 Starring: Laurence Olivier, Elisabeth Bergner, Felix Alymer
Director: Paul Czinner
Year Of Release: 1936
Plot: Duke Frederick has deposed his brother and taken over. However he initially allows his niece Rosalind to stay, as she is his daughter’s best friend. Rosalind then falls in love with Orlando, who has fled his home city because of his brother. She decides to disguise herself as a boy and heads into the forest, which leads to all manner of mistaken identity and confusion. |
What is good acting? The reason I ask is because Laurence Olivier is often held up as an example of a truly great actor, but I have to say that whenever I’ve watched one of his films, I’ve always felt he was a little bit of a ham. He is very good, but there’s always the sense of him running around going, “look at all the acting I’m doing!” It always makes me wonder whether, as with a lot of the ‘great’ actors, he’s held up as an example of terrific acting because you can’t help but be constantly aware that he’s putting on a performance, while other actors get forgotten simply because they inhabit their roles so much that you never really think about the skill that went into creating it.
Olivier is actually fairly restrained in As You Like It, probably because while the 29-year-old was already a renowned stage actor in 1936, he was only starting to get big movie roles and hadn’t yet reached the point where he got a standing ovation just for going to the toilet. It’s actually quite interesting to compare it to the later Olivier, with its more ‘look at me’ style.
He is undoubtedly very magnetic and has a wonderful way of becoming the most interesting thing on the screen, but looked at objectively Olivier’s performances are hyper-real and over the top, and if he wasn’t so skilled at keeping you watching, I have little doubt that he’d be seen as a giant ham actor who overacted at every turn. Thankfully for him though, he had the extraordinary skill to make overacting magnetically watchable, which led to 10 acting Oscar nominations, a Best Director nod, and two honorary awards.
My only gripe with this is that a lot very good actors don’t get held in the same regard as Olivier, not because they aren’t as good, but because they employ a more naturalistic style that doesn’t call attention to the fact that they’re acting. After all, if someone is so good at their role that it doesn’t even make you consider the fact that they are only pretending, surely that’s as much of an achievement as being rather over-the-top but extremely watchable?
There are actors from the past like Montgomery Clift, who gets relatively short shrift in the modern age, largely because while people like Olivier were running around DOING ACTING, Clift was putting in beautifully nuanced but less showy performances. Clift showed a truly impressive breadth and skill in his roles, but his quiet style always makes you think more about the individual character he’s portraying than him personally as an actor. I would say he’s actually as good an actor as Olivier, but because of his acting style, his skill and technique isn’t as noticeable and was never supposed to be.
Olivier is not the only one who’s become a legend by ensuring people watched him as much as the role he was playing. For example despite their reputations for naturalistic method acting, if you dissect what people like Marlon Brando and James Dean did on screen, their performances are actually pretty extreme compared to how real people act. They both gave stylised performances where the fact they are acting is ever present. They’re both amazingly magnetic actors and they gave great performances, but they never let you forget you are watching somebody doing some acting.
I don’t think the reputation of any of these slightly OTT actors ought to be less than it is, but I wish there was more balance in who gets the ‘great actor’ label. It seems to me that because it’s more noticeable that they’re acting, too many of these verging-on-hammy actors get lauded as greats, while many excellent actors are forgotten because their style is quieter and doesn’t drawn attention to them as a performer, instead allowing the characters to live and breathe on their own.
This praising of the somewhat hammy still goes on today with people like Daniel Day Lewis, who’s another actor who’s lauded for his method acting and the lengths he goes to in order to inhabit his characters, but whose reputation is actually built on performances where you never forget that he’s acting. For my money he’s one of the most overrated actors in the business, but even something as ridiculously OTT and hammy as Bill The Butcher in Gangs Of New York gets rewarded with an Oscar nomination.
Sometimes more naturalistic actors get pushed up into the greats category (Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman spring to mind as too people whose performances aren’t normally desperately showy but who still get praised to the hilt), but it seems that unless you’re going to be noisy about how much acting you’re doing, you’re fighting an uphill battle to be considered as good as the likes of Olivier.
TIM ISAAC
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