Books, Arts & Manners: The Lord and the Bard

By the time he died, the younger English actors were saying his acting style was “calculated,” mechanical, essentially heartless. It was a style he had invented and perfected and taken beyond all previous ideas of perfection. They might as well denigrate it; there was no hope at all of rivaling him at it.

The chorus of detractors included Olivier himself. “Tricks, my dear fellow,” he told a Newsweek interviewer who had asked for the secrets of his art. “Don’t you realize they’re nothing more than tricks?”

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Joseph Sobran

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By the time he died, the younger English actors were saying his acting style was “calculated,” mechanical, essentially heartless. It was a style he had invented and perfected and taken beyond all previous ideas of perfection. They might as well denigrate it; there was no hope at all of rivaling him at it.

The chorus of detractors included Olivier himself. “Tricks, my dear fellow,” he told a Newsweek interviewer who had asked for the secrets of his art. “Don’t you realize they’re nothing more than tricks?”