Laurence Olivier

Born: May 22 1907
Where: Dorking, Surrey, UK

Died: July 11 1989, Steyning, West Sussex, UK (natural causes)

Olivier is widely regarded as this century's consummate English-speaking theatrical actor.

Career highlights include Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, Sleuth, Othello, The Entertainer and Richard III.

He was born into a severe, confining religious household, presided over by a cleric who moved his family through a number of parish districts.

Young Olivier took refuge in play-acting and had played several Shakespearean roles by his mid-teens.

So successful was his portrayal of Puck in A Midsummer's Night Dream at the School of St Edward that even his pious father encouraged him to apply to London's Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Arts.

As a student there, Olivier secured his first professional acting credits - as a stage manager and understudy in Through the Crack and as Lennox in Macbeth.

Upon graduation, Olivier became a member of Sir Barry Vincent Jackson's Birmingham Repertory Company and landed his first leading role at the age of twenty.

His early film work was unimpressive and his outspoken disdain for film in general undoubtedly contributed to his wooden performances in The Yellow Ticket and Perfect Understanding.

It was Shakespeare and Freud who turned Olivier's career around in the mid-1930s.

In 1935, London was undergoing a Shakespeare revival, largely thanks to John Gielgud's successful production of Hamlet.

For his next production, Gielgud chose Olivier to play Romeo and, in spite of complaints that his performance was shallow and athletic, the play was another huge hit.

In 1937, Olivier was offered the role of Hamlet and given a copy of Ernest Jones' Essays in Applied Psychoanalysis by the play's director, Tyrone Guthrie.

Olivier became fascinated with the idea of adapting Freudian psychology to his character.

He would bring this psychological intensity to bear upon his next important film performance, in 1939's Wuthering Heights.

Instead of a stock-in-trade doomed lover, Olivier played Heathcliff with a smoldering undercurrent, one that carried over into his subsequent performances in Rebecca, "Pride and Prejudice and That Hamilton Woman.

As a director, Olivier adapted this duality of artifice and immediacy to cinematic techniques in his Shakespearean films.

Henry V begins in a blatantly false Globe Theatre and gradually opens out into an intensely cinematic battle at Agincourt.

Hamlet employs voice-over interior monologues for Hamlet's soliloquies and enlists Wellesian deep focus and ominous moving-camera shots to convey the fetid atmosphere of the restricted castle setting of Elsinore.

Richard III uses eye contact with the camera to permit the audience to become accomplices in the comically maniacal Richard's conspiracies.

From the end of WWII to the early 70s, Olivier made sporadic film appearances, largely owing to his involvement in the administration of London's St. James Theatre in the late 40s and the National Theatre at the Old Vic from 1963 to 1973.

With the film version of John Osborne's play The Entertainer, Olivier quit his romantic screen persona and introduced Olivier the character actor in the role of Archie Rice, the seedy, pathetic vaudevillian.

Now he began making film appearances in small character roles, often virtually unrecognizable beneath heavy makeup.

Most notable among these performances were the Madhi in Khartoum, the reclusive mystery writer in Sleuth and the evil Nazi dentist in 1976's Marathon Man.

In declining health, Olivier mustered his old fire in 1984 for a bittersweet, reflective television production of King Lear, a fitting swan song for an actor dedicated to depicting the life-spark of humanity.