Incomparable Voice of John Gielgud

Actors and their vocal coaches customarily refer to the voice as the Instrument, with the capital in place. So it is--although not all voices are created equal and some are blunt instruments, fine for crying “Charge” or “Save the Dauphin” but of limited range otherwise.

Sir John Gielgud, who died Sunday at the age of 96, had the most perfect male vocal instrument of them all, and no one who heard it on stage or on screen will likely ever forget it.

One morning, a half-century ago, when he was in Boston performing his one-man show “The Ages of Man,” he visited a Shakespeare course I was taking at the request of the professor, an old friend of his. Dressed in a rumpled old tweed jacket and baggy gray flannels and holding his battered copy of the “Collected Works,” Gielgud chatted quietly about the way he created mental images to help him memorize. “Like Niobe, all tears,” was such an image, he said.

Yet that process must have been completed years before. He seemed to know all the texts by heart. He seemed to open the book to the various soliloquies he recited, but seemed never to look at the page; memory was speaking.

The instrument that morning was a cello, occasionally a viola, the quick rumble of a bass viol. He was, above all, Hamlet in all the Dane’s emotions, from range to seeming madness to empty scheming. It was easy to close one’s eyes and let Gielgud’s voice and Shakespeare’s words create the stage, the proscenium, the drama.

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When at last he closed the book to be thanked by Professor Spencer, Sir John was again a balding, already middle-aged man in tweed jacket and baggy flannels. But he was at the same time a magician and a whole string section.

He was the Compleat Actor, which is to say that he lived to act, and all else in his life was, it was clear, secondary to the practice of the craft he had mastered.

In ordinary life, Gielgud’s social gaffes were legendary and, like Sam Goldwyn’s malapropisms, probably largely apocryphal. One of the most famous was at a dinner, with Gielgud sitting beside a quite well-known actress. Her name varies with the telling but let’s say she was Regina Folkestone. At one point, gossiping, Gielgud said, “I’ve been hearing the most awful reports about Regina’s performance at Brighton.” Then he realized he was in fact talking to Regina, and quickly added, “Not you, of course, the other Regina Folkestone.”

Blake Edwards once dramatized another Gielgud legend and incorporated it into one of his films. It was in the first telling a rather convoluted story, but the denouement was of Gielgud coming to take tea with the duchess and inadvertently sitting on and smothering her pet poodle.

His range went from comedy--from Restoration period pieces to the modern drawing room--to drama. While the film “Providence” was not widely seen here, Gielgud’s tour de force performance as an author swigging white wine through a long, increasingly hallucinatory night was, like so many of his appearances, unforgettable.

Active until well into his 90s, Gielgud, and we, were blessed with one of the longest acting careers ever, and it is reasonable to hope that as night fell, he could dream of angels come to sing him to his rest.