Shakespeare’s great actors, from Olivier to Charlton Heston

Laurence Olivier and Ian McKellen make the cut but a history of great Shakespearean actors has some weird omissions.

Laurence Olivier as Macbeth and Judith Anderson as Lady Macbeth at London’s Old Vic. Picture: Getty

It’s inevitable with the work of any great dramatic genius that the actors capable of realising their vision should be at their level. Think of the astonishing perform­ances Ingmar Bergman could get out of Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow and needed to get if The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers were to become what those films were meant to be. Well, Shakespeare wasn’t a movie director (however much he sometimes seems as if he aspired to be) but it’s obvious from the plays that he wrote for — and possessed — actors of genius, the kind we call great.

We sometimes forget how collaborative the theatre is, how much a Stephen Sewell, to write what he does, needs a Neil Armfield or a Jim Sharman or a Geoffrey Rush; how Tennessee Williams needed actors such as Marlon Brando and directors such as Elia Kazan to work at all.

So we have Stanley Wells’s neatly named Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh. Back in the 1970s, there was a handsome edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works — edited by Peter Alexander, the last version to be universally admired — that came with the subheading “Burbage to Burton”. It featured not only the one portrait of the rugged Richard Burbage, who seems to have looked a bit like that tough British actor Trevor Howard — remember him in Brief Encounter and The Charge of the Light Brigade? — but the famous Angus McBean photo of the young, lyrically good-looking Richard Burton, looking upwards at the crown above his head at the moment Prince Hal fully imagines what it will be to become Henry V.

Rather weirdly, Wells leaves Burton out of this book, together with Vanessa Redgrave, Peter O’Toole, Maggie Smith, Ralph Fiennes, Helen Mirren, Glenda Jackson and (if you want to keep up with the young) Ben Whishaw, a remarkable Richard II in minor key for the BBC’s The Hollow Crown series to coincide with the London Olympics, a superb Ariel in the Julie Taymor film of The Tempest and the young man who took the world by storm when Trevor Nunn made him his teary, runny-nosed Hamlet with Imogen Stubbs as his 40-year-old mum. Whishaw, who played Keats for Jane Campion in Bright Star, is an actor of the first rank, which is all Will wanted.

He seems to have had it in Burbage, how else could the man have created the roles of Lear and Hamlet, Othello and Richard III? When Burbage died, some poetic hack wrote how the great roles “that lived in him have now forever died”, rather the way people might have thought: how can anyone play Richard III again now that Larry Olivier is dead.

They did, of course, and Wells cites critic Michael Billington on how Ian McKellen’s posh, fascist 30s Richard exhibited what Hannah Arendt in her famous phrase about Adolf Eichmann called “the banality of evil”. I’m not sure about that. When I saw Richard Eyre’s stage production — more mesmeric than the film — what was remarkable about McKellen was how much he played Richard III as a member of the royal family or, as someone said in the Times Literary Supplement, he was the first Richard who looked truly born to rule.

But there have always been Richards that court something other than Olivier’s shrill-voiced, Hitlerian hobgoblin. David Malouf is a great admirer of the Richard III of Ian Holm in the 60s Peter Hall-John Barton War of the Roses history cycle. Holm, another superb actor, has played a lot of the major roles in Shakespeare — he was a dazzlingly plausible Iago — and he is someone else Wells doesn’t devote a chapter to.

Not that we should complain too much. Wells acknowledges the existence of a man who must have been a very great actor indeed because he seems to have shifted the tilt of Shakespeare’s drama and his sense of comedy, the second of his great fools, Robert Armin.

Shakespeare seems to have written his more exuberant comic roles for Will Kemp, the man who, for a bet or a joke, danced from London to Norwich. He must have been a great comedian and it’s possible his repertoire included that greatest of all comic roles, Falstaff, the fat villain who loves the hero Hal.

But then like a shadow there is the figure of Armin for whom he writes Feste in Twelfth Night, the man who sings how like the tears of the world, the rain it raineth every day. The man too for whom he wrote the Fool in King Lear. It’s too easy to mythologise and sentimentalise these shadows and shrouds of Shakespeare’s intimates.

Like the Dark Lady and the Golden Boy of the sonnets, they exist primarily in our imaginations. But it does seem as if Shakespeare started out writing comedy for someone like Harry Secombe and ended up writing it — in its formal and formulaic aspect — for someone like Peter Sellers.

Then again, in the case of the dramatist who put all the world on to his stage, it’s not hard to imagine that Shakespeare’s leading men — his tragedians, as they were sometimes called — could get the dumbfounding sense of desolation that Donald Wolfit or Paul Scofield got in Lear, the ironic self-dramatising wit and plangent poeticism that John Gielgud got as Richard II and (if you can come at a prince in lyrical mode) as Hamlet. Or the sheer electrifying intensity of Olivier as Macbeth with Vivien Leigh sleepwalking through it at his side in the 20th century’s most highly regarded production of the Scottish tragedy. Though the McKellen-Judi Dench Macbeth with Nunn — intense, rhapsodic and urgent — is there on DVD as a testament to other dark stairways.

So too somewhere on the internet you’ll find Australia’s Zoe Caldwell holding murderous hands with the young Sean Connery on American television in the role he said taught him to play James Bond. A Macbeth many people would kill to have seen was in fact directed by Caldwell on the New York stage with her old stage partner, Christopher Plummer — he said her Cleopatra at Stratford, Ontario, was the greatest he knew — with Glenda Jackson as the fiendlike queen. As a prospect would that top Redgrave as Lady M to the Macbeth of the man who used to play God, Charlton Heston, who for that reason had the capacity to represent a titanic villainy?

Wells is good at taking us through the paces of the famous actors of the remote past: David Garrick, who knew Dr Johnson and seems to have had immense virtuosity and wit and grace; the great Mrs Siddons, who visited asylums to try to penetrate the heart of Lady Macbeth’s mystery and who Dennis Bartholomeusz in his book Macbeth and the Players suggests was on the verge of something like the Method.

Wells describes the turbulent career of Edmund Kean vividly enough with the help of those romantic scribblers, one of whom, William Hazlitt, had the power to describe what was before his eyes: “The concluding scene, in which he is killed by Richmond, was the most brilliant. He fought like one drunk with wounds and the attitude in which he stands with his hands stretched out after his sword is taken from him had a preternatural and terrific grandeur as if his will could not be disarmed and the very phantoms of his despair had a withering power.”

This is discernibly modern and imaginable and — there’s no denying — very impressive.

One thing that comes through in this book, a bit surprisingly, is how much and for how long the theatre took Shakespeare as a kind of icon to draw squiggles on, acting the plays, into the 19th century, in bastardised adaptations by Colley Cibber or whoever.

It’s as we hit the mid-19th century that the interest in the history of performance quickens. We get a sense of proportion, of understatement and subtlety from the description of the great American actor Edwin Booth (brother of Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth) and there is this intelligent bit of advice from him for anyone playing Iago. “Don’t act the villain. Don’t look it or speak it (by scowling or growling I mean), but think it all the time. Be genial, sometimes jovial, always gentlemanly. Quick in motion as in thought, lithe and sinuous as a snake.”

Wells says of this, “In other words, the actor was acting the quintessential actor by pretending not to be acting.”

He’s interesting on the fact in the one recording of Edwin Booth, of Othello’s “You potent, grave and reverend signiors,” the address to the Senate, there is no discernible American accent and Booth pronounces “my” as “me”.

The discussion of great Victorian actor Henry Irving fills in the details of the tremendous career — he was the first great gentleman actor, the first to be knighted — and Wells has the interesting detail that some of the recordings are not in fact of Irving but of comedians sending him up. Wells says of Irving, “He was an interior actor who could convey a character’s state of mind by gesture, facial expression and intonation. And he had a perfectionist’s attention to detail along with a highly developed sense of what would work in the theatre.”

He doesn’t say — as Bartholomeusz does — that Irving was one of the greatest pioneers of naturalistic acting, of finding the soul through the external prop, the bit of costuming or makeup. Nor does he give the detail that when Olivier was preparing his Richard III, he sat at the feet of old actors, taking in and reproducing their imitations of Irving as Old Crookback.

Irving seems to have anticipated Olivier with his extroversion, in his mastery of showmanship and in his relishing of theatre tricks: making his voice deepen as Othello, parading a Malvolio voice (the imperfect impersonation of an upper-class person by a lower-class one), as Shylock, the sheer hurtling magnetism of great actor effect.

As his wife Leigh — as physically beautiful as he was and nobody’s fool, the woman who would cheat on him with Peter Finch — said of the great Macbeth, “Larry’s makeup comes on, then Banquo comes on, then Larry comes on.”

But in his modest way Wells is good on Olivier and his book is at its best in notating the careers of the great modern actors he cherishes.

He has particularly fond chapters on Sibyl Thorndike and Edith Evans. Here we have the greatest of all Lady Bracknells talking of her conception of Volumnia, Coriolanus’s mother, in that legendary performance with Olivier as the great soldier she turns into a boy of tears. Olivier was understudied by Albert Finney, who says he didn’t have to fake the tears when Dame Edith pleaded for Rome.

She gave a talk in which she described ­Coriolanus as “a very arrogant boy who displeases — what do you call it — the Labour Party … and when she meets her son, she’s almost too excited to be coherent, ‘What is it — Coriolanus, must I call thee?’ In other words, ‘What is this thing they’ve pinned on you, darling? The VC?”

Wells has written an interesting and sensible book for all his sometimes weird omissions. You could learn more about Shakespearean acting from listening to Evans as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet or as Mistress Quickly in Henry IV in the great Caedmon recordings than in any book of theatre criticism.

Still, Wells is able enough at quoting people more eloquent than himself and it’s good to have his accounts of mighty presences such as Charles Laughton and Peggy Ashcroft and Dench even if you wonder why fine actors such as Ian Richardson and Donald Sinden are in this book.

He’s convincing though on the absolutely natural authority of Ken Branagh as a master interpreter of Shakespeare’s language and he’s absolutely entitled to inclusion.

But if you want to know what great acting looks like you might as well fall back on Kenneth Tynan: “[Burton’s] Prince Hal turned interested speculation into awe just as soon as he started to speak … Burton is a still, brimming pool running disturbingly deep; at 25 he commands repose and makes silence garrulous. His Prince Hal is never a roaring boy, he sits, hunched or sprawled, with dark, unwinking eyes; he hopes to be amused by his bully companions, but the eyes muse beyond them into the time when he must steady himself for the crown. ‘He brings his cathedral on with him,’ said one dazed member of the company … Fluent and sparing of gesture, compact and spruce of build, Burton smiles where other Hals have guffawed, relaxes where they have strained … In battle, Burton’s voice cuts urgent and keen, always likable, always inaccessible. If he can sustain and vary this performance through to the end of Henry V, we can safely send him to swell the thin company of actors who have shown us the mystery and the power of which heroes are capable.”

Of course heroism here also means the heroism of the actor. Shakespeare adored great actors and saw straight through them. Their phantom magnetism, its examination and the use of its mystery, was at the heart of his art.

Peter Craven was founding editor of Quarterly Essay.

Great Shakespeare Actors: Burbage to Branagh

By Stanley Wells

Oxford University Press, 308pp, $34.95 (HB)