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“... only Brando should play Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Other actors had been mentioned, including Laurence Olivier, Robert Mitchum and Sinatra. But Coppola held out; he shot a test in which Marlon made himself up as the old don, and set about finding a creaking, breathless voice for him. Then, in a trice, there was Brando, enthroned for that first ...”

“... of lovely young Sarah Grimes and her dashing fiancé, fresh from his English public school, with Laurence Olivier looks and P.G. Wodehouse affectations. As it turns out, he is a bigoted wife-beater, who never even makes it into middle management. Like her mother, Pookie, Sarah turns to drink and self-delusion. Her sister, Emily, meanwhile, wins a ...”

“... probably comes from Brando’s time shooting A Streetcar Named Desire, when he used to imitate Laurence Olivier for Vivien Leigh’s amusement. But what is Bosworth’s take on this sorry career? Her work comes in the wake of Peter Manso’s massive biography (1994), of Brando’s autobiography, and a 1999 update of Richard Schickel’s 1991 book. She ...”

“... of stage and screen. In one film she played opposite Ralph Richardson, whom she much liked, and Laurence Olivier, whom she did not, finding him selfish, offhand and cold. He was however preferable to Leslie Howard, who with his girlfriend for a time shared a house with the Havelock-Allans. Valerie’s best-known films were Great Expectations and Kind ...”

“... He moved sharpish up the literary food chain, becoming part of the talentocracy he was drawn to. Laurence Olivier commissioned him (along with Kenneth Tynan) to write a musical on nuclear war; the Spectator appointed him film critic, and his friend David Astor got him permanent residence and made him a regular reporter on the Observer. Lessing and Sigal ...”

“... one of a pair. She came to England the following year to star in The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier. At the initial press conference one of the straps on her dress broke with suspiciously good timing, whereupon she announced that she would very much like to appear in a film adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov. ‘Which one would you ...”

“... shots through the French trenches of World War One, an elegant ball on the eve of an execution; Laurence Olivier as a Roman patrician in the bathtub suggesting the joys of sex and power to the slave Tony Curtis; a cowboy riding a hydrogen bomb as if in a rodeo, an American strategy expert whose artificial arm keeps offering a Hitlerian salute; a large ...”

“... reaction was: ‘Oh no, not the ironing-board.’ He went on to write The Entertainer (in which Laurence Olivier played the lead), Luther (played by Albert Finney), Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson) and A Patriot for Me (which, along with Edward Bond’s later Saved, can be credited with having brought about the end of theatre ...”

“... and I was a cunt – Dance with a Stranger was a great film.’ Then there was the time when Laurence Olivier died, and Rupert was performing in Noël Coward’s play The Vortex with my friend Maria Aitken. At the end of the performance on the night in question, Maria called for three minutes’ silence in honour of the great actor. It is not hard ...”

“... pleasure in it: leading drama critic of the English-speaking world, newly-appointed dramaturg of Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre, someone who could claim, like Oscar Wilde, a symbolic relation to his time. The husband whose agonising death from emphysema she watched in California in 1980 (this is the book to give a smoker you love for ...”

“... to a little thing he was hosting. Who was there? Oh, you know, the usual crew: Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Hemingway’s great chum, the one he called ‘the Kraut’: Marlene Dietrich. ‘You could have knocked me over with a pin,’ Styron wrote to his aunt Edith, ‘when Leo took me over to meet Dietrich and she took my ...”

“... off the coup de grâce. It’s a gesture, Frink said, that she owed to the final moments of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, where Richard is viciously stabbed by a swarm of Lancastrian soldiers. He falls, then writhes and jerks in painful spasms, each marked in William Walton’s score by a dissonant chord. Then he collapses, his sword arm ...”

“... has not been to bed with. Such a pity.’ She cannot, however, be expected to reproduce what Edith Olivier said of him in the Twenties: ‘Willy looks a pitiable little cad-and a diseased one too – rather like a maggot.’ Laurence Whistler, in his biography of Rex Whistler, hastily excuses this stab from the Wiltshire ...”

“... neatly inserted Ray Peters’s surname at the first mention in the London Library copy).In 2004 Olivier Bell, Quentin Bell’s widow, asked Stansky how he felt about there being a new Life of Julian: Patricia Laurence, author of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes, had expressed an interest. Stansky, no doubt influenced by a ...”

“... theatrical visits, starting in 1935 with Maurice Evans in Hamlet at the Old Vic, followed there by Laurence Olivier in Macbeth and, at the Golders Green Hippodrome, by John Gielgud in Richard II. I was also taken to things picked out by myself: the Crazy Gang in OK for Sound at the London Palladium and Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, after I had heard ...”