Archie Rice, a failing music-hall comedian, clings to the stage — and to his family — as both his career and his country change around him.
In The Entertainer (1960), based on John Osborne’s play, Laurence Olivier plays Archie Rice, a second-rate music-hall performer in a seaside town. Archie is in debt, his marriage is failing, and his son has been killed in the Suez crisis, yet he keeps performing, with jokes that are increasingly desperate and a charm that is increasingly hollow.
Olivier’s Archie is a complete break from his Shakespearean heroes. He is shabby, selfish and sad, and he plays him without vanity, letting the audience see both the performer’s need for applause and the man’s failure to be honest with himself. The film, directed by Tony Richardson, captures a Britain in transition, with the music hall dying and a new, angrier culture taking its place.
The Entertainer is a powerful portrait of a performer past his prime, and Olivier’s Archie Rice is one of his most human performances: funny, pathetic and, in the end, strangely moving.