Laurence Olivier was an actor famous for working from the outside in. His approach to Shylock, for example, began with large, prosthetic false teeth: ‘I had teeth made that totally altered the shape of my face … The mouth was the thing’; his Richard III likewise came together only after Olivier ‘decided on the shape of his nose’. The most notorious of the actor's prosthetic transformations was his metamorphosis from ‘Olivier’ to ‘Othello’ in the celebrated, if controversial, 1964 National Theatre production of the tragedy (from an interview with Life magazine: ‘the whole thing will be in the lips and the colour’). Requiring hours of careful application of makeup to his body, the theatrical process Olivier underwent for each performance is the stuff of backstage legend: the story of various people ‘walking in on a naked Olivier, of various hues between Brighton white and Caribbean black’; the story of the makeup rubbing off onto a snow-white Desdemona played by Maggie Smith.