A Gallery of Great Performances

On an autumn morning in 1946, John Gielgud, who was touring the country with his one-man show, “The Ages of Man,” visited a large lecture class I was taking on Shakespeare, to talk a little about acting.

In an ancient tweed jacket and baggy gray flannels and carrying a well-used one-volume Shakespeare that seemed to fall open to the soliloquys at Gielgud’s slightest touch, Sir John began to recite.

The book was a prop; he obviously had no need to refer to it at all. But in that worn, mundane and untheatrical setting, a world away from Dunsinane or the Forest of Arden or any other place known to Shakespeare, magic began to occur. Hamlet, soft-voiced, wondered whether to commit suicide and, a moment later, boasted what a rogue and peasant slave he was. Somehow, beyond reason, the prince had emerged out of time and stood free of the pencil-marked, heavily footnoted pages.

The morning was a sonata for unaccompanied voice, an a cappella concert that became an exhilarating demonstration of the power of the actor and the words alone to move an audience.

There is an ample reconfirmation of Gielgud’s magical gifts in “John Gielgud: An Actor’s Life,” airing Friday from 9 to 10:30 p.m. on PBS (KCET Channel 28) as the latest in the “Great Performances” series.

The several substantial clips include two from the documentary made of his “Ages of Man” show. Here is Sir John, in not quite such comfortably well-traveled clothes, alone on a bare stage, doing the prologue to “Henry the Fifth,” which is a summoning of the imagination of every theater audience to accept the make-believe. It is charming.

The heart of the program is an interview with Gielgud, conducted over several days earlier this year, by an unobtrusive questioner, John Miller, who was also the program’s producer.

Gielgud, now 84, sits in the elegant drawing room or strolls the formal grounds of his impressive home in Buckinghamshire and recalls with candor his successes and flops, his youthful arrogance in announcing that he was going to be a star and his excessive early mannerisms against which kindly colleagues warned him.

It was Dame Edith Evans, I think, who said, “John, if you would cry less, the audiences would cry more.” But Gielgud’s ability to produce tears at will has been one of his many gifts. In an affecting scene from David Storey’s “Home” (a text that overcame the actor’s distaste for avant-garde theater), Gielgud indeed stands in silent tears as Ralph Richardson speaks behind him. You need not have seen the production to feel the quiet desolation of the moment.

As he told Miller, Gielgud was born to the stage. The actress Ellen Terry was his great-aunt and as a child he was taken to see her perform. The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts was inevitable. His “Hamlet” is regarded as one of the finest of the century, a success in London and later in New York. Still later, Gielgud directed Richard Burton in his own hugely popular “Hamlet.”

The other excerpts include a long sequence from Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land,” in which Gielgud was again teamed with his old colleague in greasepaint Ralph Richardson and in which--pure Harold Pinter--it is amusingly unclear what the devil is going on.

There is a glimpse of Gielgud’s role as Jeremy Irons’ exasperating father in “Brideshead Revisited” and others of Gielgud as Richard III and Julius Caesar, that film startling now for the appearance of a young, darkly intense Marlon Brando as Marc Antony.

It is one of the ironies that can festoon an actor’s life that Sir John, having triumphed in the most testing roles the stage has to offer, should win his widest public notice as a kind but outspoken butler to a drunk in the movie “Arthur,” and been so winning that he returned for a sepulchral visit in the sequel “Arthur 2: on the Rocks.”

The Academy Award he won for looking after Dudley Moore so astonished Sir John, he tells Miller, that he had made no plans to come to Hollywood to accept it. But it is clear that he has grown quite fond of the film work, and in his senior years he has created a gallery of memorable portraits--pre-eminent among them the quarrelsome, Maugham-like dying author in “Providence,” unfortunately not represented in “An Actor’s Life.”

Without a script, gazing neither at Miller nor the camera but into space (or toward the balcony), Sir John is a fine raconteur. The program is not the least of his performances.