Laurence Olivier honoured with blue plaque unveiled by Ian McKellen

Laurence Olivier has joined David Garrick, Henry Irving, Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward with an English Heritage blue plaque outside his former London home. Ian McKellen unveiled the plaque at 22 Lupus Street in Pimlico, where Olivier lived from the age of five to 12 and discovered a talent for acting under the watchful eye of his father, a curate at St Saviour’s church across the road.

David Hare once said that a blue plaque was the only honour worth having, but the trouble was that you never lived to see it. You felt, however, that Olivier would have been gratified by the warmth of the tributes paid on Wednesday afternoon. McKellen said it was the fate of actors to be forgotten 20 years after their death, but that Olivier’s memory lived on in numerous ways, partly through having a theatre and an awards ceremony named after him but even more through the glow cast by his performances.

England, Pimlico, London

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