I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.

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The film was a hit and Olivier was praised for his performance with a nomination for an Academy Award for Best Actor. The magic continued with one of Olivier's most famous endeavours the double bill of Sophocles' Oedipus and Sheridan's The Critic with Olivier's transition from Greek tragedy to high comedy in a single evening becoming a thing of legend. Leigh next sought the role of Blanche DuBois in the West End stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire and was cast after Williams and the play's producer Irene Mayer Selznick saw her in The School for Scandal and Antigone and Olivier was contracted to direct.

Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet) plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He continued to act until the year before his death in 1989. His career as a stage and film actor spanned more than six decades and included a wide variety of roles from the title role in Shakespeare's Othello and Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night to the sadistic Nazi dentist Dr.