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How far was Laurence Olivier a CSA victim?

Posted by Edmund on 2026-May-1 17:02:18, Friday

I've been trying to make sense of wildly varying accounts of the degree to which Laurence Olivier may have been the victim of genuine sexual abuse as a boy of around 12 to 14. I'm wondering if anyone here knows anything I've missed or can shed further light? To explain the dilemma, I'll summarise what I've read.

Priority should surely go to Olivier's Confessions of an Actor (1982), both because it's his own account and the earliest to touch on the subject. He describes how, as a pretty 14-year-old new boy at St. Edward's, Oxford he attracted the sexual interest of older boys, which he didn't welcome because he'd already experienced frightening near-rape by an older boy two years earlier. He also attracted the sadistic attentions of a schoolmaster who was expelled for it.

Daniel Spoto in his Laurence Olivier: A Biography (1992), apparently the first significant biography after Olivier's death, casts a positive spin, saying only:
" 'I was ostracised,' Olivier wrote later. 'I was a flirt [who] sang like an angel and was as pretty as was needed to attract the worst in certain males,' by which he meant not only older bullies but also those repressed homosexual teachers who vented their frustrations by sadistic beatings of desired but for-bidden boys. 'In any case, I was generally disliked. My manner was florid, and I was girlish and a bit sissy.' These characteristics made him a ripe target for the sexual advances of older boys, with whom (as he later freely confided to friends) he blithely cavorted throughout his school years. Such adventures, blessedly free for Larry of any subsequent neurotic guilt, were typical of the English boarding school tradition, and are not unknown elsewhere."

The apparently best-regarded biography by Terry Coleman (2005) says barely anything on this.

And then suddenly there is a biography by one Michael Munn, Lord Larry. The Secret Life of Laurence Olivier. A Personal and Intimate Portrait, 2007, in which the characteristic voice of our age makes itself heard. Munn claims in his youth to have become vary close to the elderly Olivier, who confided in him that he'd been sexually abused by a choirmaster with devastating life-long effects The problems with accepting this narrative are that (1) Munn made a successful career out of writing biographies of several extremely famous and conveniently-deceased film stars allegedly based on interviews he recorded (but always conveniently lost the tapes) with startling revelations denied by the subjects' genuine intimates. There was an article in The Observer exposing this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/25/michael-munn-biographer-interview-tim-adams, and (2) Olivier's alleged revelation of this is dated to 1981, the very beginning of the CSA hysteria and his alleged account of it smacks much too strongly of the dogma that was developed by the CSA industry over the course of that decade. In other words, written in 2007, it sounds strongly like an account catering to popular ideas that hadn't taken hold in 1981 but were bound to attract sales in 2007.

The problem is that, apart from the Observer article, I've been unable to find anything that tackles Munn's veracity. There has been no serious biography of Olivier since then, no one seems to have attacked or questioned Munn and yet conventional sources like Wikipedia have not taken him on board. So, was he a fraud, as I'm 80% inclined to think, or not?
Edmund
www.amazon.com/dp/1481222112

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