Laurence Olivier

What prompted Vivien Leigh’s dark journey into madness?

7 September 2024 9:00 am

Did her many miscarriages so unhinge the beautiful actress that she ended up a sex-crazed harridan, screaming obscenities at those she loved?

My Negroni-soaked lunch with Laurence Olivier

27 April 2024 9:00 am

Breakfast is my preferred meal, in case you’re interested. I broke my fast this week with my walking laser-light of…

The joy of being cancelled

20 November 2021 9:00 am

New York I’ve never met anyone called Othello, certainly not in Venice nor in Cyprus, but perhaps there are men…

Granada’s Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series

16 October 2021 9:00 am

Sumptuous, glorious, luminous, lavish: Granada’s 40-year-old adaptation of Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series, says Mark McGinness

Brightest of the Bright Young People: the rich, rackety life of Cecil Beaton

12 June 2021 9:00 am

In December 1979, the 28-year-old Hugo Vickers, dining with a friend, declared: ‘I see little point to life these days.’…

Vivien Leigh in a publicity still for Waterloo Bridge, 1940

Vivien Leigh: the brilliant star that fast burned out

15 December 2018 9:00 am

‘Dark Star’ is a suitable enough title in itself, but the definition makes it a brilliant one: ‘A Dark Star’,…

Helen Mirren in the title role of Phèdre, in the 2009 production at the National directed by Nicholas Hytner. ‘I was honoured to be involved in the very first NT Live broadcast,’ she writes in her foreword to Dramatic Exchanges. ‘Suddenly we were performing to many thousands of people’

Rows backstage at the National Theatre

1 December 2018 9:00 am

It is, proclaimed Charles Wyndham in 1908, ‘an institution alien to the spirit of our nation’. The alien having long…

Volpone and his coterie of misfits, L–R from the back: Julian Hoult (Castrone), Ankur Bahl (Androgyno), Henry Goodman (Volpone) and Jonathan Key (Nano)

Trevor Nunn’s Volpone reviewed: Henry Goodman bewitches the audience by doing nothing wittily

18 July 2015 9:00 am

Easy playwright to get on with, Ben Jonson. His world is simple, his tastes endearing. He likes golden-hearted swindlers and…

Italy’s highest-paid heart-throb, Mastroianni as Guido Anselmi, a film director in ‘creative limbo’

How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½

The National Theatre Story by Daniel Rosenthal - review

11 January 2014 9:00 am

In 1976, as the National Theatre moved into its new home on London’s South Bank, its literary manager Kenneth Tynan…

As Luck Would Have It, by Derek Jacobi - review

28 September 2013 9:00 am

Alan Bennett once overheard an old lady say, ‘I think a knighthood was wasted on Derek Jacobi,’ and I know…

Stage Blood, by Michael Blakemore - review

21 September 2013 9:00 am

Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this…

Olivier, by Philip Ziegler - review

7 September 2013 9:00 am

Philip Ziegler is best known for his biographies, often official, of politicians, royalty  and soldiers. They include Harold Wilson, Edward…