‘May God bless and guide you, Larry’

September 2026 will see the 35th anniversary of ‘the greatest actor who ever lived’ being interred in Poets’ Corner. Yet Laurence Olivier’s remains are not marked by an ostentatious mausoleum; there is simply a grey diamond on the floor, easy to overlook. So often with the Abbey, it’s strange to think that tight geometric lines can contain lives of such richness and depth, in Olivier’s case from his glittering, troubled marriage to Vivien Leigh to his psychologically layered approach to Shakespeare’s Henry V. 

It’s less well-known that the origins of this colossus of stage and screen were quietly Christian. Both London and the Church of England loomed large in his childhood, making his final resting place fitting in more ways than one. He was a star who early on had a global reach, but his vocation started in a frugal rectory on Lupus Street, only a mile down the road from Westminster Abbey. 

The man known to friends and family as ‘Larry’ was born in Dorking, Surrey in 1907 but spent much of his early childhood in Pimlico after his father followed a vocation to the priesthood in the Church of England. Father Gerard Olivier’s career history was erratic; the entry in the clerical directory Crockfords shows that he worked in four other parishes before taking a more settled job as Assistant Curate at St Saviour’s Pimlico between 1912 and 1918, a church with strong Anglo-Catholic leanings.

It was a world dominated by the Oxford Movement, a 19th century trend that aimed to revive Catholic beliefs and practices in the Church of England. In the words of biographer Donald Spoto, it meant, ‘incense, gold brocade vestments, and wearing a cassock in public’. It was a rather dramatic left turn given that the Oliviers had been Huguenots, a French non-conformist tradition that valued minimalist worship over theatricality, and had spawned six generations of Protestant ministers. 

Little remains of the Olivier connection to St Saviour’s Pimlico other than the name of Larry’s uncle, Robert Harold Olivier, who was killed in action in 1914, inscribed on the war memorial. This might be due partly to how Father Gerard rarely seemed to spark joy.

In an article for the parish magazine during Christmas 1917, he spent much of it berating people for spending money ‘thoughtlessly, indulgently, unnecessarily and un-nationally’ instead of giving it to the church – this at a time when Britain was at war and many of his parishioners were already experiencing great hardship.

The parish registers show that Father Gerard often preached three times per day on ominous subjects like ‘disappointment’, ‘sin’, ‘judgement’ and ‘little sins’ (for children). Larry saw him as cold and distant. Later, he claimed he was someone he ‘barely knew’. 

Given how well into Larry’s teens Father Gerard was forcing the family to share bath water, you could be forgiven for thinking he associated the theatre with a scurrilous level of frivolity. However, he broke with centuries of family tradition in a crucial way – he told Larry that he was to go ‘on the stage’.  

Life lessons

In a BBC interview from 1967, Larry talked about how watching his father at work nurtured the instinct that later made him feel like one whom ‘God had touched on the shoulder’. However economical Father Gerard was with money, the flamboyance in his words and actions clearly had an impact: ‘I was fascinated by the way a sermon was delivered. (My father) knew when to drop the voice, when to bellow about the perils of hellfire, when to slip in a gag, when suddenly to wax sentimental, when to turn solemn, when to pronounce the blessing. The quick changes in mood and manner absorbed me, and I have never forgotten them.’ 

At St Saviour’s, Larry assisted the main thurifer, Bob Wyatt, as a ‘boat boy’, carrying the incense boat that kept the swinging metal thurible lit and sending pungent clouds wafting over the congregation. He also marshalled the neighbourhood children into being his worshippers before a toy altar as he delivered monologues dressed in vestments made from blankets in a room he had designated ‘St Laurence’s Shrine’. 

Father Gerard’s influence meant the fumes of damnation may have hung in the air as much as the incense, but there was no shortage of drama. For a man who was described by biographer Terry Coleman as wanting actors to be ‘larger than life’ and to be ‘seen to be acting at the same time as moving an audience to tears or laughter’, it seemed to be, as was thought by Graham Greene’s whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory (a film where Larry had the starring role), the moment in childhood where ‘the door opens and lets the future in’. 

Some of this might have been pragmatic. At the school attached to All Saints Margaret Street near Oxford Circus, where Larry was a chorister, the comments from teachers suggest that his future lay in gaining a trade rather than in any academic pursuit.

A scathing range of adjectives litter his school reports, including ‘disgraceful’, ‘slovenly’, ‘careless’ and ‘weak’ – except for in Scripture, the only subject where he tended to score average marks (it’s rather poetic that four decades later he released a series of recordings of the Old Testament). His father’s parsimony perhaps meant he sensed Larry’s only route to financial independence might be through acting. 

As an adult, his upbringing left him feeling uneasy about pre-marital intimacies, but he also confessed to his first wife that he regretted becoming ‘frightfully slack’ about his religion since working in America and that he felt an urge to be of use ‘to God and the world’. Later, he expressed regret that he no longer had faith. When his Press Secretary once asked him outright if he believed in God, he replied: ‘No – I wish I could.’ 

Yet there are hints of buried longing. Margarida Araya’s book, Sir Laurence Olivier in Spain: the Shooting of Richard III and Other Visits, describes how in the mid-1950s Larry and Vivien Leigh almost certainly went to see the heavily religious film Marcelino Pan y Vino three times due to intrigue at the film’s themes. Neither could speak Spanish and subtitles didn’t exist. 

During this time Larry also responded to a request from a member of the St Saviour’s church council for a donation to mend the church’s organ – he donated £12, around £4,000 in today’s money. 

In 1960, when he was divorcing Leigh and facing decades of poor health, his former teacher at St Edward’s School in Oxford, Arthur Macnamara, wrote a letter expressing concern for Larry’s ‘anxiety and suffering’ and assuring him he was praying for him. ‘May God bless and guide you, Larry’, was his tender sign-off. 

According to the archivist at St Edward’s, Macnamara was a much-loved father figure to many of the boys – and to Larry, the kind of warm, paternal, religious influence his own father never was. 

The rituals of faith also provided comfort in times of distress. Coleman describes movingly how Larry often had the vicar around when he was sick, and that he and his third wife, Joan Plowright, would let themselves into their local church when no-one was there. His friend, Alec Guinness, said that the need for mystery and ritual never ‘quite left him’. The word ‘quite’ seems fitting given how he had once said before the House of Lords: ‘I think I believe in God. I think I do not believe in an afterlife.’ 

As his death drew nearer, he stated he wanted to be interred at the Abbey and felt joy at imagining the sun streaming through the windows near his grave. However, when asked how it felt to know he’d be buried there, he said: ‘The Abbey is as cold as the village churchyard. I don’t want to die.’ 

It all reads as touchingly human given how near-mythical, almost God-like, he was to many. These links to his past contained more than just nostalgia – they suggest a desire for a spiritual connection that was always just out of reach, but that was brought slightly closer by the rituals of his boyhood.  

His relationship with the Abbey was long and has an accompanying myth. In 1971, when the hands and head of the effigy at Henry V’s tomb were replaced, Larry read lines from the play. A rumour began to circulate that the sculptor had used him as a model. Although members of the Olivier family have since highlighted a likeness between his fingernails and those of the statue, as with some of the best stories there’s no evidence of its truth. It somehow seems fitting given Larry’s trade, one where fictional events carried the greatest meaning of all.

When he died in 1989 (with Psalm 23 read over his body), the family considered taking his remains to St Paul’s Cathedral. Abbey Dean Michael Mayne realised it would be hard to have a memorial in Poets’ Corner if his ashes were there. Two years after the memorial service that was attended by 2,000 people, Larry got his wish. His remains were buried near his heroes David Garrick and Sir Henry Irving. 

When I visited Poets’ Corner, every few seconds someone came over to hover and take photos of Larry’s grave, almost as many as gathered beneath Shakespeare’s statue. It felt right given that the final words of Henry V could be said about Larry: ‘In that small time once greatly lived this star of England.’ Larry’s own faith might have wavered, but many had faith in his power to inspire. If the crowd around his grave was anything to go by, they still do. 

In a rare moment when the onlookers thinned out, I crouched and traced the years ‘1907’ and ‘1989’ – his ‘small’ but eventful time. Far from being the cold churchyard that he feared, the stone and everything around it was warm, and humming with life. I was glad. 

Maddy Fry is Commissioning Editor of the Review and a contributor to The Guardian, New Statesman and Time. 

With thanks to Molly Greenwood at St Saviour’s Pimlico, the Westminster City Archives, the British Library, Chris Nathan from the St Edward’s School archives, Richard and Tarquin Olivier, Margarida Araya and Dr Tony Trowles.