My Father Laurence Olivier by Tarquin Olivier

Product Details

Publishers Weekly

Sir Laurence's delightfully quirky letters to ``Tarkie'' and his mother form the core of this reminiscence ``about Jill, Larry, Vivien, and what it was like to grow up among them.'' The author was 10 months old (the year was 1937) when his father left him and his mother, actress Jill Esmond, to marry Vivien Leigh. In this forgiving memoir he handles the divorce with grace and delicacy, doing nothing to hide his adoration of his Da. The book rests heavily on anecdotes that would be uninteresting were the family in question other than Olivier's. The author is at pains to demolish the ``wall of untruth which has become ever more solid with each succeeding biography'' of his father, a wall to which the subject himself contributed in his 1982 Confessions of an Actor. The author maintains that his mother's influence on his father's early career was significant, and he is vehement in his denial that Sir Laurence had affairs with critic Kenneth Tynan and entertainer Danny Kaye (`` . . . unforgivable garbage''). His portrait of the great thespian in old age is memorable and affecting: ``His defiance was magnificent, his fury noble; he was impossible.'' Olivier died in 1989 at the age of 82. Photos. (Feb.)