“My taste includes both snails and oysters”—Laurence Olivier (Marcus Licinius Crassus to his slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) in Spartacus from the 1967 rerelease.

Olivier was gay, or at least Hollywood Bisexual, having a real love affair with Vivien Leigh and other women, but also married a beard lesbian actress in his first marriage, and went out on the DL with many actors while also married to women, most famously with Danny Kaye, but also reported, by David Niven, to make out even with Marlon Brando in a pool, when Vivien’s back was turned. He was also one of the greatest actors in the twentieth century, a true genius who also directed, produced, was in the theater as much as he was filmed, and had a lifelong abundant career as a Sir Olivier, a gentleman actor who changed cultural history. He always appealed to me, watching old reruns of films and TV shows as a kid growing up, I looked to him as model of being a gentleman.

He was smart and gentle, but also grave and powerful, he let his feelings show but he also could be intensely private and cool. His genius was pervasive, I don’t think I can remember seeing him in a role playing someone naive or stupid, and he had a feline manner that could also rule. Hamlet is one of my favorite films, of him and of Shakespeare, and this image, from the also Olivier-directed Henry V, is from that sublime movie in which I’ve made many images. Here he plays a great king, who rules with authority but also sincerity and conviction. I like how in this image he looks like he came from a Holbein, in fact, it seems like his dress, or at least his fabulous necklace, was inspired by the portrait by Hans Holbein of Sir Thomas More at the Frick—with the same dollar-sign insignias. It’s how it’s not like the photo is what is me about it—I made this image from a black-and-white still, and brought I hope regal queer life to the painting.

That a gay man could also be so successful, with his winning ways and incredible career, truly one of the best actors of his or anyone’s generation and serve as a model of what to be a man—in a queer—or at least, not presenting in an American patriarchal phallocentric way, is outstanding to me. He has always been one of my influences, and a great hero.