John Gielgud

When avant-garde plays began to supersede traditional West End productions in the later 1950s he found no new suitable stage roles, and for several years he was best known in the theatre for his one-man Shakespeare show The Ages of Man.

Gielgud's elder brothers were Lewis, who became a senior official of the Red Cross and UNESCO, and Val, later head of BBC radio drama; his younger sister Eleanor became John's secretary for many years.

[8] Hillside encouraged his interest in drama, and he played several leading roles in school productions, including Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.

Val Gielgud recalled, "Our parents looked distinctly sideways at the Stage as a means of livelihood, and when John showed some talent for drawing his father spoke crisply of the advantages of an architect's office.

[34] His distinctive speaking voice attracted attention and led to work for BBC Radio, which his biographer Sheridan Morley calls "a medium he made his own for seventy years".

Morley makes the point that, like Coward, Gielgud's principal passion was the stage; both men had casual dalliances, but were more comfortable with "low-maintenance" long-term partners who did not impede their theatrical work and ambitions.

[44] After returning to London he starred in a succession of short runs, including Ibsen's Ghosts with Mrs Patrick Campbell (1928), and Reginald Berkeley's The Lady with a Lamp (1929) with Edith Evans and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies.

[51] She paid her performers very modest wages, but the theatre was known for its unrivalled repertory of classics, mostly Shakespeare, and Gielgud was not the first West End star to take a large pay cut to work there.

[1] During his first season at the Old Vic, Gielgud played Romeo to the Juliet of Adele Dixon, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, Cleante in The Imaginary Invalid, the title role in Richard II, and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The Times commented, "It is a mountain of a part, and at the end of the evening the peak remains unscaled";[65] in The Manchester Guardian, however, Brown wrote that Gielgud "is a match for the thunder, and at length takes the Dover road with a broken tranquillity that allowed every word of the King's agony to be clear as well as poignant".

This crowd-pleaser drew disapproval from the more austere reviewers, who felt Gielgud should be doing something more demanding,[69] but he found playing a conventional juvenile lead had challenges of its own and helped him improve his technique.

"[85] Morley writes that junior members of the cast such as Alec Guinness and Frith Banbury would gather in the wings every night "to watch what they seemed intuitively already to know was to be the Hamlet of their time".

[92] The two stars were praised for their performances, but Hitchcock's "preoccupation with incident" was felt by critics to make the leading roles one-dimensional, and the laurels went to Peter Lorre as Gielgud's deranged assistant.

[102] His company included Harry Andrews, Peggy Ashcroft, Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine, Michael Redgrave and Harcourt Williams, with Angela Baddeley and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as guests.

He played the role quite differently from his attempt on the same stage in 1930: in place of the "manic conjurer"[110] his Prospero was "very far from the usual mixture of Father Christmas, a Colonial Bishop, and the President of the Magicians' Union ... a clear, arresting picture of a virile Renaissance notable", according to Brown.

He gave recitals of prose and poetry, and acted in a triple bill of short plays, including two from Coward's Tonight at 8.30, but he found at first that less highbrow performers like Beatrice Lillie were better than he at entertaining the troops.

Olivier was celebrated for his recent film of Henry V, and with Richardson (and John Burrell in Gielgud's stead) was making the Old Vic "the most famous theatre in the Anglo-Saxon world" according to the critic Harold Hobson.

[131] Returning to London later in 1953 Gielgud took over management of the Lyric, Hammersmith, for a classical season of Richard II, Congreve's The Way of the World, and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd, directing the first, acting in the last, and doing both in the second.

[29][143] During 1957 Gielgud directed Berlioz's The Trojans at Covent Garden and played Prospero at Drury Lane,[29] but the production central to his career over the late 1950s and into the 1960s was his one-man show The Ages of Man.

It was an anthology of Shakespearean speeches and sonnets, compiled by George Rylands, in which, wearing modern evening clothes on a plain stage, Gielgud recited the verses, with his own linking commentary.

[154] The following year Gielgud directed Richardson in The School for Scandal, first at the Haymarket and then on a North American tour, which he joined as, in his words, "the oldest Joseph Surface in the business".

[161][n 19] Much of Gielgud's theatre work in the later 1960s was as a director: Chekhov's Ivanov at the Phoenix in London and the Shubert in New York, Peter Ustinov's Half Way Up the Tree at the Queen's and Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Coliseum.

[165] John Barber wrote in The Daily Telegraph that "Gielgud dominates all with an unexpected caricature of a mincing pedant, his noble features blurred so as to mimic a fussed and fatuous egghead.

In The New York Times Clive Barnes wrote, "The two men, bleakly examining the little nothingness of their lives, are John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson giving two of the greatest performances of two careers that have been among the glories of the English-speaking theater.

Morley describes his choice as indiscriminate, but singles out for praise his performances in 1974 as the Old Cardinal in Joseph Losey's Galileo and the manservant Beddoes in Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express.

[29] In Julian Mitchell's Half-Life (1977) at the National, Gielgud was warmly praised by reviewers; he reprised the role at the Duke of York's Theatre in the West End in 1978 and on tour the following year.

[179] He won a New York Film Critics Circle award for his performance as a dying author, "drunk half the time ... throwing bottles about, and roaring a lot of very coarse dialogue".

Morley singles out as noteworthy The Elephant Man (1980), as the chairman of the Royal London Hospital, Chariots of Fire (1981), as the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Gandhi (1982), as Lord Irwin (the latter two winning Academy Awards as Best Picture), The Shooting Party (1984) and Plenty (1985), directed by David Lynch, Hugh Hudson, Richard Attenborough, Alan Bridges and Fred Schepisi respectively.

[185] Gielgud had some trouble learning his lines;[186] at one performance he almost forgot them, momentarily distracted by seeing in a 1938 copy of The Times, read by his character, a review of his own portrayal of Vershinin in Three Sisters fifty years earlier.

He is indelibly linked with the roles of Prospero and King Lear – regarded as pinnacles of theatrical achievement – yet he is also widely remembered for his wonderful comic touch as Jack Worthing in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.