Lively moments offstage too

British theater enjoyed a golden age of actors from 1930 through the 1950s. (The only 18-karat playwright during those years was Noel Coward, who starred in many of his own plays and wrote the music for his musicals. And although George Bernard Shaw was still alive, his decline had begun after “The Apple Cart” in 1929.) On stage, Peggy Ashcroft, Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Wendy Hiller, Vivien Leigh, Margaret Leighton, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, Ralph Richardson and Sybil Thorndike set the gold standard, but only the few who became movie stars are remembered today, except by those old enough to have seen them in person.

John Gielgud, the unsurpassed Shakespearean actor of his time, who had only 15 minutes of movie fame as Dudley Moore’s valet in “Arthur,” owes his survival to the video age. As Cassius in the movie “Julius Caesar” (directed by Joseph Mankiewicz in 1953) and Henry IV in Orson Welles’ 1965 “Chimes at Midnight,” he created profoundly dissimilar characters, one driven by bitterness, the other lonely and melancholy. As well as his classic technique and range of human insight, the voice that Alec Guinness once compared to “a silver trumpet muffled in silk” is on glorious display. Also available on video is a further extension of his talent in a contemporary play, David Storey’s “Home,” filmed for TV during its New York run. The bonus here is that Richardson, a colleague from the golden age, plays the other leading role.

Gielgud also survives as a wonderful and wonderfully prolific letter writer in this collection that begins in 1931, when he was 27, and ends in 1999, a year before he died. It reveals an actor with a consuming passion for theater, ambitious yet modest, acutely self-critical, a disciplined professional with a sometimes turbulent private life.

One of the earliest letters reflects not only Gielgud’s innate discipline but his resolve never to let a playwright or an audience down. He established his reputation as a Shakespearean actor during the 1930-31 seasons at the Old Vic, when he played Romeo, Richard II, Macbeth, Mark Antony, Prospero, Hamlet and even Lear. The production of “Hamlet,” a box office as well as critical success, transferred to a theater in London’s West End, but while still doing good business it had to close to make way for a production previously booked to open there. “It certainly seems a pity,” Gielgud wrote the director, “ ... but I honestly do not feel that I could anyhow have gone on doing justice to the part for eight shows a week.” When he became a star, he attacked the star system, opting instead for a “well-balanced cast headed by actors who can be trusted not to throw the play out of proportion.”

Until he met Martin Hensler, the “strange Hungarian” whom he “picked up rather shamelessly at the Kokoschka exhibition” at London’s Tate Gallery in 1962, and with whom he settled down for almost 40 years, Gielgud had many affairs, two of them overlapping. In 1953 he began a relationship with Paul Anstee, an interior designer, and two years later with George Pitcher, a visiting American scholar at Oxford. Although Pitcher later returned to the United States, they resumed their affair whenever Gielgud appeared on Broadway. “I can’t really share my life completely with anybody, as you know,” he wrote Anstee, who learned of the affair and resented it. “If it hurts you to be with me and you would rather make a complete break, you must say so, even if it makes us both very unhappy. I am quite unworthy of your devotion and I truly do not want to humiliate or hurt you.”

Anstee accepted the situation, and although their sexual relationship ended a few years later, they remained close friends for the rest of Gielgud’s life. The relationship with Pitcher followed a similar pattern, and however unworthy of such devotion Gielgud may have felt, he certainly inspired it, and was overwhelmed by the way his friends in the theater closed ranks during the most traumatic occasion of his life.

A few weeks after he had been knighted in 1953, Sir John was arrested by a police decoy for “importuning male persons” in a public toilet. Terrified of the publicity that would follow, he identified himself as Arthur Gielgud, a “clerk.” The terror was understandable, as the British home secretary had recently launched a campaign against homosexuals, with the tabloid press joining the hunt.

When Gielgud pleaded guilty but drunk in court next day, the judge let him off with a fine and advised him to see a doctor. But a reporter recognized the actor’s voice, and the case quickly made headlines. Many in Gielgud’s circle, including Cecil Beaton, Coward, Leigh and Olivier, immediately wrote him letters of support. “Your constant thought of me in my travail has touched me deeply,” he wrote Olivier. “I cannot tell you how I have been helped and encouraged and above all by you and Viv and Ralph and Mu [Richardson’s wife].”

At about the same time, on tour with a play prior to its London opening, Gielgud made his first entrance to a standing ovation from the audience in Liverpool. Edinburgh, like the “obscene” tabloids, was less friendly; but Thorndike, also appearing in the play, wrote Gielgud’s mother not to worry: “He is surrounded by people who love him.”

In London he had another positive reception, but remorse for “the distress I have caused my friends,” he wrote Beaton, was as profound as his gratitude. For a while Gielgud struggled against depression, but his career wasn’t seriously affected. Disconcerted at first by the theatrical “new wave” that broke with John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” in 1956, he soon realized that it showed “how a new sort of class has evolved, politically and socially and everything.” But although he doubted “there’s any place in it for me,” he would find a triumphant place in Alan Bennett’s sly comedy “Forty Years On,” as the rather down-at-the-heels headmaster of a down-at-the-heels school, desperately trying to adjust to changing times.

The longer he lived, in fact, the more open to change he became. In “Home” (1970), Gielgud and Richardson played two elderly men who meet in what seems to be a country hotel but is revealed to be a mental institution. These two great actors gave audiences, as David Storey commented, “a glimpse of the final flowering of a tradition that was vanishing.” In 1975 the same pair would provide another glimpse in Harold Pinter’s “No Man’s Land,” which Gielgud found “funny, menacing, poetic and powerful.” As an unsuccessful, impoverished poet, he based his frayed and wrinkled appearance on W.H. Auden and abandoned his famous voice (which he decided had become “something of a cliche”) for the lazy monotone of students recalled from university days.

From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s I saw many of Gielgud’s most acclaimed performances and remember his superb high style in high comedy, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Congreve’s “Love for Love”; his powerful Leontes in “The Winter’s Tale”; and his deeply conflicted Jaffier in Otway’s Restoration melodrama “Venice Preserv’d.” In 1955 the London critics were generally cool to his innovative Lear, in a setting by Noguchi, but I never saw a more gripping and adventurous portrait of a wild, deluded, fatally vain old man.

Genuinely modest and kind in person, Gielgud the letter-writer was uncommonly sharp and occasionally ruthless. He wrote of Irene Selznick at the memorial for actress Kay Kendall “looking like a mad prophetess in an unsuitable girlie hat.” Of Chaplin at a dinner party, “prissy, weary and neat” but giving an “extraordinarily vivid” impersonation of Eleanora Duse, he writes: “Suddenly there was a stirring behind the piano, some huge chrysanthemums on it moved, and the old lady suddenly appeared from a concealed entrance, and by her utter simplicity, as she first arranged the flowers, slowly sat down and held her wonderful hands towards the fire, the man was completely blotted out.”

Of Lindsay Anderson, who directed “Home”: “Rather short, wears a funny cap. I think gay, but not quite up to it.” On directing Richard Burton as Hamlet on the road before the 1964 Broadway opening: “Richard dreadfully uneven, but brilliant enough in the best bits to be well worth working on, and so patient and agreeable. He looks suddenly years younger, and his costume (though not yet quite right) makes him quite boyish [at 38] and attractive. The company adore him. Hume Cronyn [Polonius] is brilliant -- the rest very adequate -- but [Alfred] Drake [Claudius] and [Eileen] Herlie [Gertrude] at present seem like an ex-croupier from Monte Carlo who has eloped with a fat landlady who keeps a discreet brothel on the Cote d’Azur.”

Finally, what’s not to admire in an 86-year-old actor who agrees to play Prospero in “Prospero’s Books,” Peter Greenaway’s postmodern take on “The Tempest,” and doesn’t object when asked to “play naked myself in a pool” or when he is surrounded by a crowd “of both sexes