Anybody who has ever had to clear out the family home after their parents die knows it can be a poignant and sad experience that sometimes throws up a few surprises.
It is no different if your parents are two of the world’s most revered actors: Dame Joan Plowright and Sir Laurence Olivier.
For their eldest child, Richard, emptying the seven-bedroom cottage in West Sussex that had been in the family for 60 years revealed one unseen side to his father, who died in 1989 at the age of 82: his battles with customer service.
Richard found a series of letters from Olivier, who won two Oscars, five Emmys and three Golden Globes in a career that spanned half a century.
“Dad had a very special way of making a complaint if a supplier wasn’t shaping up the way he thought they should,” Richard said. Among the correspondence found in a box were papers that revealed a battle to buy a cover for the family’s swimming pool. A local company had failed to get one but said it had found one in Los Angeles.
Olivier had written in response: “I can only imagine how you must be almost as frustrated as me with the lack of progress in this endeavour. I only wish I had known about the Los Angeles connection as I had just come back from making a film there and I would have brought it back with me.”
Plowright died aged 95 in January at a retirement home, and Richard, 63, and his siblings, Tamsin, 62, and Julie-Kate, 58, took time off their jobs as a consultant, therapist and yoga teacher, respectively, and moved back into the house for a clear-out week before putting the house on the market.
The Malthouse goes on sale next month, valued at £2 million by the estate agents TLC.
“Every so often we’d find a photograph or a letter about a particular occasion with someone thanking them for a lovely weekend at the Malthouse and we’d stop and read those out,” Richard recalled. They gave most of the items relating to their parents’ careers to the British Library, kept a few sentimental pieces and auctioned off others.
The one item they are not sure what to do with, however, is a theatrical sword, which the British Library cannot take. It once belonged to the Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean and was passed on to Olivier on the opening night of Richard III. “We’re looking for a good home,” Richard said.
Before Laurence bought it, the Malthouse, set in four and a half acres, consisted of two cottages and two fields. Today it covers 5,000 sq ft, with three reception rooms, an indoor swimming pool, a tennis court, a maze and an orchard. It also provided the backdrop for the film Nothing Like a Dame, in which Plowright and fellow dames Maggie Smith, Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins enjoy afternoon tea. “They definitely edited themselves down because they’re normally much ruder around the dining room,” Richard said.
Although Richard spent much of his childhood at Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, he spent weekends and summers in West Sussex. After marrying Shelley, he moved back in. Their son Troy, now 36, was born in the house.
Richard says his father waited nervously downstairs during the birth. “He said, ‘Why are you not at the hospital?’ Richard recalled. “It was a beautiful place to raise a baby. We had a cook who would prepare great feasts for guests.”
Richard’s favourite room is the View Room, previously known as the Library Room, which over the years hosted actors such as Alan Bennett, Colin Blakely and Sir Ian McKellen when they came over to practise their lines.
An old file unearthed by the siblings showed the level of fame Olivier achieved during his marriage to Vivien Leigh, star of Gone with the Wind: it contained a record of all the signed photographs sent out every month by the actor’s first production company to fans around the world. “It was a big surprise, just the level of interest in them as a couple in the 1950s,” Richard said.
But there was also surprise at the memorabilia from his mother’s career. Olivier and Plowright met in 1957 and married in 1961. She won two Golden Globes, a Tony and, in 1978, an Olivier — the theatre award named after her husband. To Richard, however, she was simply the mother who enjoyed joining in with games of football, even into her eighties.
“My mum was a great goalkeeper. That got a couple of mentions at our private family cremation —what a good sport she was, sticking in goal. Even when she was going blind, everyone used to be slightly terrified of approaching her in the goal. I’m sure she enjoyed it too.
“Dad’s history was so public and worldwide, but Mum’s was ingrained in the English theatre scene. There’s so much I hadn’t heard before.”
He said messages from younger actors who had been inspired by Plowright left the greatest impression, however: “It was like opening up the door to what she wanted to do with her life and how my mum’s impacted the next generation.”
