Laurence Olivier was a Projector — built not for relentless output but for seeing through other actors, other texts, other audiences with a precision that made him the most studied performer of his century. He didn't work the way Gielgud worked, or Richardson, or the Americans he'd later spar with. He watched, he calibrated, he chose his moments, and when he stepped into the light he had already mapped the part down to the false nose, the limp, the specific pitch of a vowel. The famous Olivier trick — the technical, exterior-in approach to character — was a Projector's craft: see the system, refine the system, then inhabit it.

His 6/2 profile wrote the shape of his career almost too literally. The early years were trial and error, sometimes embarrassingly so: matinee-idol stretches in Hollywood, a misfired Romeo opposite Gielgud, the long apprenticeship of working out what he actually was. By his forties he had become the figure others measured themselves against, and by his sixties — running the National Theatre, knighted, then made a life peer — he was the unambiguous elder of the English stage. The wisdom arrived exactly when the profile says it should, and he carried the kind of big-picture authority that takes decades to earn into every institution he touched.

The decisions that defined him were never quick ones. He sat with Henry V through the war years before filming it; he circled Hamlet, Richard III, and Othello for years apiece, waiting for choices to settle into something cool and clear before committing. The marriages told the same story in a more painful register — the long, agonised exit from Jill Esmond, the consuming decade with Vivien Leigh, the eventual quiet with Joan Plowright — each one a slow emotional weather system rather than a clean break. He was capable of emotional storms that reshaped everyone around him, and he knew, painfully, that his clarity arrived only after the storm had passed.

On stage he was a provocateur in the most exact sense. His Richard III hissed and seduced; his Othello, blacked up and unsettling even at the time, was a deliberate detonation; his Archie Rice in The Entertainer was a man flayed in public. He had a gift for pulling the truth out of an audience whether they wanted it or not, and a voice that could land a line at precisely the moment it would do the most damage. Critics talked about his danger. What they meant was that he understood timing the way a sniper understands wind.

He fought, too. The founding of the National Theatre was a decade of political warfare with boards, ministers, and the Old Vic establishment, and Olivier ran it like a cause worth bleeding for even as his health collapsed under the load. He had the drive of someone who could not stop climbing and the restless dreamer's hunger for the next role, the next company, the next reinvention. It cost him — cancers, a near-fatal thrombosis, the long late years of dwindling strength — but it built the institution that outlasted him.

In the final phase he became what 6/2s become when they stop hiding: the visible elder. The grainy television Lears, the memoirs, the appearances at his own tributes. He had been a tastemaker about what English acting could be, and by the end the entire profession was working in vocabulary he had written.