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…