Laurence Olivier

The son of a clergyman with no theatrical connections, Olivier was pushed toward acting by his father and learned the trade through a string of jobs in the late 1920s. His first major West End break came in 1930 in Noël Coward's Private Lives, the same year he entered film, and by decade's end he was a star - Romeo opposite Gielgud and Ashcroft in 1935, then Heathcliff and Maxim de Winter in Wuthering Heights and Rebecca. In the 1940s he co-directed the Old Vic with Richardson and Burrell, turning it into a powerhouse where his Richard III and Oedipus became legend, and he began his trilogy of Shakespeare films: Henry V, Hamlet, and Richard III. A mid-1950s stage slump broke when he joined the English Stage Company in 1957 to play the washed-up music hall performer in The Entertainer, and from 1963 to 1973 he ran the National Theatre, building a company that launched careers while he played Othello and Shylock. His later films ranged from Spartacus to Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil; his television work stretched from Long Day's Journey into Night to Brideshead Revisited and King Lear. He collected a knighthood, a life peerage, the Order of Merit, an Oscar