REVIEW POTPOURRI: Authors and Actors

by Peter Cates

Louise Dickinson Rich

Louise Dickinson Rich

The Coast of Maine by Louise Dickinson Rich (1903-1991) was first published in 1956 and subsequently revised in 1962 and 1970. Dipping in it, I came across the following:

“Considering its present and past eminence as a seaport, which always connotes-perhaps unfairly – sailors celebrating shore leave by bending the festive elbow, I think it is a little odd that Rockland, over a hundred years ago, organized the first Total Abstinence Society in America. I’m not talking about temperance now, but complete abstinence, an unheard-of thing at the time.”

“The tourist trade had its inception around 1870, when Bar Harbor, which was then little more than a collection of fishing shacks, was ‘discovered ‘, along with the other now well-known resort towns of the coast.”

Finally Kennebunk has a Unitarian Church containing a bell in its steeple that was cast by Paul Revere.

Rich’s book has numerous other anecdotes about past and, as of 1970, present Maine along with a number of striking black and white photographs by Samuel Chamberlain. For me personally, it lends itself better to browsing than cover to cover reading.

Sir Laurence Olivier

Sir Laurence Olivier

Sir Laurence Olivier (1907-1989) wrote in his autobiography Confessions of an Actor, published in 1982, of being asked to fire British actress Dame Edith Evans from a production he had directed in which she had the leading role because she was messing up her movements on stage, not remembering her lines and generally looking spaced out.

Feeling incapable of firing a much admired colleague and friend, Olivier strolled to the actress’s dressing room “to bluster it out with Edith”:

“As I was doling out the bubbling greetings of an old colleague, I caught sight of a pair of unworn eyelashes beside her makeup tray and burst out, ‘Edith, dear, why on earth didn’t you wear those?’ ‘Well, dear,’ she said, ‘I didn’t want to think of it as a performance!’

Preparing to drop “the bloody but necessary axe” if Edith still messed up, Olivier was much relieved when the actress delivered a much better “performance”, approaching her role as a “performance” and wearing the necessary eyelashes, and Olivier kept her on for the play’s entire run.

Olivier himself delivered a very memorable performance as the sadistic Nazi dentist Szell working on Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in the 1976 Marathon Man.

Dame Edith Evan

Other memorable roles were the earlier film classics Wuthering Heights, the suspenseful Rebecca directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Richard the Third with actress Claire Bloom and the Boys from Brazil as the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal opposite Gregory Peck as another Nazi doctor.

Olivier’s second ex-wife, Vivian Leigh, (1913-1967) performed exceptionally as Scarlet O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind with Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler and Olivia de Haviland’s lovely Melanie Hamilton.

Olivier’s third wife and widow Joan Plowright, still living at 95, delivered a sterling performance in the 2005 Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont.

Olivier speaks of the challenges for memorizing lines when one is past 60: “When the brain is at its clearest, probably in the early morning, is the best time for learning; when you’re young, late at night is all right – well, any time’s all right for anything when golden youth is yours.”