3 - Black: Mastering Masques of Blackness
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
Summary
Black all over my body, Max Factor 2880, then a lighter brown, then Negro No. 2, a stronger brown. Brown on black to give a rich mahogany. Then the great trick: that glorious half-yard of chiffon with which I polished myself all over until I shone … The lips blueberry, the tight curled wig, the white of the eyes, whiter than ever, and the black, black sheen that covered my flesh and bones, glistening in the dressing-room lights.
I am … I am I … I am Othello … but Olivier is in charge.
Laurence Olivier, On ActingLaurence 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.
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- Inventions of the SkinThe Painted Body in Early English Drama, pp. 87 - 120Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013