in racing home from the set of Fire Over England, smelling of his love scenes with Vivien, to attend Jill's accouchement with Tarquin, and the next day bringing Vivien to visit Jill. Choice all the way and filled with unpublished letters from Larry to Tarquin, Jill, and others that reveal a charming but guilt-ridden Olivier. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Though the senior Olivier callously abandoned Tarquin and his mother, actress Jill Esmond, shortly after his birth in 1936, Tarquin apparently never bore any enduring ill-will toward his wayward and indifferent parent. Rather than dwelling on Olivier's well-documented shortcomings as a husband, a father, and a human being, the author prefers to emphasize Larry's development as a thespian and his astonishingly rapid evolution from young hopeful to one of the premier theatrical talents of the twentieth century. Understandably, a great deal of attention is devoted to examining Olivier's doomed first marriage; in fact, Jill Esmond emerges as the unacknowledged guiding force behind his early success on the stage. Tarquin also faithfully recounts his father's passionate, tempestuous, and ultimately tragic relationship with the lovely but unstable Vivien Leigh. Since Olivier virtually cut Tarquin out of his life upon his marriage to actress Joan Plowright in 1960, very little information about Olivier's declining years is provided. Interspersed with numerous excerpts from family letters and fuzzy personal anecdotes, this often saccharine and highly selective chronicle is more filial tribute than conventional biography. Margaret Flanagan

About this edition

• Publisher: Trafalgar Square
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0747206112
• ISBN 13: 9780747206118
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288