Making meaning of Laurence Olivier : reading queer sensibilities in his Hollywood performances, 1939-1960

Abstract

Between 1939 and 1940, British actor Laurence Olivier broke new ground as a film actor and star in a sequence of landmark performances in classical Hollywood cinema: as a tortured Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’ (William Wyler, 1939), a brooding Maxim de Winter in ‘Rebecca’ (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), and a charming Darcy in ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940). This thesis argues that Olivier’s performances in these and subsequent Hollywood films depended on not only his much-vaunted abilities as an actor, but, more fundamentally, on an erotically mysterious and ultimately queer masculinity singular among male stars in the classical Hollywood era. It identifies this queerness as crucial to the Hollywood oeuvre Olivier established by these initial, star-making roles, particularly his performances as George Hurstwood in ‘Carrie’ (William Wyler, 1952), the Prince in ‘The Prince and the Showgirl’ (Laurence Olivier, 1957), Gen. Burgoyne in ‘The Devil’s Disciple’ (Guy Hamilton, 1959) and Crassus in ‘Spartacus’ (Stanley Kubrick, 1960). Existing scholarship on Olivier offers a myopic understanding of the actor, as it neglects his other Hollywood projects in favour of his Shakespearean works on stage or screen. Against such neglect, the thesis is comprised of seven case studies, which, taken together, reveal a continuous, if varied, trajectory of a subversive sexual presence central to his Hollywood career. This thesis deploys Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s foundational concept of the closet to identify and decode a closetedness in each of Olivier’s performances, to argue for their queer sensibilities. Each case study textually analyses Olivier’s performance by bringing various accounts of gender and desire in dialogue with central concepts in queer theory as well as biographical material and archival resources. In exploring the queerness underlying Olivier’s Hollywood performances, this thesis offers a fundamental reassessment of the cultural, social, and aesthetic impact of a figure central to modern conceptions of acting.