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Lacquered in glamour

The Oliviers’ famous tour of 1948
by
May 2024, no. 464

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

Melbourne Books, $59.95 hb, 253 pp

Lacquered in glamour

The Oliviers’ famous tour of 1948
by
May 2024, no. 464

This attractive and fascinating volume is billed as ‘the first illustrated book on the 1948 Old Vic tour’, and, sure enough, it is jammed from stage-left to stage-right with scores of images – especially of the eternally photogenic two superstars who led the tour. Not among them is one particular photograph – more of a snapshot, really, just 6 x 4½ inches in 1948 measurements. It was taken on the night of 17 May 1948 at a post-performance party at a family home in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Four of the seven people in shot are unidentified; but two of the others, unmistakably, are Vivien Leigh and her husband, Laurence Olivier: she is in a fur coat, sitting in an armchair, a plate of food balanced on her lap; he is two along, perched on a piano stool. But who is that man in the middle in half profile? None other than Chico Marx, who was also in Melbourne, with his own show at the Tivoli.

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand

by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

Melbourne Books, $59.95 hb, 253 pp

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