So Who's Your Mother?

Book excerpt: As the first-born of such a prominent acting family - his father, Laurence Olivier, matchless, and his mother and her mother no mean performers themselves; then add in successive stepmothers Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright, not to mention, among the godparents, Sybil Thorndike, Ralph Richardson and Noel Coward, and the author's personal associations are enviably exotic. Naturally they constantly illumine his narrative. But he was also concerned to find his own fulfilment - principally in Third World countries."