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?"

But that may have been Olivier playing his longest-running role, World's Greatest Actor, luxuriating in modesty on a scale only he could afford. After (say) 1964, the year of his Othello, not even he could diminish his stature.

He loved to talk about those "tricks," a thousand of which will remain observable forever, in dozens of filmed performances that will suffice to explain his reputation to future generations. The common principle behind them all is surprise. Never do what the audience expects. This underlies the famous sudden rages, the equally sudden flashes of wit, the subtle pauses, the hints of effeminacy that complicated his bounding virility.

"Young man," an older actress once told him, "you are a gorgeous creature on stage, but you are altogether too predictable in what you do." For instance, she said, you should pause for breath in the middle of sentences, not at the end. That was the difference between acting and declaiming. "Audiences love to be surprised, to be shocked." He only had to be told once. He would outrage critics, but none of them ever thought to damn him with that single fatal word: "predictable." When his Titus Andronicus received word that his sons had been killed (after he'd allowed his own hand to be chopped off as ransom), he leaned back and laughed softly. How the next Titus played the scene is not recorded.

Electrifying audiences was his trade. He discussed acting, in books and interviews, almost as if it were crowd control. In the great Shakespearean roles, make a quiet opening entrance. Let the audience see you on a human scale first, so they can sympathize with you; save the roaring for later. "If you have succeeded in the initial moments, either by a very strong stamp of characterization so they recognize you as a real guy, or by a quiet approach, then I think there's no end to where you can lead them in size of acting a little later in the evening."

And when your Othello or Lear does roar, he said, you must never quite hit the top of your voice. Always keep something in reserve, never show the audience your limits. You have to seem potentially infinite.

Olivier's preoccupation with externals was notorious: false noses, dyed hair, a rainbow of greasepaints. He derided Method acting. Most of his inspiration went into preparation, conceiving roles anew and then revising every physical detail. All this gave him something solid to fall back on in case of an opening-night adrenaline shortage, which rarely happened. During his Oedipus and Titus, some spectators had to be carried out; medical teams stood by to succor overwrought nervous systems. Such is the magic of great acting, aided by gouged eyeballs and severed hands.

Terror and pity, says Aristotle, are the chemistry of tragedy. Olivier was better at the terror part. He understood audiences; he didn't really understand Shakespeare, except as a motherlode of great opportunities for stardom. His education was on the boards, not in the study. Two of his greatest successes came in two of Shakespeare's hammiest roles, Titus and Richard 111.

Olivier's Richard (filmed and now on a cheap video) is enhanced by the splendid gimmickry of his technique. But the actor's defects show up in his moody, Freudian Hamlet (also on video) and his Othello and Lear (not yet available). These are not only great roles but also, of course, pinnacles of the poetic imagination, For them, trickery won't do.

Olivier played Hamlet under the tutelage of Ernest Jones, Freud's chief English exponent, who planted in Olivier's bleached head the notion that Hamlet was afflicted with an Oedipus complex, and was thus "a man who could not make up his mind." (You know the type.) This theory explains nothing about the play but does account for the film's interlinear obsession with beds and mother-son smooching-still mildly daring stuff in the Forties.

For Othello, Olivier turned to F.R. Leavis's crabby essay debunking the assumption that the hero is, as his final speech says, "not easily jealous." The essay might do as a courtroom plea by Iago's defense attorney, but it flattens the whole play. Not that 01ivier minded: it enabled him to turn the greatest duel in drama into a oneman show. lago was reduced to a surly prop, hardly necessary to ignite such an emotional self-starter as this volatile Moor (who seemed suspiciously Jamaican), It didn't help matters that Maggie Smith's Desdemona totally lacked the ethereal innocence that can lift a man's heart to adoration; she was a sturdy English girl who seemed perfectly capable of taking care of herself. It wouldn't have made much difference to this version of the play if she had been carrying on with Cassio. Olivier enacted raw jealousy-the wounded male ego in full fury-as nobody else ever will, with full measure of histrionic frisson. What he missed was "the pity of it, lago"-the grief, deeper than any rage, of the man who has glimpsed heaven and lost it.

As always, Olivier had found a novel theatrical angle for his interpretation. He told Kenneth Tynan that "I'm sure Shakespeare meant there to be a great splash of sexual shock" in the interracial union of Othello and Desdemona. So he'd heightened the swaggering negritude, in defiance of the text (which stresses Othello's reserve) but in tune with 1964's topicalities. It never crossed his mind that Shakespeare might have had a purpose beyond wowing 'em. Shocks, thrills, surprises, emotional danger: this was Olivier's art. There's more to Shakespeare's.

His 1983 Lear, made for TV, had his usual physical authority, only slightly diminished by old age. No matter how wrongheadedly he played a Shakespearean role, he fixed his own ineffaceably magnificent image of it in your mind. But this time the quiet opening didn't serve him well. After all, we meet Lear on his worst behavior; as someone has said, Shakespeare doesn't ask our sympathy for him on easy terms. Lear is the consummate tragic hero, whose stubborn will precipitates a terrible fate; he may not deserve it, but he asks for it. Lear is not a victim of circumstance, and in his self-inflicted helplessness he must undergo a tremendous conversion. Olivier's Lear was so ingratiating (and rather weak) in the first scene that there wasn't much call for either his suffering or his change of heart. It was sad, not tragic; not even very moving.

The question is not at all whether Olivier was a great actor, but whether he reached the very highest peaks. To say that he never quite made it is not to belittle what he did achieve. The thrills were genuine, more than the sum of "tricks." (In a way, Archie Rice was Olivier's nightmare, the performer whose tricks all fizzled miserably before empty, silent houses.) As James Agee observed, no actor since Chaplin was so complete a master of all that the body can contribute to a role, Olivier could speak a line of Shakespeare as if it had just occurred to him; his unique rhythm and energy are as evident in the pianissimo passages as in the Agincourt ripsnorters, He was not only versatile but versatile at a magnitude few actors achieve even once. Being gigantic was the only trick he never managed to explain.