Happy Birthday, Sir Laurence Olivier!

If not the greatest actor of the 20th Century, certainly one of them, Larry was born this day in 1907 in Surrey.

Here's his St. Crispian's Day speech from the 1944 version of Henry V:

I increasingly favor this version over Brannagh's more recent effort not because I think the acting is better but because I become more and more impatient with Brannagh's "New Criticism" interpretation of the piece. (But that's the subject of another rant another time.)

And here, to get a rise out of our Maximum Leader (who thinks Richard the single-most maligned monarch in the history of England), is his extremely creepy "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech from Richard III:

And here is Peter Sellers aping Larry to such perfection that he ought to be ashamed of himself, and possibly shot:

If you're looking for some interesting Netflix fodder and you haven't done so before, you might consider tossing in 1957's The Prince and the Showgirl, in which Olivier is the Prince-Regent of Carpathia and Marilyn Monroe is an American chorus girl. Larry is hilarious doing a Balkan-royalty shtick (as is Sybil Thorndike, who plays the Queen Dowager). Monroe is funny, too, although not for the reasons she might imagine. (Where else are you going to see her breath that immortal line, "God bless President Taft!") The movie turns to mush and stalls out about two thirds of the way through, but the first part makes it well worth a look.

In his autobiography, Olivier relates the terrible time he had dealing with Monroe while filming this movie. At one point, Monroe's character is supposed to suffer a wardrobe malfunction just as the Prince is about to meet her in a back-stage receiving line. The story goes that Monroe threw a fit after one of the takes because she thought she had revealed too much and that all the stage-hands saw her. When an inquiry went round the set about this, the reply came back, "They were all watching Mr. Olivier." Heh.