Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Gielgud was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades, from his birth on the 14th of April 1904 to his death on the 21st of May 2000. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. He was acclaimed as the finest speaker of Shakespearean verse of his century.
John Gielgud held the rare distinction of winning an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for playing Hobson the butler in Arthur in 1981, and his film work also earned a Golden Globe and two BAFTAs. He was knighted in 1953.
John Gielgud was arrested on the 20th of October 1953 in Chelsea for cruising for sex in a public lavatory, then a crime in Britain, where sexual activity between men was illegal until the 1960s. He was fined and feared the scandal would end his career, but his colleagues and the public supported him. Days later in Liverpool the audience gave him a standing ovation.
John Gielgud was regarded by many as the finest Hamlet of his era, a role with which he was associated for more than a decade. His 1930 Old Vic production used the complete text and ran nearly five hours, and James Agate called it the high-water mark of English Shakespearean acting of the time. He was also indelibly linked with Prospero and King Lear.
John Gielgud did not take cinema seriously during the first half of his career and devoted two pages of his 1939 memoirs to the things about filming he detested. He did not begin a regular film career until his sixties, and his first Academy Award nomination came for playing King Louis VII of France in Becket in 1964. He later regretted sticking to the stage while Olivier and Richardson signed film contracts.
John Gielgud was a member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, which included the actresses Ellen, Marion and Kate Terry. His mother was the daughter of the actress Kate Terry, while his father Frank Henry Gielgud worked as a stockbroker in the City of London. The surname derives from Gelgaudiskis, a village in Lithuania.