I joined the National Theatre two years after the company was formed at the Old Vic. It was on everyone's lips. I had been at Salisbury Rep and I went up on the train for the audition. I thought, "What the heck?" I did one of Edmund's speeches from King Lear for Sir Laurence Olivier and Bill Gaskill. I did two lines and Bill Gaskill said, "Could you move a bit further away?"
But I got through it. And I was able to talk to Sir Laurence afterwards. I'd watched his films – Henry V, Hamlet, Richard III – when I was a young man. He was like a sportsman, like Ian Botham, as if he was cheering us on – saying, "Come on! This is fun!"
I was given a year's contract. That meant you could set up home and have a family and know you were going to be working solidly. Others in the company used it as a leg up to doing movies, but I wanted a career on the stage. I stayed at the National for eight years, from 1965 to 1973.
We were all in awe of Olivier – we regarded him as a god. When he came to the canteen at the Old Vic, people were desperately scanning their brains to think of something intellectual to talk to him about.
I watched his technique as much as I could. My father was profoundly deaf and I took him to see Laurence in Othello one afternoon. He said afterwards, "I couldn't understand a word Olivier said but I understood everything he was going through." He was a very physical actor – marvellous at exits and entrances. When he left the room, it was as if all the furniture went with him. Nothing was left behind. He held you every moment he was on the stage
I went to Canada with the company in the early 70s. Laurence had to be seen in the plays on the tour but health-wise he wasn't up to it, so he didn't take the big roles. Vivien Leigh had died in 1967 and he'd had various health crises. We didn't hear about those things, in the way that you wouldn't hear about your school master's private life.
When we were in Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear together, Laurence played the butler and I was a mad German who kept rushing into the hotel lobby shouting at people. One night, I rushed out and held on to him by the lapels, and he staggered back a few feet and I was swept across the stage hanging on to him. There's a picture of the scene in rehearsals and it seems so representative of what happened – how I was dragged into the theatre by Olivier.
David Ryall is in King Lear at the Cockpit theatre until 29 March 2014
