Laurence Olivier

His great-great-grandfather, Daniel Stephen Olivier, was from a French Huguenot family; they fled from France to England around the 17th century, as they were Protestants, who were being persecuted by the majority Catholics.

2014: His film version of Shakespeare's Hamlet (1948) is still, to date, the only film of a Shakespeare play to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and the only one to actually win an Oscar for acting (Olivier for Best Actor).

2001: Ranked tenth in the Orange Film Survey of greatest British actors.

A PBS documentary on Olivier's career broadcast in 1987 covered his first sojourn in Hollywood in the early 1930s with his first wife, Jill Esmond, and noted that her star was higher than his at that time. On film, he was upstaged by his second wife, too, even though the list of films he made is four times as long as hers.

1985: When presenting at the Oscars, he forgot to name the Best Picture nominees. He simply opened the envelope and proclaimed, "Amadeus (1984)".

In his 1983 autobiography "Confessions of an Actor", Olivier writes that upon meeting Marilyn Monroe preparatory to the commencement of production of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), he was convinced he was going to fall in love with her. During production, Olivier bore the brunt of Marilyn's famous indiscipline and wound up despising her. However, he admits that she was wonderful in the film, the best thing in it, her performance overshadowing his own, and that the final result was worth the aggravation.

Portrayals by other actors: Anthony Gordon in Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980); Anthony Higgins in Darlings of the Gods (1989); Andrew Clarke in Blonde (2001); Julian Sands in Kenneth Tynan: In Praise of Hardcore (2005); Kenneth Branagh in My Week with Marilyn (2011).

Olivier delivered one of the more eccentric acceptance speeches in 1979, upon receiving an Oscar statuette for Lifetime Achievement. His rundown of thanked Academy bigwigs, colleagues and friends included kudos to "my very noble and approved good masters", a quote from Shakespeare's "Othello", Act I, Scene 3, line 77. (Olivier had received a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the role in 1966, losing out to Lee Marvin.) Characterizing the acceptance speech, John J. O'Connor of the 'New York Times' wrote, "Olivier lapsed into a curiously rambling, slightly sticky, extended metaphor about stars and firmaments.".

The Olivier Theatre, the largest theatre in the new National Theatre complex on the south bank of the Thames, opened on 4 October 1976 with Albert Finney playing Christopher Marlowe's "Tamburlaine The Great", directed by Peter Hall. The Queen officially opened the National Theatre on October 25. Years later, Michael Caine met his former co-star at the theatre named after him, and asked him if he could get in for free. No, he could not, answered Olivier, but he told Caine that he would work on it.

He was seriously considered for the role of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972) before Marlon Brando was cast.

His oldest son by Jill Esmond, Tarquin Olivier, says in his 1993 memoir "My Father Laurence Olivier" that he was shocked when meeting his father in California in the early 1980s that he was dissatisfied with his career and felt something of a failure. Olivier belittled his own achievements and held up the career of Cary Grant as the paradigm of greatness. Grant, who had a fortune estimated at $70 million by Look Magazine in its February 23, 1971, issue (an amount equivalent to $300 million in 2003 dollars), was the person who presented Olivier with his career achievement Oscar in 1979. The two were acquaintances, never friends.

Wanted desperately to stage "Guys and Dolls" in the early 1970s, as he dreamed of playing Sky Masterson, but after stringing him along for several years, the board of governors of the National Theatre vetoed any chance of a production. After years of being hamstrung by the board, Olivier resigned as artistic director in 1973 without being able to name his successor. The governors appointed Peter Hall, founder of the National Theatre's great rival, the Royal Shakespeare Company, as director to replace Olivier. The move is widely seen as an insult to Olivier, who had given up an incalculable fortune in potential earnings in the commercial theater and in motion pictures to make his dream of a National Theatre a reality. However, he was honored by having the largest auditorium in the under-construction National Theatre building named after him. "Guys and Dolls" was eventually staged by the National Theatre in 1982.

Was gradually forced out of his position as head of the National Theatre by the board of directors after the board vetoed a production of Rolf Hochhuth's 1968 play "Soldaten" ("Soldiers"). The controversial play, championed by National Theatre dramaturge Kenneth Tynan, implied that Winston Churchill had arranged the death of General Wladyslaw Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish government-in-exile, and the fire-bombing of civilians during World War II. Olivier, who revered Churchill, backed his dramaturge, but Tynan was sacked and Olivier's position was undermined, thus compromising the independence of the National Theatre. After unsuccessfully canvassing Albert Finney, Olivier tried to interest Richard Burton in taking over the National Theatre after his imminent retirement from the post. Burton declined, seeing the great Olivier forced out of his beloved theater that he had built over two decades and for which he had become the first actor peer.

Luchino Visconti wanted to cast him in the title role of the Italian prince in The Leopard (1963), but his producer overruled him. The producer insisted on a box-office star to justify the lavish production's high budget and essentially forced Visconti to accept Burt Lancaster. A decade later, the two Oscar-winning actors competed again for the role of another Italian prince, Mafia chieftain Don Corleone, in The Godfather (1972), ultimately losing out to Marlon Brando, Olivier's only rival for the title of world's greatest actor.

Turned down the role of Humbert in Lolita (1962). He originally agreed with Stanley Kubrick, his director on Spartacus (1960), to appear in his film of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial classic, but dropped out on the advice of his agent. Ironically, Kubrick shared the same agent.

More than half of his film credits come after The Entertainer (1960), which started out as a play in London in 1957.

When the play moved across the Atlantic to Broadway in 1958, the role of "Archie Rice"'s daughter was taken over by Joan Plowright, who was also in the film.

Orson Welles wrote his novel Confidential Report (1955) during an extended stay with Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh. Welles was appearing at Olivier's St. James theater in London at the time in his fabled production of Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which had been produced by Mike Todd in New York. Todd, who later made the film without Welles's participation, had offered to produce a film version of "Macbeth" to be directed by and starring Olivier, but he died in 1958 before the plans could be finalized.

Carrie (1952) was a film that Olivier never talked about. George Hurstwood, a middle-aged married man from Chicago who tricked a young woman into leaving a younger man about to marry her, became a New York street person in the novel. Olivier played him as a somewhat nicer person who didn't fall quite as low.

In 1951, Olivier was working on a screen adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's novel "Sister Carrie" (Carrie (1952)) while Leigh was completing work on the film version of the Tennessee Williams' play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). She won her second Oscar for bringing "Blanche DuBois" to the screen.

In her autobiography "Limelight and After", Claire Bloom claims that her lover Olivier merely went through the motions during their affair in the mid-1950s. She thought Olivier seduced her as that was what a great actor was supposed to do.

His acting in Hamlet (1948) is discussed by Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye".

Knighted in the 1947 King's Birthday Honours List, made a life peer in the 1970 Queen's Birthday Honours List, awarded the Order of Merit in 1981.

There was almost a fourth film together in 1944 when Olivier and Leigh traveled to Scotland with Charles C. Bennett to research the real-life story of a Scottish girl accused of murdering her French lover. Bennett recalled that Olivier researched the story "with all the thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes" and "we unearthed evidence, never known or produced at the trial, that would most certainly have sent the young lady to the gallows". The film project was then abandoned. During their two-decade marriage, Olivier and Leigh appeared on the stage in England and America and made films whenever they really needed to make some money.

In 1940, she became his second wife after both returned from making films in America that were major box office hits of 1939.

His film was Wuthering Heights (1939), her film was Gone with the Wind (1939).

In 1937, she was "Ophelia" to his "Hamlet" in a special performance at Kronberg Castle, Elsinore, Denmark.

Vivien Leigh and Olivier were screen lovers in Fire Over England (1937), 21 Days Together (1940) and That Hamilton Woman (1941).

One of Olivier's earliest successes as a Shakespearean actor on the London stage came in 1935 when he played "Romeo" and "Mercutio" in alternate performances of "Romeo and Juliet" with John Gielgud. A young Englishwoman just beginning her career on the stage fell in love with Olivier's Romeo.

Was chosen to play Antonio in Queen Christina (1933) but was rejected by Greta Garbo after an initial meeting at the studio. The role later went to Garbo's former lover John Gilbert, whose career had hit bottom after the advent of sound. In his autobiography "Confessions of an Actor", Olivier says that he understands why she behaved the way she did, but in Felix Barker's 1953 "The Oliviers - A Biography", it was plain that Olivier and his career were hurt by being rejected by the biggest star in Hollywood. Olivier had had to sail from England to America, and then sail back, all under the harsh glare of the Hollywood publicity machine.

According to Olivier in his autobiography "Confessions of an Actor", when he went to Hollywood in the early 1930s as the "next Ronald Colman", one studio wanted to change his name to "Larry Oliver". He often wondered what his career would have been like if he kept that less-distinguished name, whether his career would have been as sorry as the name.

Laurence Olivier could speak William Shakespeare's lines as naturally as if he were "actually thinking them", said English playwright Charles Bennett, who met Olivier in 1927. Laurence Kerr Olivier was born in Dorking, Surrey, England, to Agnes Louise (Crookenden) and Gerard Kerr Olivier, a High Anglican priest. His surname came from a great-great-grandfather who was of French Huguenot origin.

Lifelong friends with Ralph Richardson, whom he met and befriended in London as a young acting student during the 1920s, he was dismayed that Richardson expected to play Buckingham in his film of Shakespeare's Richard III (1955). Olivier wanted Orson Welles, another friend, to play the role but could not deny his oldest friend. In his autobiography, Olivier says he wishes he had disappointed Richardson and cast Welles instead as he would have brought an extra element to the screen, an intelligence that would have gone well with the plot element of conspiracy.

Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890- 1945". Pages 837-843. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.