Legendary Actor Sir John Gielgud Dies

Sir John Gielgud, the last of the great trinity of British actors who dominated the theatrical world for much of the 20th century, has died.

Gielgud, 96, died Sunday at his home near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire west of London, Laurence Evans, his former agent, announced Monday.

With a voice that Sir Alec Guinness, one of the actor’s few surviving contemporaries, once called “a silver trumpet muffled in silk,” Gielgud was a consummate actor who was as fluent in tragedy as he was in comedy and as comfortable on the London stage as he was with the intimacy of the TV screen.

Along with Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989, and Ralph Richardson, who died in 1983, Gielgud defined the British theater.

“In Shakespeare, [Gielgud] set the standard across radio, film and legendary stage performances,” actor and director Kenneth Branagh said Monday. “He excelled in both comedy and tragedy. He made Shakespeare vivid, passionate and real for millions of people across the world.”

Many theaters in London dimmed their lights in homage to Gielgud on Monday night, including the theater named after the great actor where Kathleen Turner is appearing as Mrs. Robinson in a stage adaptation of “The Graduate.”

“The death of the great is always awesome,” Guinness said Monday, “ . . . and John was undoubtedly great. He was kind, generous, witty, and his loss is a loss to the nation and his profession.”

To American audiences--especially those whose interest was primarily in motion pictures--he probably is best known for his role as Hobson the butler in the 1981 film “Arthur,” for which he won an Academy Award as best supporting actor. He also won an Emmy as outstanding actor in a miniseries or drama in 1991 for the PBS “Masterpiece Theater” drama “Summer’s Lease.”

Celebrated as a premier contemporary interpreter of Shakespearean drama and widely acclaimed as a producer and director in addition to his honors as a performer, Gielgud nevertheless came late to the attention of most American audiences.

“I resisted the idea of film as an art form--at least for myself--for a long, long time,” he said years ago.

“My career had always been centered principally on the legitimate stage (he made only two silent films and two talkies before World War II), and I used to tell people they were ‘irrelevant’ to the craft of acting. But it was a cover-up.

“I was simply scared of films. I hate to fail, so I stuck to the stage.”

But when he finally determined to make the effort, he was, as he said, “an overnight success after only 40 years’ experience.”

The Academy Award he won for his interpretation of the warm but prickly valet and friend of the title character in “Arthur” was a recognition not only of that specific performance, but of a lifetime’s devotion to his art.

“I still don’t know anything about the technique of making films,” he said. “But I am not the first to take to films late. Dame May Whitty became a star in her 70s with ‘The Lady Vanishes.’ Edith Evans, until the end of her career at 88, could always do films.”

And, of course, he never made a mess of it, as he feared he would.

“Not all theater actors, particularly in the U.K., understood the difference between theater and film,” said Richard Attenborough, who directed Gielgud in the film “Gandhi.”

“What John did absolutely extraordinarily was to change his whole manner of performance, the whole way in which he projected himself, so that he became a consummate film actor.”

Difficulties in Casting

Tall, elegant, youthful and energetic late into his life, Gielgud seemed to epitomize a devotion to excellence that is rare.

He also was uniquely inner-directed.

A self-proclaimed homosexual in an era that not only rejected homosexuality as “unnatural” but persecuted it legally, he helped to dispel the aura of stigma and myth by demonstrating the irrelevance of such considerations with respect to professional and artistic qualifications.

Born April 14, 1904, in London, Arthur John Gielgud came from a theatrical family.

Both his grandmothers were actresses: His father’s mother was the Polish actress Mme. Aszberger, and his mother’s mother was Kate Terry, elder sister of the celebrated Ellen Terry and a well-known Shakespearean in her own right.

Gielgud saw his first play when he was 7, and was producer-director of a toy theater, “The New Mars,” (“My brother Val wrote most of the mystery melodramas of the repertory, while I did all the rest”) by the time he was 9. His decision to devote his life to the stage nonetheless precipitated a family crisis.

He had first acted before an audience at the Hillside School, where he distinguished himself in religious studies and English. But when he decided to seek a stage career rather than attend a university, he was required “for the sake of peace in the family” to agree to abandon the stage and become an architect as his father wanted if he was not successful by the time he was 25.

There was, he said in later years, “never a doubt” that he would win the bet. He obtained a scholarship to study acting at Lady Benson’s School and found some elements of acting easy.

“I could cry well, on cue,” he recalled, “and I could remember lines with little difficulty. There were problems, however. One teacher told me I walked ‘exactly like a cat with rickets.’ ”

During a break from the school in 1921, Gielgud worked as an unpaid supernumerary with the Old Vic company in “Henry V.”

Little was expected of “supers,” he said. “But I managed to disappoint even the most modest of these expectations.”

Undaunted, he obtained his first professional engagement (“Entirely through influence-- never let them tell you family connections don’t matter!”) in his cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry’s production of “The Wheel.”

In 1921, he obtained a year’s scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, where he fell under the influence of actor Claude Rains.

He worked professionally for six weeks in “The Insect Play,” while continuing his classes in the daytime. The play was a failure, and as for his own performance, Gielgud said, “I am surprised that the audience did not throw things at me.”

For the next three years he worked steadily but without notable success. It was during this period that he played his first professional Shakespearean lead, as Romeo to Gwen Efrangcon-Davies’ Juliet with J.B. Fagan’s company.

He was in his second season with Fagan when he was released, first to understudy and then to replace Noel Coward in “The Vortex.”

This brought a measure of success and critical acclaim, but Gielgud noted that in the following few seasons managers seemed to think of him chiefly as a “type” of “neurotic, rather hysterical young man,” and there were difficulties in casting.

Success Acting and Producing

Gielgud’s first real success came in 1930 when, after a season of Shakespeare and Shaw with the Old Vic, he created the role of Inigo Jollifant in “The Good Companions.”

Gielgud previously had produced an undergraduate group’s “Romeo and Juliet” at Oxford, during the run of “The Good Companions,” and now he turned to producing in earnest, handling the Old Vic’s “Merchant of Venice” and his friend W. Somerset Maugham’s “Sheppey.” (Maugham affectionately dedicated the book to the young producer.)

His subsequent production of “Richard of Bordeaux,” in which he played the lead and directed, was an outstanding success of the 1933 season in London, running a year before going on tour.

In 1935, he produced a new version of “Romeo and Juliet,” alternating with his friend Laurence Olivier in the roles of Romeo and Mercutio, a bravura effort that brought critical acclaim for them both.

“We were complete opposites,” he later said of working with Olivier. “He was a much more inventive impersonator that I ever was. But he also was very painstaking, industrious, violently athletic; he wanted everything to be larger than life in a wonderfully dynamic sort of way and I couldn’t quite live up to that. He was superb in the physical part of Romeo which I didn’t do well at all.”

One of Gielgud’s best known successes came in 1937, on his second trip to the United States (his first was in 1928 for a production of “The Patriot” that ran for just nine performances). The Guthrie McClintic presentation of “Hamlet” marked Gielgud’s third professional appearance in the role. But it was his first such appearance on Broadway, and it brought critics and audiences to their feet with applause.

Critic John Mason Brown said, “It will be Mr. Gielgud’s voice in the future that we shall hear [as the Prince of Denmark] . . . such a voice, such diction and such a gift of maintaining the melody of Shakespeare’s verse even while keeping it edged from speech to speech with dramatic significance is a new experience.”

Gielgud had broken with dramatic tradition by speaking the soliloquies quietly--as if to himself--rather than ranting and roaring in the manner of previous Hamlets.

During World War II, Gielgud had joined the British version of the USO and toured abroad, entertaining the troops while maintaining a regular professional schedule at home.

After the war, he took productions of “Hamlet” and “Blithe Spirit” to Burma for the British armed forces and scored outstanding American successes with “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “Love for Love.”

His stage work continued unabated over the years that followed, and he recorded successes as producer and director almost equally with those as performer--but still he shied away from films and from television.

“It seemed to me in the 1960s,” he said, “that there was a whole new spirit abroad--one I could not comprehend.

“Never mind my own reservations concerning media other than the legitimate stage--it was the whole of style and life that had begun to appall me.

“I found new actors creating classless kings and princes in prefabricated A-frame Elsinores.

“I knew nothing about these people.

“I was afraid of appearing old-fashioned and hammy. I thought my number was up.”

But that was nonsense, as subsequent events were to demonstrate.

‘The End of an Era’ in Theater

By 1980, well past the time of life when most men--and almost all former matinee idol actors--have slipped into retirement, Gielgud found himself working harder than ever.

Created a Knight Bachelor in the Coronation and Birthday Honours list of 1953, Sir John had made his television debut in 1959 in “A Day by the Sea” for the BBC, following it with work in “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Mayfly and the Frog,” “Deliver Us From Evil,” “Edward VII,” “Special Duties” and “Brideshead Revisited,” in which he played Edward Ryder, the eccentric father of Jeremy Irons’ Charles Ryder, in a miniseries that was broadcast in the United States on PBS.

In 1988 he returned to the London stage for the first time in a decade, and at age 83 starred in “The Best of Friends” as Sir Sydney Cockerell, the influential curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge University. His performance, which kept him on stage most of the evening, was widely praised as was “the supple voice, as always oboe-like in its poetic flow and timbre,” said the New York Times review.

But it was his work in motion pictures that brought him worldwide celebration.

His 1932 appearances in “Insult” and “The Good Companions” (re-creating his stage success) and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1936 thriller “Secret Agent” had been followed by a long withdrawal from that medium. He had returned, briefly, for appearances with friends Richardson and Olivier in the latter’s film production of “Richard III.” But in 1953 he was nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal of Cassius in the Oscar-nominated version of “Julius Caesar” with Marlon Brando.

As the years advanced he discovered that motion pictures, whatever their other limitations from his point of view, offered an opportunity to sneer at the physical difficulty of roles that would be impossible for a man of advancing years if attempted onstage.

His appearances in “The Loved One” and “Shoes of the Fisherman” were followed with those in “Lost Horizon,” “11 Harrow House,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Murder by Decree,” “The Elephant Man,” “Chariots of Fire,” “The Formula,” “Sphinx,” “Lions of the Desert” “The Shooting Party” and “Arthur.”

Interviewed after his unconventional appearance in “Arthur,” Sir John admitted certain misgivings.

“I thought the language a bit strong,” he said. “I turned it (‘Arthur’) down twice, in fact. Then they persuaded me that it would be all right.”

It brought him an Oscar and “offers of more work than any 10 actors could handle--even if they didn’t have to sleep from time to time.”

In 1991 he appeared in the title role in Peter Greenaway’s film “Prospero’s Books,” based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” a role that he had wanted to do for 15 years. Although Greenaway’s film was a radical reinterpretation of the play, Gielgud felt gratified to have a part in a new school of filmmaking.

“I’ve been so lucky in this late part of my career,” he told a reporter some years ago. “I’ve had such an exciting range of parts. . . . That’s lovely for an actor. I was afraid that I’d just end up playing diplomats and heavy fathers.”

Active well into his 90s, Gielgud appeared in Jane Campion’s “The Portrait of a Lady” in 1996 and in “Shine.” In 1998, he was the voice of Merlin in the “The Quest for Camelot.” His last film role was believed to be Pope Paul IV that same year in “Elizabeth.”

In the end, he was what Trevor Nunn, the artistic director of the Royal National Theater, called “a seemingly indestructible genius of his age.”

“Everybody currently working in the theater will agree that his death brings the end of an era,” Nunn said Monday. “As Shakespeare said: ‘There’s a good spirit gone.’ ”

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An Actor’s Life

“A silver trumpet muffled in silk,” *

--Alec Guinness describing the voice of John Gielgud.

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John Gielgud, who along with Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier dominated the theater for most of the 20th century, was the only actor in his immediate family. His parents wanted him to be an architect, but he was terrible at mathematics and pressed his desire to become an actor. They gave him five years to achieve success. He easily met the challenge.

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Highlights of his career

1921: Debuts on London stage with one line in “Henry V.”

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1928: Makes New York acting debut in “The Patriot.”

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1932: Feature debut in sound film, “Insult.”

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1936: Plays romantic lead in Alfred Hitchcock film “Secret Agent.”

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1937: Takes over Queen’s Theater and launches his own company.

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1948: Wins first Tony for “The Importance of Being Earnest.”

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1953: Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.

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1955: Has featured role in Olivier’s “Richard III,” marking the first time Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson, three of the finest actors of their generation, appear in the same film.

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1961: Makes Broadway directing debut with “Big Fish, Little Fish.”

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1964: Directs modern-dress version of “Hamlet” on Broadway with Richard Burton.

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1981: Wins supporting actor Oscar for his role as Hobson the butler in “Arthur.”

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1982: Appears as eccentric father of Charles Ryder in “Brideshead Revisited.”

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1988: Makes last appearance on London stage in “The Best of Friends.”

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1991: Receives acting Emmy for “Summer’s Lease” on PBS.

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1998: Makes what is believed to be his last film appearance as Pope Paul IV in “Elizabeth.”

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Source: Baseline, the Entertainment information database

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Janet Stobart of The Times’ London bureau contributed to this story. David Gritten, a London-based freelance arts writer whose work appears frequently in The Times, also contributed.

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* GIELGUD APPRECIATION

Sir John Gielgud had a voice that no one could ever forget, writes Charles Champlin. F1