The Player Kings.

After playing in Paris, Hamburg, and the British military post at the remains of the concentration camp at Belsen, the Old Vic Theatre Company arrived in New York in April, 1946, on a victory tour for a battered but triumphant Western culture. Ticket prices were high, but lines at the box office were long and the atmosphere was frenzied with anticipation. The company opened with Shakespeare--"Henry IV," Parts One and Two--and continued with Chekhov, Sophocles, and Sheridan: six weeks of repertory, fifty classically trained British actors, even a small orchestra in the pit. Although top billing was shared by the company's two leading actors, Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, there was no doubt who the star really was. Playing valiant Hotspur on opening night, Olivier employed a nervous stutter that made the exalted (and possibly intimidating) language startlingly real. The following night, in Part Two, he was unrecognizable in the minor role of ancient Justice Shallow, whom he played as a fixated beekeeper--an occupation that Shakespeare had failed to mention--upstaging Richardson, in the larger role of Falstaff, by continually swatting at imaginary bees. More brazenly virtuosic was the contrast between Sophocles' Oedipus and the giddy eighteenth-century dandy Mr. Puff, in Sheridan's "The Critic": Olivier left the stage with his eye sockets streaming blood and returned, after a brief intermission, prancing in lace and a powdered wig. The Times, speaking for the conquered city, noted, "The spring seems to be given over to Laurence Olivier."

This was not the spring that Orson Welles had planned. In March, just before the Old Vic's impending visit made the news, he had announced the rebirth of the famous Mercury Theatre, starting with a musical extravaganza based on "Around the World in Eighty Days." Soon, however, tales of disaster started drifting in from out-of-town tryouts. Forty-five tons of sets, a sixteen-hundred-pound mechanized elephant, and a Japanese circus were making for an epic level of chaos: on the eve of the show's Broadway opening, the Times compared the backstage scene, perhaps inevitably, to Kane's warehouse. Although several critics appreciated Welles's old-fashioned showmanship--he promised a reporter that he was equally prepared to "act Hamlet and do a roller-skating act" to sell the show--"Around the World" closed in less time than its hero took to circle the globe. Welles, saddled with enormous debts and thousands of unsold souvenir books, spoke nostalgically of 1937, when there was widespread hope that he would single-handedly create an American national theatre: "I was the Laurence Olivier of that year."

The twentieth century's two greatest dramatic illusionists had more in common and, ultimately, more effect on each other's work--as friendly, if occasionally cutthroat, competitors; as reinventors of Shakespeare for a modern audience--than has been noted even in the mountains of books that each has inspired. By 1946, comparison was unavoidable, and not just because Welles and Olivier were occupying theatres a few blocks apart. Growing up an ocean apart, they had emerged independently, in the mid-thirties, as the biggest theatre personalities and Shakespeare revolutionaries of the age. Barely out of his teens, Welles directed a sensational all-black "Macbeth," in Harlem; Olivier--eight years Welles's senior--was twenty-seven when he gave a performance of Romeo so painfully, youthfully awkward that London critics accused him of not knowing how to speak verse. To the wider public, they were, moreover, Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff: their film portrayals of these Bronte heartthrobs had turned them into full-fledged movie stars. And each was now paired with a matching screen goddess: Olivier was married to Vivien Leigh (who very noticeably accompanied him to New York) and Welles to Rita Hayworth (who just as noticeably stayed home). Yet neither was instinctively or even happily a movie actor. Rare in the post-Stanislavsky age, both lived in professional thrall to the infinite possibilities of false noses, padding, wigs, and generally disguising or (better yet) disfiguring makeup. Welles called it "camouflage," suggesting more profound similarities between the men, since these physical transformations allowed the actor, as Olivier later explained, "to avoid anything so embarrassing as self-representation."

This theatrical ideal had already got them both into trouble. Despite the swooning female audience, Welles's flamboyant portrayal of Mr. Rochester, in the 1943 film "Jane Eyre," had earned him reviews that he complained were "the worst accorded to an American actor since John Wilkes Booth." He had agreed to take a mere acting job only after his career as Hollywood's wunderkind--at twenty-five, he had co-written, produced, directed, and starred in "Citizen Kane"--came to an unhappy end, with his failure to prove that art could turn a profit. Still, he remained a fearsome presence. The unassuming director of "Jane Eyre," Robert Stevenson, was clearly too intimidated to bully Welles the way William Wyler had bullied Olivier when, at the start of work on "Wuthering Heights," in 1938, the cocky British stage star offered the same sort of grandstanding performance. Olivier had rebuffed Wyler's corrections by informing him that his chosen medium was "too anemic to take great acting." But Wyler persisted, and Olivier credited him for the rest of his life with teaching him how to act in films. And more: with teaching him to respect the medium, assuring him that there was nothing in literature, not even Shakespeare, that a film could not encompass.

The most difficult role for Olivier during his early years onstage was Henry V. Its problems were the opposite of those he had with film: Shakespeare's blazing soldier-king was too unhesitatingly bold, his speeches too fervently jingoistic ("God for Harry! England and St. George!") to suit the young actor's comfort. Olivier later explained that he had been "frightened of the heroism" at the heart of "Henry V" because the feeling throughout England during the nineteen-thirties was against heroics, inclining instead toward the languid elegance of the immensely popular Noel Coward. Then came the war. And Olivier, performing a one-man show for British troops, discovered that Henry's clarion calls to arms had a powerful effect on real and unquestionably heroic soldiers. He went on to read Henry's speeches on national radio, and by 1943 he had a motion picture in the works. Seeking a director, he had asked Wyler, who passed him to John Ford, who found the idea that he might direct Shakespeare very funny. When other candidates fell through, Olivier himself took on the job, becoming the director, producer, and star of the most important English movie yet made--which was what he had hoped for all along.

The problem with converting Shakespeare to the movies was the disparity between the language and modern reality. Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle's spectacular film of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) and George Cukor's equally lavish "Romeo and Juliet" (1936)--the most expensive Shakespeare films made after the advent of sound--had both been box-office flops. Olivier, to prepare his audience for the linguistic shock, began "Henry V" with a performance of the play in the Globe ...