Laurence Olivier was the greatest British actor of his time, primus inter pares of the trio who dominated our theater from the early 1930s to the 1980s. His superiority to his chief rivals, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, resides in the role he played in the creation of the National Theatre and in the way he came to embody for the public at large a sense of national greatness. His most magnificent and emblematic performances were as Henry V and as Archie Rice in John Osborne's "The Entertainer."

OLIVIER, by Philip Ziegler. Maclehose Press, 2013, 461 pp., £25 (hardcover)

The former was the warrior king in the patriotic Second World War movie that captured the Churchillian spirit of Britain at her finest hour. The latter was the second-rate music hall comedian, full of imperial bluster and bad faith, who symbolized in the aftermath of the Suez debacle a nation that had, in the words of Dean Acheson, "lost an empire but not yet found a role."