John Gielgud

• 1. Introduction

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  On the evening of the 20th of October 1953, John Gielgud was arrested in Chelsea for cruising for sex in a public lavatory, an act that was then a crime in Britain. He had been knighted only months earlier in the Coronation Honours. He was fined, the press reported it, and he believed his disgrace would end everything. Days later, on a pre-London tour in Liverpool, he stood frozen backstage, sure he could not face an audience. What happened when he stepped out tells you something about the place this man held in English life. Gielgud was an actor and theatre director whose career ran across eight decades, from 1904 to 2000. He was acclaimed as the finest speaker of Shakespearean verse of his century, the Hamlet who shaped how a role was played for more than thirty years. Yet for the first half of that career he detested the camera. So how did a stage purist end up in more than sixty films, winning an Oscar in his late seventies? And how does an actor born into a theatrical dynasty become its most quietly revolutionary member?

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• 2. The Terry Inheritance

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  The surname Gielgud comes from Gelgaudiskis, a village in Lithuania, where the Counts Gielgud had owned a manor on the Nemunas river. Their estates were confiscated after they joined a failed uprising against Russian rule in 1830-31, and Jan Gielgud took refuge in England. His descendant Frank Henry Gielgud worked all his life as a stockbroker in the City of London and had no theatrical ambitions of his own.

  Frank married into theatre instead. His wife was the daughter of the actress Kate Terry, part of a dynasty that included Ellen, Fred and Marion Terry, Mabel Terry-Lewis, and Edith and Edward Gordon Craig. John was born on the 14th of April 1904 in South Kensington, the third of four children. His brother Lewis became a senior official of the Red Cross and UNESCO, his brother Val became head of BBC radio drama, and his younger sister Eleanor served as John's secretary for many years.

  The parents looked sideways at the stage as a living. Val Gielgud recalled that when John showed talent for drawing, their father spoke crisply of the advantages of an architect's office. At Hillside preparatory school in Surrey he hated mathematics and excelled at English and divinity. At Westminster School, a day boy with access to the West End, he saw Sarah Bernhardt act and watched the music-hall stars perform. On leaving in 1921 he won a concession from his reluctant parents. If he was not self-supporting by the age of twenty-five, he would take an office post.

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• 3. A Cat With Rickets

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  At seventeen Gielgud joined a private drama school run by Constance Benson, and on his first day she told him he walked like a cat with rickets. He later said it dealt a severe blow to his conceit, which was a good thing. In November 1921 he made his professional debut as the Herald in Henry V at the Old Vic, with one line, which he recalled speaking badly.

  Family opened the next door. In 1922 his cousin Phyllis Neilson-Terry invited him to tour in J. B. Fagan's The Wheel as understudy and assistant stage manager. A colleague who saw both talent and a lack of technique recommended him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained throughout 1923 under teachers including Claude Rains. The actor-manager Nigel Playfair, a family friend, cast him as Felix in the British premiere of the Capek brothers' The Insect Play. Gielgud said he was surprised the audience did not throw things at him.

  The role that changed his sense of himself came in Fagan's repertory company at the Oxford Playhouse. Playing Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, his first Chekhov, he felt for the first time that he could really be an actor. In May 1924 the producer Barry Jackson cast him as Romeo opposite the Juliet of Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, who became a lifelong friend and frequent colleague.

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• 4. The Hamlet Of His Time

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  In 1929 Harcourt Williams invited Gielgud to join the Old Vic, run by Lilian Baylis for a mostly working-class audience at low ticket prices and very modest wages. There he took on Richard II and was recognised by critics as a Shakespearean actor of undoubted authority. The Times praised his sensitiveness, strength and firmness, and his grasp of language.

  In April 1930 he finished the season as Hamlet in a production that used the complete text, a radical departure from the heavily cut versions then customary. The running time approached five hours and the public did not flinch. Sybil Thorndike said she felt swept right off her feet into another life, moved beyond words. James Agate called it the high-water mark of English Shakespearean acting of the time. Demand was so great the cast moved to the Queen's Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue.

  The role bound itself to him for more than a decade. In 1934 he directed and played Hamlet again to lavish reviews; Charles Morgan wrote in The New York Times that he had never heard verse and naturalness so gently combined. Junior cast members such as Alec Guinness gathered in the wings each night to watch what they sensed was the Hamlet of their generation. A 1944-45 season at the Haymarket produced a Hamlet that many considered his finest, and Agate declared it likely to remain the best of their time.

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• 5. Building A Company

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  Donald Wolfit, who loathed Gielgud, was dropped from the Old Vic for the 1930-31 season, and a new recruit arrived whom Gielgud doubted: Ralph Richardson. The two had little in common. Richardson called him a brilliant butterfly and found his clothes extravagant and his conversation flippant. The thaw came when Gielgud, playing Prospero, gave Richardson about two hundred ideas for his Caliban. Richardson seized twenty-five of them and decided this chap knew something about the play. Their friendship and partnership lasted more than fifty years.

  Gielgud also lifted a rival's career. In 1932, directing Romeo and Juliet for the Oxford University Dramatic Society, he worked with Peggy Ashcroft and Edith Evans alongside students. He was already known for innocent slips of the tongue he called Gielgoofs; thanking his two leading ladies, he said they were the like of whom he hoped he would never meet again. Three years later he staged a Romeo and Juliet in which he alternated Mercutio and Romeo with Laurence Olivier, having spotted Olivier's potential. It ran for 189 performances. Olivier was enraged that critics praised his virility but attacked his verse-speaking against Gielgud's mastery, and the friendship stayed prickly on Olivier's side for life.

  In 1937 he made the leap to management. He invested £5,000, most of his earnings from an American Hamlet, and his partner John Perry matched it. At the Queen's Theatre he staged Richard II, The School for Scandal, Three Sisters and The Merchant of Venice, with a company including Michael Redgrave and George Devine. The venture did not make much money. Olivier called his Joseph Surface the best light comedy performance he ever saw or ever would.

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• 6. Conquering The Camera

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  A 1994 remark captures the regret of Gielgud's middle years. He said he had been stupid enough to toss his head and stick to the stage while watching Olivier and Richardson sign lucrative Korda contracts. He made his screen debut in 1924 in a silent film, and in his first volume of memoirs in 1939 he devoted two pages to listing the things about filming he detested. Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent in 1936 only deepened his dislike, the laurels going instead to Peter Lorre.

  His first Hollywood film came in 1953, when he played Cassius in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar. Marlon Brando was in awe of him and James Mason was disheartened by his apparent ease, while Gielgud felt he learned much about film technique from Mason. He enjoyed the four-month California stay, not least for the relaxed local attitude to homosexuality. Even so, a regular film career waited until his sixties.

  The turning point was Becket in 1964, where he played King Louis VII of France opposite Richard Burton and earned his first Academy Award nomination. Morley noted that a minor but flashy role gained lasting importance, because his theatrical dignity could greatly enhance a film. He told his agent to accept any reasonable offer. Then came Steve Gordon's Arthur in 1981, with Dudley Moore as a playboy and Gielgud as the acid-tongued butler Hobson. He turned it down twice, nervous after the débâcle of Caligula about Hobson's strong language. The part won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Largely indifferent to prizes, he held the rare distinction of an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Tony.

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• 7. Loyalty And Silence

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  When the news of his 1953 arrest broke, Gielgud was in Liverpool, so paralysed by nerves that going onstage seemed impossible. Sybil Thorndike grabbed him and whispered fiercely, come on, John darling, they won't boo me, and led him firmly onto the stage. The audience gave him a standing ovation. The English public had always been loyal to its favourites, and this was their chance to show they did not care tuppence about his private life.

  His career was safe, but the episode briefly broke his health, and he suffered a nervous breakdown some months later. The Home Secretary of the day, David Maxwell Fyfe, was fervently homophobic and urged police to enforce the Victorian laws under which sexual activity between men was illegal. Gielgud never spoke publicly about the incident; the press sidelined it and writers politely ignored it during his lifetime. Privately he donated to gay campaign groups but did not endorse them in public.

  His discretion shaped his domestic life too. His first serious relationship was with John Perry, who stayed a lifelong friend after the affair ended; Morley observed that, like Coward, Gielgud's principal passion was the stage. In 1962 he met Martin Hensler, an interior designer exiled from Hungary, and the two lived together until Hensler's death. Late in life Gielgud told the actor Simon Callow that he admired people like him and Ian McKellen for coming out, but could not be doing with that himself.

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• 8. The Voice And The Legacy

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  Alec Guinness once described Gielgud's voice as a silver trumpet muffled in silk. He was famous from the start for that voice and his command of Shakespearean verse. Between 1929 and 1994 he broadcast more than a hundred radio and television dramas, and recorded ten of Shakespeare's plays. His one-man show The Ages of Man, an anthology compiled by George Rylands, carried him through the lean late 1950s and into the 1960s, with a performance at the White House in 1965 and a Special Tony in 1959.

  He kept finding new ground when the avant-garde left him without West End roles. From the late 1960s he played parts written by Alan Bennett, David Storey and Harold Pinter, beginning with the Headmaster in Bennett's Forty Years On in 1968. In David Storey's Home in 1970 he and Richardson stood weeping soundlessly as the lights faded; Clive Barnes in The New York Times called the two performances among the glories of the English-speaking theatre. To mark his ninetieth birthday he played Lear for the last time, for a BBC cast that Kenneth Branagh gathered with Judi Dench and Emma Thompson among Lear's daughters.

  Gielgud died at home on the 21st of May 2000, at the age of 96, the year after Hensler's death. At his request there was no memorial service, and his funeral at All Saints' Church, Wotton Underwood, was private. The critic Michael Coveney argued that without Gielgud there would be no National Theatre or Royal Shakespeare Company, since he pioneered the first permanent companies in the West End. The Globe Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue had been renamed the Gielgud Theatre in 1994, prompting him to note that at last there was a name in lights on the Avenue he recognised, even if it was his own.

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