Laurence Olivier: Age, Wife, Children, Net Worth & Movies

For more than half a century, Laurence Olivier was the standard by which every other actor was measured. On stage he was the great Shakespearean of his age, and on film he did something no one has matched since: he directed himself to an Academy Award for Best Actor.

He played Heathcliff, Hamlet and Richard III, built Britain’s National Theatre from nothing, and married Vivien Leigh in the most famous theatrical romance of the century. His was a life lived at the very centre of English acting.

Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82, a baron of the realm, married for the third time, the father of four children, and the owner of one of the great careers in the history of performance. This is his story.

Quick Facts

What Was Laurence Olivier’s Childhood Like?

Laurence Kerr Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, in Dorking, Surrey, the youngest of three children of the Reverend Gerard Kerr Olivier and his wife Agnes. The family had no theatrical connections at all. His father was a Church of England clergyman of the high-church, ritualist wing, a dramatic preacher whose pulpit performances his son never forgot.

The family moved often in Olivier’s early years, following his father’s temporary church posts. Stability arrived in 1912, when Gerard Olivier became assistant rector at St Saviour’s, Pimlico, and held the post for six years.

Young Laurence showed his gift astonishingly early. At the choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street, the ten-year-old played Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1917 before an audience that included the legendary Ellen Terry, who wrote in her diary that the small boy was already a great actor. At St Edward’s School, Oxford, his Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream made him a school hero. When his elder brother left for India in 1924, Laurence asked his father how soon he could follow. His father replied: don’t be such a fool, you’re not going to India, you’re going on the stage.

How Did Laurence Olivier Train as an Actor?

In 1924 Olivier won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art in London. He was, by his own admission, not a very conscientious student, but his talent was obvious, and among his contemporaries was Peggy Ashcroft, who would remain a friend and colleague for life.

He learned his craft the hard way, in small touring companies, making his first stage appearance at the Brighton Hippodrome in August 1925. In 1926, on Sybil Thorndike’s recommendation, he joined the Birmingham Repertory Company, which his biographer called his university. There he played everything from Tony Lumpkin to the title role in Uncle Vanya, and formed a lifelong friendship with Ralph Richardson.

His first important West End success came in 1930, when Noël Coward cast him in Private Lives. Coward became a kind of mentor, curing the young actor of his habit of giggling on stage and teaching him, as Olivier put it, a sense of balance. By the end of the 1930s, after a celebrated Romeo and Juliet in 1935 opposite John Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, he was an established star.

How Did Vivien Leigh Change Laurence Olivier’s Life?

In 1937 Olivier was cast in the film Fire Over England, and his co-star was a young actress named Vivien Leigh. Both were married to other people. What followed was one of the great love affairs of the century, conducted in public and on stage, and it changed both their lives completely.

They married in 1940, after Olivier’s divorce from his first wife, Jill Esmond, and Leigh’s from her husband. Together they became the golden couple of the British theatre, beautiful, gifted and endlessly photographed. In the 1940s, with Richardson and John Burrell, Olivier co-directed the Old Vic, building it into a great company, and there his celebrated roles included Richard III and Oedipus.

The marriage lasted twenty years, but Leigh’s health, physical and mental, deteriorated badly through the 1950s, and the relationship could not survive it. They divorced in 1960. It was the defining romance of Olivier’s life, and its ending broke him for a time.

How Did Wuthering Heights Make Laurence Olivier a Film Star?

Olivier had always looked down on films, calling cinema an anaemic little medium. Hollywood soon changed his mind about the money, if not the art. In 1939 he played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, opposite Merle Oberon, and became an international star overnight.

The brooding, Byronic Heathcliff was the perfect vehicle for his dark good looks and barely contained intensity, and the performance earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. A year later he played Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, another huge success, and Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

He was now that rare thing: a serious stage actor who was also a genuine film star. He never quite trusted Hollywood, and Hollywood never quite knew what to do with him, but the combination of the two careers made him the most famous English actor alive.

Why Is Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet Still the Greatest Shakespeare Film?

During the war years Olivier conceived an extraordinary project: a trilogy of Shakespeare films in which he would both direct and star. Henry V arrived in 1944, a stirring wartime pageant, and it brought him a special Academy Honorary Award in 1947.

Then came Hamlet in 1948, and it remains the landmark. Olivier’s melancholy, Freudian prince, filmed in deep-focus black and white on vast Elsinore sets, won the Academy Award for Best Picture and made Olivier the Best Actor winner. He remains the only actor ever to have directed himself to the Best Actor Oscar, a record that still stands.

He completed the trilogy with Richard III in 1955, another Oscar-nominated performance as the hunchbacked villain. Few screen careers have a run to match those three films. It was the moment when Richard Burton, another great Shakespearean voice of the age, was still waiting in the wings, and Olivier stood alone at the summit. For the fullest record of his stage and screen work, his life and career on Wikipedia remains an excellent place to keep reading.

How Did Laurence Olivier Rebuild His Career with The Entertainer?

By the mid-1950s Olivier’s stage career had stalled. The great classical actor looked, to a new generation of angry young playwrights, like a monument from another age. Then, in 1957, he did the bravest thing of his career.

He joined the avant-garde English Stage Company at the Royal Court to play Archie Rice, the seedy, failing music-hall comedian at the heart of John Osborne’s The Entertainer. It was a deliberate act of self-destruction and rebirth, and it worked completely. Olivier said playing Archie made him feel like a modern actor again, and he later repeated the role on film.

The production changed his personal life too. The role of Archie’s daughter Jean was played by a young actress named Joan Plowright, and Olivier began a relationship with her that would endure for the rest of his life. They married in 1961 and stayed together until his death.

How Did Laurence Olivier Create the National Theatre?

In 1963 Olivier took on the greatest administrative task of his life: he became the founding director of Britain’s National Theatre. Starting from nothing, he built a resident company at the Old Vic that became one of the great theatre ensembles in the world, fostering a generation of future stars.

He led from the front as well as from the office. His own performances for the National included the title role in Othello in 1965, filmed the same year in a performance that brought him another Oscar nomination, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in 1970.

He ran the company until 1973, ten exhausting years that cemented his place as the central figure of twentieth-century English theatre. Like his great contemporary Alec Guinness, Olivier moved all his life between stage and screen, but the National was the achievement he guarded most fiercely. Among the young talents he championed there was Peter O’Toole, whose Hamlet in the National’s early seasons announced a major new star.

What Were Laurence Olivier’s Greatest Later Films?

Even while running the National Theatre, Olivier kept working in films, and his later screen career was remarkably rich. In Spartacus in 1960 he played the scheming Roman Crassus opposite Kirk Douglas. In Sleuth in 1972 he sparred deliciously with Michael Caine in a two-hander of deception, earning another Oscar nomination.

In Marathon Man in 1976 he played a Nazi war criminal and former concentration camp dentist, a genuinely terrifying performance that brought him yet another Oscar nomination. The much-repeated story says that when his young co-star Dustin Hoffman stayed up for days to play an exhausted man, Olivier advised him simply to try acting.

His last great film role came in The Boys from Brazil in 1978, as the Nazi-hunter Ezra Lieberman, which earned him his final competitive Oscar nomination. Late television work, including Brideshead Revisited in 1981 and King Lear in 1983, showed that the old fire had never really gone out.

What Was Laurence Olivier’s Net Worth at Death?

Olivier worked relentlessly for more than sixty years, on stage, in films and on television, and he was paid accordingly. He was also careful with money in a way many stars are not, spending the last fifteen years of his life deliberately securing his family’s finances, including a famous series of Polaroid camera advertisements in 1972.

Celebrity Net Worth estimates that Laurence Olivier had a net worth equal to $20 million at the time of his death in 1989, after adjusting for inflation. As with all such figures for stars of his era, it is an attributed estimate rather than an official valuation, but it is the figure most commonly quoted.

The fortune reflected one of the longest and most varied earning lives in show business: six decades of stage salaries, film fees, directing work, television and, in his later years, the steady income of a national institution. For a clergyman’s son who started on £60 film jobs, it was a remarkable ending balance.

Who Were Laurence Olivier’s Three Wives?

Olivier married three times, and each marriage belonged to a different chapter of his life. His first wife was the actress Jill Esmond, whom he married on July 25, 1930. He later called the marriage a pretty crass mistake, and it ended in divorce in 1940. Their son Tarquin was born in 1936.

His second marriage was the famous one. He married Vivien Leigh in 1940, after both had divorced their spouses, and for twenty years they were the most glamorous couple in the English theatre. Leigh’s illnesses wore the marriage down, and the divorce came in 1960.

In March 1961 he married Joan Plowright, the young actress he had met on The Entertainer. This was the marriage that lasted. They had three children together and remained together until his death in 1989, through the long decline of his health.

How Many Children Did Laurence Olivier Have?

Olivier had four children. His eldest, (Simon) Tarquin Olivier, was born in August 1936 during his first marriage to Jill Esmond. Tarquin later wrote a memoir of his father.

With Joan Plowright he had three more: a son, Richard, born in December 1961, and two daughters, Tamsin Agnes Margaret, born in January 1963, and Julie-Kate, born in July 1966. Richard became a theatre director, and Julie-Kate an actress.

The children of the third marriage grew up in the long, settled final chapter of Olivier’s life, at the family’s homes in Sussex, during the years when their father was building the National Theatre and fighting his failing health at the same time.

What Were Laurence Olivier’s Final Years Like?

Olivier’s health declined seriously from the 1970s onward. He suffered from thrombosis and from dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder that at one point put him in hospital for three months. He kept working through it all, at a pace that astonished everyone around him.

His honours in those years were the kind given to national monuments. He had been knighted in 1947 and made a life peer, Baron Olivier, in 1970. In 1981 he received the Order of Merit, and in 1979 the Academy gave him his second Honorary Oscar.

He died at his home in Ashurst, West Sussex, on July 11, 1989, at the age of 82, after a long decline. A memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey that October, and his ashes were later buried in Poets’ Corner, among the greatest writers in English history. Few actors have ever been so honoured.

Lesser-Known Facts About Laurence Olivier

• When his brother left for India in 1924, Olivier’s clergyman father told him: you’re not going to India, you’re going on the stage.
• At ten years old, his performance as Brutus in a school Julius Caesar moved the great Ellen Terry to write that he was already a great actor.
• In 1928 he created the role of Stanhope in the premiere of Journey’s End, then turned down the West End transfer to play Beau Geste instead. The transfer was a triumph; his play flopped.
• He remains the only actor to have won the Best Actor Oscar for a performance in a film he directed himself.
• Across his career he received twelve Academy Award nominations as an actor, director and producer, winning twice competitively and receiving two Honorary Oscars.
• In 1972, to secure his family’s finances, he made a famous series of television advertisements for Polaroid cameras.
• His ashes rest in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, one of the highest honours England can give an artist.

Frequently Asked Questions

How old was Laurence Olivier when he died?

Laurence Olivier died on July 11, 1989, at the age of 82. He had been born on May 22, 1907, in Dorking, Surrey, England, and he died at his home in Ashurst, West Sussex, after a long decline in health.

How many Oscars did Laurence Olivier win?

He won four Academy Awards in total. Two were competitive, both for Hamlet in 1948: Best Picture and Best Actor. He also received two Academy Honorary Awards, in 1947 for Henry V and in 1979 for his lifetime of work. He was nominated twelve times altogether.

Who were Laurence Olivier’s wives?

He was married three times: to the actress Jill Esmond from 1930 to 1940, to Vivien Leigh from 1940 to 1960, and to Joan Plowright from 1961 until his death in 1989.

How many children did Laurence Olivier have?

He had four children: Simon Tarquin, born in 1936 during his first marriage, and Richard, Tamsin Agnes Margaret and Julie-Kate, born between 1961 and 1966 during his marriage to Joan Plowright.

What was Laurence Olivier’s net worth?

Celebrity Net Worth estimates that Laurence Olivier’s net worth at his death in 1989 was equal to $20 million after adjusting for inflation. It is an attributed estimate built on a career of more than sixty years across stage, film and television.

What did Laurence Olivier die of?

No single cause was publicised. He died after a long decline in health that had included thrombosis and dermatomyositis, a degenerative muscle disorder, and he passed away peacefully at his home in Sussex.

Final Thoughts

Laurence Olivier’s gift was completeness. He could play a king and a music-hall comic, direct a film and run a national institution, and do all of it at the highest level anyone had ever seen. No actor of his century attempted more, and none achieved more.

The National Theatre stands as his monument in bricks and mortar, and the Shakespeare films as his monument on screen. But his real monument is the standard he set. Every classical actor since has worked in his shadow.

Heathcliff on the moors, Hamlet with the skull, Archie Rice grinning through the wreckage. Three performances from three different worlds, all unmistakably Olivier. That is why, more than thirty-five years after his death, the name still means the thing itself: acting, at its greatest.