“Larry had the advantage over me in his vitality, looks, humour, and directness […] I had an advantage over him in my familiarity with the verse, and in the fact that the production was of my own devising, so that all the scenes were arranged just as I had imagined I could play them best.”
(See pic for the full quote)
Of course, it’s always possible to “perform” in memoir-writing, to present a kinder, humbler version of yourself on the page than you really feel inside – but I think it’s still remarkable that at a point in their careers when Olivier was emerging as a genuine threat to Gielgud’s position as the pre-eminent Shakespearean actor of their generation, Gielgud was still being so generous and de-emphasising his own strengths. Especially that bit about how he had the luxury of designing the production just so, in keeping with his comfort zone as an actor.
In the Olivier biography, Donald Spoto repeatedly observes that there was a marked difference in attitude between the two greats when it came to their rivalry – that Olivier, even after reaching the point where he was a more internationally known performer (thanks to his much more extensive body of film work), still carried a massive chip on his shoulder, behaving as if *he* were the perpetual underdog and Gielgud everyone’s favourite child. In the images below, a couple of excerpts here from the Spoto book (including an amusing bit about Olivier regularly speaking on Gielgud’s cues during their Romeo and Juliet scenes).
All in all, I don’t think the TV series Feud (which had a nice season on the Bette Davis-Joan Crawford rivalry) would have been able to create much drama with the Gielgud-Olivier story… unless they made it an internal monologue about Olivier’s insecurities and persecution complex, and had him hobbling up and down a stage in Richard III costume muttering “Cheated of feature by dissembling nature…” to himself.
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