Laurence Olivier on how affair with Noel Coward doomed his marriage

• Laurence Olivier married lesbian actress Jill Esmond in 1930
• He starred alongside her in Broadway production of The Green Bay Tree
• Torrid drama of homosexual lust forced him to consider his sexuality
• He had intimate relationships with actor Denys Blakelock and Noel Coward
• Coward thought Olivier was 'the most staggeringly beautiful creature'

By Michael Thornton for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:24 EST, 21 November 2014 | Updated: 20:08 EST, 21 November 2014

Back in the pre-permissive 1930s it was the sensational play that shocked, scandalised and titillated an entire generation of theatregoers in London and New York.

Mordaunt Shairp's torrid drama of homosexual lust, The Green Bay Tree — which through clever use of unspoken implications avoided censorship from the Lord Chamberlain's office on its world premiere in 1933, when any depiction of gay love was banned from public performance — returns to the West End stage next Tuesday for the first time in 64 years.

This groundbreaking work also marked a sexual watershed in the turbulent private life of the great English actor Laurence Olivier, who starred in the 1933 Broadway production opposite his lesbian first wife, Jill Esmond.

Laurence Olivier married actress Jill Esmond in 1930, but it was regarded as a strange match as Esmond was known to be attracted to her own sex

Olivier, known as Larry, was then 26 and his dark, brooding good looks were at their peak when he and Esmond, to whom he had been married for three years, were signed to appear in The Green Bay Tree (its title comes from Psalm 37, referring to 'the ungodly in great power and flourishing like a green bay tree').

The Olivier marriage was regarded in showbusiness circles as a strange coupling. Before it took place, Esmond was known to be attracted to her own sex, while Olivier had had close and intimate relationships with two older men.

One was the actor Denys Blakelock, six years his senior, who was homosexual. Writing, years later, of their relationship, Olivier admitted that he 'embraced this unaccustomed happiness with an innocent young gratitude'.

On the night before Olivier's marriage to Esmond in July 1930, Blakelock, who was to be his best man, climbed into Olivier's bed, where Blakelock's hands 'strayed'. Olivier admitted this but insisted that the full sex act between the two men did not take place.

Olivier became intimately involved with Noël Coward (right) who gave Olivier a £50-a-week contract to play the second lead in his new play Private Lives (pictured)

The second older man with whom Olivier became intimately involved was Noël Coward, six-and-a-half years his senior, who, just before Larry's marriage to Jill, gave Olivier a £50-a-week contract to play the second lead in his new play Private Lives.

Their first meeting took place while Coward was sitting up in bed in Japanese silk pyjamas, finishing his breakfast.

During the last 13 years of his life, when I came to know 'The Master' well, Coward admitted to me that he had thought Olivier 'the most staggeringly beautiful creature I ever saw in my life', that on his part it had been 'love at first sight', and that sexual familiarities occurred between them 'with some regularity'.

Even after Larry's marriage to Jill, Coward was clearly still in hot pursuit of Olivier. When the trio went on holiday together, Coward insisted on nude bathing, and on one occasion he pinned down a naked Olivier, trying to shave off his pubic hair, until Jill came to Larry's rescue and chased Coward off.

Coward admitted that he thought Olivier was 'the most staggeringly beautiful creature' he had ever seen

The Oliviers starred in the 1933 Broadway production of The Green Bay Tree (pictured)

It was against this unconventional marital background, and increasing rumours that Esmond preferred sexual relations with other women to those with her husband, that Larry and Jill approached their leading roles in The Green Bay Tree.

Olivier was cast as a handsome but idle young man who had been adopted in a financial transaction at the age of 11 by a rich and fastidious older bachelor, who changes the boy's name from Davy Owen to Julian Dulcimer.

The bachelor provides him with a lavish allowance and a luxurious lifestyle in a Mayfair flat, where he is waited on by a manservant. The bachelor, of course, insists on sharing the flat with the boy Julian.

Esmond, playing the only female role, appeared as Leonora Yale, an attractive and strong-minded young veterinary surgeon whom Julian wishes to marry. She wants him to pass exams, acquire qualifications and earn his own living.

But his adoptive guardian, who seems obsessed by the boy, threatens to cut off his allowance if he leaves him to marry Leonora. The play develops into a battle of wills between the girl in Julian's life and his possessive mentor, and ends in murder.

British actress Vivian Leigh became the second Mrs Laurence Olivier in 1940, but her manic depression transformed the marriage into a gothic nightmare

But even after the death of the older man, his influence on Julian prevails and Leonora decides not to marry him.

The Green Bay Tree became a major hit and ran for 21 weeks on Broadway, but it was a time of misery for the Oliviers. It was whispered that Jill had entered into several lesbian liaisons during their time in New York, and observers noted her 'coldness, distance and apparent unhappiness' while in her husband's company.

The only thing in which she and Larry appeared united was their loathing of their director, Jed Harris, described by Olivier as 'a hurtful, arrogant, venomous little fiend . . . cruel, sadistic, obviously hating us for both our nation and our race'. Larry channelled this antipathy into his performance, noting: 'I hate Jed so. I have to get rid of all the drive to kill him.'

Walt Disney used Harris's malevolent features to create the Big Bad Wolf in his 1933 cartoon Three Little Pigs. Years later, Olivier went one better by using Harris as the model for his stage and screen performances as the evil, hunchbacked Richard III.

The late actress Phyllis Konstam, who played opposite Olivier in his first appearance on Broadway, and who was also a close friend of Jill Esmond, told me that appearing in The Green Bay Tree traumatised the Oliviers and made them both feel that their marriage was doomed.

'Night after night,' she said, 'they were speaking lines and creating characters that mirrored their own private lives. She preferred women to men. He was, at the very least, bisexual. They must have known that the marriage could never last.'

But in public they continued to present a facade of domestic bliss.

On the night before Olivier's marriage to Esmond, Denys Blakelock (left), who was to be his best man, climbed into Olivier's bed, pictured with Vivien Leigh

'I know that we will never be divorced,' Jill insisted to one interviewer, 'because we've talked about it, about everything. We know that we'll be attracted to other men and women, respectively. But we have determined that no matter what happens, no matter what the difficulty or what the temptation, we won't let it break us. We're too good for that — that's our slogan.'

Those words were to become increasingly hollow. Larry and Jill's only child, a son, Tarquin, was born on August 21, 1936, but by then their marriage was dead in the water. Olivier had not only met the feline, green-eyed, 22-year-old actress and beauty Vivien Leigh, who was to be his nemesis, but also his most unlikely homosexual partner, Henry Ainley, a 57-year-old married actor and father, who had appeared with Larry in the 1936 film of Shakespeare's As You Like It.

Ainley, who was clearly besotted by Olivier, wrote to him as 'Larry darling' and 'Larry Kin Mine', signing himself, 'Your sweet little kitten, Henrietta'. In one letter he says: 'How Jill must hate me, taking you away from her!'.

Jill Esmond divorced Olivier for adultery on January 29, 1940, citing Vivien Leigh. Jill was awarded custody of the three-and-a-half-year-old Tarquin.

After Vivien's husband, Leigh Holman, had also sued for divorce, citing Larry, she became the second Mrs Laurence Olivier on August 31, 1940. Even before that, however, during filming of her Oscar-winning role as Scarlett O'Hara in the film Gone With The Wind, Vivien had exhibited the first symptoms of manic depression, the malady that was to turn her marriage to Larry into a gothic nightmare.

Outwardly the Oliviers were the most gilded couple in international showbusiness, but Vivien, plagued by mental breakdown and tortured by professional jealousy of Larry's superior talent, became an alcoholic and a nymphomaniac, often pursuing total strangers as sexual partners.

It was small wonder that Olivier continued to turn to men. There was a long and flamboyant relationship with the Hollywood film star Danny Kaye. The Queen's late aunt, Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, who was involved with the bisexual and married Kaye for some years, told me quite emphatically that he and Olivier were 'épris' ('in love').

And Coward, who was appalled to witness the two men openly exchanging French kisses in public, despised Kaye, whom he habitually referred to as 'randy Dan Kaminski' (David Daniel Kaminski was Kaye's real name).

In 1950, when the Oliviers returned to Hollywood for Vivien to film her Oscar-winning role as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire opposite Marlon Brando, David Niven walked into the garden of their Hollywood mansion and discovered 'Brando and Larry swimming naked in the pool. Larry was kissing Brando. Or maybe it was the other way around. I turned my back to them and went inside to join Vivien.'

In a recent television documentary on his life, the stage and screen star Leslie Phillips revealed that he realised, as a young actor, that Olivier was secretly gay.

In his later years Larry became involved with younger actors, including Denholm Elliott and Richard Warwick, both of whom died from AIDS.

After Olivier's divorce from Vivien Leigh in 1961 he married Joan Plowright, who was to bear him a son, Richard, and two daughters, Tamsin and Julie-Kate. Asked by his official biographer, Terry Coleman, if Olivier had had homosexual affairs, Dame Joan replied robustly: 'If he did, so what?'.

At Lord Olivier's memorial service at Westminster Abbey on October 20, 1989, a frail, elderly woman in a wheelchair went unrecognised by most of the congregation. It was Larry's 81-year-old first wife, Jill Esmond, who had lived since their divorce in 1940 with a series of lesbian partners.

She died nine months later. The turning point for them both, in coming to terms with their true sexual identities, had almost certainly been their Broadway run in The Green Bay Tree.

The new production of the play has been adapted for modern staging by the Olivier Award-nominated director Tim Luscombe. It stars the strikingly beautiful Downton Abbey actress Poppy Drayton in Jill Esmond's role as the girl who fights to save the man she loves from the demonic and manipulative control of his possessive mentor.

Producer Max Tiarks believes that despite the passing of 81 years since its original presentation, the play remains starkly relevant to sexual issues today. 'What is startling watching rehearsals,' he said, 'has been the degree to which the subject of manipulation and power is coming out in the script, sometimes uncomfortably so in this hideous age of people being 'groomed' for sex, whether gay or straight. This is happening all around us in the world today.'

Laurence Olivier, during the Broadway run of The Green Bay Tree, told his sister, Sybille Day: 'I've never hated playing any part so much before.' Was that because, for the first time, he was forced to confront reality about his sham first marriage and his true bisexual nature?

The Green Bay Tree, published by Oberon Books, opens on Tuesday at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London. Box office: 020-7287 2875; jermynstreettheatre.co.uk