Fire, energy and muscular power... the statue of Olivier outside the National. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/Getty Images
On the day we learned of Marcel Marceau's death, I went to a National Theatre knees-up celebrating the centenary of Laurence Olivier's birth. Tempting, of course, to see them as opposite poles of 20th century theatre: the poet of silence and the master of whiplash speech. Tempting but wrong. What makes Olivier, for me, a greater artist than Marceau is that he embraced the latter's mimetic skill. In 1962 when Olivier was in Semi-Detached at the old Saville Theatre - where Marceau had appeared the same year - he actually leant against an imaginary fourth wall in a way that evoked the French mime-artist. It might have been an act of homage. More likely, Olivier was cheekily reminding us that he could out-Marcel Marceau.
Admittedly the National's celebration of Olivier's 100th birthday came six months late. But that, presumably, was because it was timed to coincide with the unveiling of a statue to Olivier outside the National itself. With all due respect to Olivier's son, Tarquin, and those who responded to his appeal for a statue, the result strikes me as deeply disappointing. Showing the great man as Hamlet with sword upraised against the Ghost, it makes Olivier look lightweight, flimsy, even fey. ("Olivier as Peter Pan," quipped one colleague). Those are the very last qualities I would associate with an actor who was all fire, energy and muscular power.
Inside the National itself (where else but in the Olivier?) there was a more telling tribute to the actor in the form of a celebratory performance made up of potted biography, film-clips and personal reminiscences. These last were fascinating. Sheila Reid recalled how, as a director, "he applauded daring." Anna Carteret talked about his enduring sex-appeal and how, in Saturday, Sunday, Monday, he delighted in his character's proclivity for bottom-pinching. Best of all, Ronald Pickup recalled a moment in Long Day's Journey Into Night when Olivier leapt athletically on and off a table in the course of removing a light-bulb. Marceau couldn't have done it better. But what I remember, even after 36 years, is how we all gasped as Olivier whipped his hand away from the sizzling bulb as if he'd actually been burned.
Watching the film-clips, I was struck yet again by Olivier's ability to encompass all humanity. In the early As You Like It he reacted with hilarious astonishment to the tendency of Elizabeth Bergner's Germanic Rosalind to beat him about the chest with a paper scroll. In William Wyler's little-known Carrie we saw Olivier, in one of his greatest screen performances, as a humiliated down-and-out reduced to begging his wife for a dime. In The Entertainer he was a more resilient failure whose deadbeat music-hall comic was a kind of front-cloth King Leer. Most astonishing of all was a scene from a TV version of Pinter's The Collection in which Olivier wrapped his tongue round every syllable of a speech in which the bilious Harry dismisses his young male lover as a "filthy putrid slum slug." It made me desperately wish Olivier had played the ferocious patriarch, Max, in The Homecoming.
I've seen many fine actors in my lifetime. But Olivier had a quality of genius in his ability to combine interpretative intelligence, scorching vocal precision and an often outrageous physicality: remember the swallow-like dive onto Claudius at the end of the screen Hamlet? We are right to mourn the passing of Marcel Marceau. But his was a specialised, limited art that, for Olivier, was simply part of his all-inclusive theatrical armoury.
