John Gielgud E-Book

Gyles Brandreth

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 260

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

'A sense of delight permeates Gyles Brandreth's John Gielgud: An Actor's Life … Brandreth combines neat reportage, deft evocation and lovely tales about a man he knew and relished.' – The Times 'A delightful memoir which tells you all you need to know and collects all the anecdotes.' – Daily Mail John Gielgud was born in April 1904. When he died in May 2000, he was honoured as 'the giant of twentieth-century theatre'. In this updated, acclaimed biography, Gyles Brandreth draws from over thirty years of conversations with Gielgud to tell the extraordinary story of a unique actor, film star, director and raconteur. In 1921 Gielgud made his first appearance at the Old Vic in London and through the next eight decades he dominated his profession – initially as a classical actor, later in plays by Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett. In his twenties he had appeared in silent movies; more than half a century later, he emerged as a Hollywood star, winning his first Oscar at the age of seventy-eight. With wonderful anecdotes, and contributions from Kenneth Branagh, Alec Guinness, Paul Scofield, Donald Sinden, Judi Dench and Peter Hall, John Gielgud: An Actor's Life is a compelling, humorous and moving account of a remarkable man.

Leseprobe

‘A testimony to Gyles Brandreth’s talent … Avoiding the usual tedious cradle-to-grave narrative, Brandreth braids Gielgud’s own reminiscences with those from friends and colleagues. What sets this apart from the usual kind of puff is Brandreth’s own voice, directing our responses to Gielgud’s art.’

Kathryn Hughes, Daily Telegraph

‘Full of personal detail … a treasure trove of anecdote but also clear and informative … Brandreth’s immaculate, charming and deceptively modest book … fascinating.’

Carole Woddis, Glasgow Herald

‘Cometh the hour, cometh the biography.’

Stratford-upon-Avon Herald

Front cover photo by Don Smith/Radio Times/Getty Images

First published 2000

First paperback edition published 2001

Second paperback edition published 2004

This third paperback edition published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Gyles Brandreth, 2000, 2001, 2004, 2024

Parts of chapters 2 to 8 are based on material first published in Gyles Brandreth’s John Gielgud: A Celebration, 1984, 1994.

The right of Gyles Brandreth to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 558 8

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

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CONTENTS

The Verdict of History

Preface

1. ‘Wonderful actor, wonderful friend’, 1904–2000

2. Arthur John Gielgud, 1904–1929

3. ‘I’m a star!’, 1929–1933

4. ‘The world’s best Hamlet’, 1933–1946

5. ‘The finest flower of the contemporary stage’, 1934–1948

6. Honour – and humiliation, 1949–1958

7. ‘You’ve already shown me that – now show me something else’, 1958–1968

8. ‘New notes from an old cello’, 1968–1994

9. ‘The end of an era’, 1994–2000

The Gielgud–Terry Family Tree

Stage Chronology: John Gielgud, Actor and Director

Film and Television Chronology: Major Roles

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

THE VERDICT OF HISTORY

In 1937, following the release and worldwide success of Walt Disney’s first full-length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, one of the lines from the movie was being universally quoted:

‘Magic mirror on the wall

Who’s the fairest one of all?’

Ask that question of British theatre-goers at the time – and perhaps even of American ones, too – and the answer would almost certainly have been: John Gielgud.

In May 1937, Gielgud turned 33. He was universally recognised as the pre-eminent classical actor of his generation. A matinee idol since his triumph in Richard of Bordeaux in 1933, the definitive Hamlet of the decade (at the Old Vic and the West End in 1930, again in the West End in 1934, then in Toronto and on Broadway in 1936), in 1937 his success in Shakespeare’s Richard II and his Joseph Surface in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal sealed his supremacy, whether in tragedy or comedy.

In 1935 Gielgud had taken on his one challenger when he directed a production of Romeo and Juliet at the New Theatre in London and alternated the roles of Mercutio and Romeo with the young Laurence Olivier, three years his junior. Both actors were well received, but when the reviews were in, Gielgud remained ahead on points. On his second visit to the acclaimed production, this was the verdict of the Daily Telegraph’s critic, W.A. Darlington:

Romeo and Juliet, at the New Theatre, is one of those productions whose memory the true theatre-lover will carry with him to the grave. Visiting it again last night, I was swept once more by the same almost intolerable sense of enchantment which I had experienced when the run of the play began.

Now that John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier have changed parts, the production, which could hardly gain much in emotional effect, gains greatly in artistic balance. Mr Gielgud’s Romeo is more romantic than was Mr Olivier’s, has a much greater sense of the beauty of language, and substitutes a thoughtfulness that suits the part for an impetuosity that did not.

And if there were doubts whether Mr Olivier was well cast as Romeo, there can be none about his Mercutio. This is a brilliant piece of work – full of zest, humour and virility. The ‘Queen Mab’ speech – that most famous of purple patches – went for rather less than usual; but it could be counted well lost, seeing that it gave us a perfect interpretation of one of the most effective small parts in all drama.

A decade on, by 1947, when people were starting to misquote Snow White and asking ‘Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?’, the answer would certainly not have been Gielgud. It would have been Olivier every time.

In 1947, Olivier was honoured with a knighthood, aged just 40. He had become a movie star, playing Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940). He had directed and starred in his own film adaptation of Henry V (1943–44). In 1944, on stage, Olivier gave what many regarded as the definitive performance of Richard III, and came to be accepted as the heir to the theatrical line that began with Shakespeare’s contemporary, Richard Burbage, and ran through David Garrick (1717–79), Edmund Kean (1787–1833) and Henry Irving (1838–1905). It was a lineage that was in a way formalised in 1944 by Gielgud himself when he presented Olivier with the prop sword used first by Kean in his 1813 portrayal of Richard III, then by Irving when he played the same part in 1877. The inscription on the blade reads: ‘This sword, given to him by his mother Kate Terry Gielgud 1938, is given to Laurence Olivier by his friend John Gielgud in appreciation of his performance of Richard III at the New Theatre, 1944.’

Gielgud appeared to accept Olivier’s ascendancy. Gielgud had made half a dozen films – notably The Secret Agent (1936), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and The Prime Minister (1941), in which he portrayed Benjamin Disraeli – but filming did not hold much appeal for him. He was still a theatrical force to be reckoned with. He directed and starred in more than thirty stage productions in the decade between 1937 and 1947. He reprised his Hamlet in London, at the Lyceum Theatre, at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, and as a contribution to the war effort on tour in the UK and in North Africa and the Far East. His production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, with his performance as John Worthing and Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, was universally acclaimed. He was still one of ‘the greats’, but he was no longer ‘the greatest’.

And now, in 2024, as I write this, 120 years after his birth, what is the verdict of history? When Olivier died in 1989, garlanded with honours (a knighthood, a peerage, the Order of Merit), he was an undoubted colossus: actor, film star, the founding director of the National Theatre, a man whose performances crackled with energy and the sheen that comes with the glamour of fame. (He had been married to Vivien Leigh. He had worked with Marilyn Monroe.) I remember going to his memorial service at Westminster Abbey. It felt like a state occasion.

When John Gielgud died in 2000, there was no memorial service. He had not wanted one: he was emphatic about that. His funeral, at his local church, was a modest affair, attended by fifty or so colleagues and friends. But the obituaries were on a grand scale and marvelled at the length and range and quality of his career. By living longer, had he caught up with Olivier and even overtaken him? Gielgud came late to film, but once he had learnt to love it, he seemed all-conquering – from my personal favourite, Alain Resnais’ Providence (1977), through the nonsense of playing Dudley Moore’s butler in Arthur in 1981 (and winning an Oscar for the role) to the title role in Prospero’s Books (1991), Peter Greenaway’s surreal adaptation of The Tempest.

In the theatre, he had always had a special command of Chekov and Sheridan and Wilde. In later life he embraced new writing – Edward Bond, David Storey, Harold Pinter, even Samuel Beckett – and his mastery of Shakespeare remained unrivalled. To mark his ninetieth birthday, he played King Lear once more – on the radio, in a production directed by Kenneth Branagh, with Judi Dench as Goneril, Eileen Atkins as Regan and Emma Thompson as Cordelia. The critic Michael Billington summed up the performance: ‘This is not something wistful, embalmed and elegiac, but a compelling and urgent study of an imperious tyrant splintering into madness. And that is nothing less than you would expect from Gielgud.’

He was hungry for fresh challenges right to the end. The story of him looking for a new agent at the age of 96 ‘because I’m not getting enough work’ may be apocryphal, but it rings true. He was impatient with his partner, Martin Hensler, for spending so much time on the telephone: ‘Someone may be trying to call to offer me something.’

He loved his work – and he loved his fellow actors. And they loved him. Judi Dench told me about the 1961 production of The Cherry Orchard in which, as a very young actress, she made her first appearance with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. The play starred Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft and was directed by the French director, actor and ‘drama theorist’ Michel Saint-Denis – not an easy man, by all accounts. At the end of the first run-through, Saint-Denis addressed each actor in turn, lavishing particular praise on Sir John and Dame Peggy. When he came to young Judi Dench, he merely shrugged his shoulders, shook his head and looked at her balefully. Later, in the wings, Gielgud murmured to Judi Dench, ‘If I had been your director and you had given me this performance, I’d have been delighted.’

Gielgud was a kind man. He was generous. He was funny. He was naughty. Judi Dench also told me about the gathering in the rehearsal room when everyone was sitting around the table waiting for the morning’s work to begin. Gielgud broke the awkward silence by enquiring cheerfully: ‘Has anyone had any obscene phone calls lately?’

A quarter of a century after his death, theatre people still do ‘Gielgud impressions’ and tell stories of his notorious ‘gaffes’. (You will read a few of my favourites in the pages that follow.) In 2023, at the National Theatre and then in the West End, the actor Mark Gatiss scored a great personal success playing Gielgud in The Motive and the Cue, a drama by Jack Thorne about the 1964 New York production of Hamlet that was directed by John Gielgud and starred Richard Burton. As a director, Gielgud had many successes, but he never thought of himself as ‘a director’. Directing was simply one of the things he did as a complete man of the theatre. As he often said, ‘The theatre is all I know, really. It has been my life.’ And what a life – as I hope you will discover in this short account of it. I was lucky enough to get to know Sir John in the early 1970s, when I was in my early twenties and working at the Oxford Playhouse, where he had started out in his early twenties in the 1920s. Over the next thirty years I met with him and wrote about him – with his blessing and with ever-increasing admiration. He was the most delightful, amusing and modest man.

For 2025, the Disney Corporation has made a new live-action version of their 1937 classic, Snow White.

‘Magic mirror on the wall

Who’s the fairest one of all?’

Was John Gielgud the greatest classical actor of his time? It’s a game, of course, and comparing Gielgud with Olivier is ridiculous: what each gave was extraordinary and, both as actors and as people, they were so different. Besides, ‘comparisons are odorous’, as Dogberry tells Verges in Much Ado (one of Gielgud’s favourite plays). That said, in retrospect, I reckon probably he was – and having canvassed his contemporaries and the generations that immediately followed him, that I think is their verdict, too. He was certainly the most loved by his fellows in the profession.

Judi Dench put it to me very simply: ‘Sir John? He was sublime.’

Gyles Brandreth

April 2024

PREFACE

This book offers a brief account of one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of entertainment. John Gielgud made his first appearance at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 1921, his first radio broadcast in 1923, his first film in 1924. By 1926 he was starring in the West End. In 1928 he made his debut on Broadway. Through eight decades his was a household name. Harcourt Williams produced Gielgud’s first King Lear in 1931. Kenneth Branagh produced his last, a special radio production marking Sir John’s ninetieth birthday on 14 April 1994.

In the 1920s John Gielgud was making silent pictures. Half a century later he emerged as one of the world’s most sought-after movie actors. After winning his first Oscar for Arthur at the age of seventy-eight, he appeared in dozens of films and television series. He was working until only a few months before his death, aged ninety-six, on 21 May 2000. Inevitably, there are millions who have only ever seen him on screen, but it is as stage actor that he would want to be remembered, above all, as an interpreter of Shakespeare. ‘Never has English sounded more beautiful from the human mouth’, was the verdict on his Hamlet at Elsinore in 1939.

John Gielgud was the giant of twentieth-century theatre, but also one of the most generous and amusing of men. I wouldn’t presume to say I was a friend: simply one of his biographers, a grateful audience and occasional prompt – not that Sir John needed much prompting. He loved to talk, he loved to gossip. Despite the perfect posture and aristocratic demeanour that made him seem so self-assured, and somewhat grand and forbidding, he was a shy, sensitive man, keenly aware of, and inclined to exaggerate, his own shortcomings. When I first worked with him, in the early 1970s, he came to record the narration for a son et lumière I was directing. His reading was impeccable, his instinctive phrasing flawless, the shading exactly what was required, but he wasn’t happy. ‘I’m afraid I’m letting you down badly,’ he kept saying. ‘We’d better start all over again.’

However self-deprecating he may have been at times, and whatever the public and critical reaction to his performances, Gielgud’s overall attitude to his work was, from start to finish, one of total dedication. His commitment to his craft was all-absorbing and absolute. Peter Brook described Gielgud’s mind as ‘unique and endlessly inventive … he had only one reference: an intuitive sense of quality’. Unlike some other fine players in the older actor-manager tradition (and unlike his near-contemporary, Donald Wolfit), Gielgud always sought to surround himself with the best. From the early 1930s to the mid-1970s he worked almost as much as a director as an actor. Some said that all too often, when directing a play in which he was also appearing, his concern for the production overall was at the expense of his own performance. In a business not noted for those qualities, Gielgud was neither a selfish actor nor a jealous one.

I am happy to say that Sir John approved of the books I published about him. He did not like all the pictures I selected. He was particularly unhappy with a drawing of him at seventy by David Hockney (‘If I really thought I looked like that I’d kill myself tomorrow’), which is why it does not feature among the illustrations here. Sir John approved of my text, and corrected some of the detail. I think he particularly liked the way I tried to tell the story of his working life through the words and recollections of people who saw him in performance – friends, colleagues, even critics. Generously, he claimed to be content with the words of his that I had chosen to use (‘Gyles – You are quoting a few of the only fairly intelligent things I have ever said about the theatre – thank you!’), and I know he liked the way – while, of course, covering his career as a film and television actor and, inevitably, touching on his private life – I tried to concentrate on Gielgud as a man of the theatre. ‘The theatre has been my universe,’ he said to me. ‘I am useless at almost everything except where the theatre is concerned. I have no family. I don’t have the urge to take holidays in the way other people do. I read, I walk, I watch TV, but I don’t like to be idle. I have had my fill of parties and great social gatherings. I no longer crave for success and acclaim as once I did. I feel useless unless I have a job, but when I am working I am at ease with myself. To work in the theatre is all I have ever wanted to do. Acting has rid me of my frustrations and satisfied me of many of my ambitions. It is more than an occupation or a profession; for me it has been a life.’

   one   

‘WONDERFUL ACTOR, WONDERFUL FRIEND’ 1904–2000

The first time I saw John Gielgud on stage, the audience booed. It was 1963, the opening night of Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, with Sir John as a modern-dress Julius Caesar. It was not a success. When I first met the great actor not long afterwards (I was twenty, a star-struck Oxford undergraduate; he was sixty-five, the acclaimed leader of his profession), he asked me what I had seen him in. I told him. ‘Oh dear,’ he sighed, ‘Were you really there? I am so sorry. It was terrible, truly terrible. I went through a bad patch, you know. I’ve had one or two.’ Not many.

I am fairly familiar with the highs and lows of his extraordinary career. With his blessing, I published two accounts of it during his lifetime and, over thirty years, I was privileged to spend many memorable hours sitting, notebook in hand, gazing at that noble countenance, listening to the Gielgud voice – ‘all cello and woodwind’, in Kenneth Tynan’s phrase – as, effortlessly, and at an alarming pace, Sir John rattled off anecdote after anecdote. He could talk for an hour without pause. As I scribbled I looked up at him, but he rarely looked at me. As a story reached its pay-off – every tale appeared beautifully crafted – his eyes would slide to one side and he’d glance my way to see that I was suitably amused – or moved. (Alongside a waspish sense of humour, he had a profoundly sentimental streak. Famously, he could cry at will. ‘It’s rather a cheap effect. I know I shouldn’t do it. If the actor cries, the audience doesn’t.’1) Always immaculately turned out, with ramrod back and Turkish cigarette permanently in hand, he was an odd mix of Edwardian dandy and Roman emperor, gossip and grandee. He performed his stories not to me, I felt, but to an invisible audience in the middle distance.

To get on with Sir John, to understand him at all, you had to share his love of the theatre. It was his life. In 1983, the year before Gielgud’s eightieth birthday, the playwright Ronald Harwood went to see Sir Ralph Richardson, then eighty-one, in the hope of coaxing from him some reminiscences of his old friend and colleague. Richardson liked to smoke a pipe and showed Harwood a beautiful silver tobacco jar he had been given. ‘Johnny gave me that,’ he said. ‘He’s given me so many things. Gave us some glorious silver for our silver wedding, so that whenever we dine – there’s Johnny. He’s everywhere in this house. I think of him often. Wonderful actor. Wonderful friend. Never known a man so keen on the theatre. Extraordinary. I’ve had lunch with Johnny and the moment I mention something that isn’t to do with the theatre, he goes blank. Gets that bored look … so I’ve taken to saying things on purpose just to get the reaction. The other day I told him Concorde flies faster than sound. On cue, the bored look. Wonderful fellow.’

Gielgud was a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines – ‘And potboilers: I read the most dreadful rubbish’ – but professed no interest in world affairs or domestic politics. Not long before his death he confessed to me, ‘I have lost all interest in the London mayoral race now that Glenda [Jackson] is out of the running. She was a wonderful Cleopatra, you know. She’d have been a splendid Lady Mayoress.’

Whatever the subject under discussion, he always came back to the theatre. Ronald Harwood tells a story of Gielgud and another actor playing in the same film, sitting on the set in their canvas chairs, waiting to be called for their next shot. Sir John was reading; the other actor, wrestling with The Times crossword, leant over to Gielgud and asked, ‘Sorry, but is there a character in Shakespeare called the Earl of Westmoreland?’ ‘Yes,’ murmured Sir John, without looking up, ‘in Henry IV Part Two.’ Then, to break the bad news, he looked up, ‘But it’s a very poor part.’

Doing the crossword in The Times was the nearest Sir John ever got to regular exercise. ‘I loathe sport,’ he told me gleefully, ‘detest it. I do no exercise, I never have. You know, Olivier used to work so hard to prepare himself for his roles. I was rather jealous of the trouble he used to take. When he did his famous Othello, he went into training for months on end, lifting weights, going for long runs, swimming up and down his pool for hours at a stretch. He succeeded in altering his whole physique, the way he walked, the range of his voice. Quite extraordinary. My Othello was not a success and his was. Is there a lesson there? Very possibly,’ he said, his eyes twinkling, ‘but the truth is I’m very lazy, I’ve never bothered with that kind of thing. No exercise, and I don’t diet. I eat what I like, and I enjoy wine. I enjoy smoking too. I always have. I smoke furiously, at least a packet a day. Smoking, I suppose, is one of my principal pleasures.’

All I ever heard Gielgud talk about with any enthusiasm was the world of entertainment. ‘You must understand that cast adrift in the ordinary world I am a timid, shy, cowardly man, but once I go into the theatre I have great authority and I get great respect and love from all the people working in it … It is where I belong.’ I asked him if there had ever been a prospect of him doing something else: ‘No. My parents hoped I might become an architect, but I was besotted with the theatre as far back as I can remember. As you know, as a boy, I took lessons from Lady Benson. She said I walked “like a cat with rickets”, but I persisted. I went to RADA.2 There really wasn’t anything else I wanted to do. Or could.’

As with the other ‘greats’ of his vintage – Donald Wolfit (1902–68), Ralph Richardson (1902–83), Laurence Olivier (1907–89), Peggy Ashcroft (1907–91), Michael Redgrave (1908–85) – it was to the formidable Lilian Baylis (1874–1937), manager of Sadler’s Wells and the Old Vic, that he owed the break that established him as a classical actor of the first rank. ‘She could be rather fierce, you know. She was terribly devout. And utterly determined. I must say she kept us on our toes.’

At the Old Vic, in a period of just twenty months between 1929 and 1931, Gielgud’s roles included Romeo, Richard II, Oberon, Mark Antony, Orlando, Macbeth, Hotspur, Prospero, Antony, Malvolio, Benedick, King Lear, and the first of his celebrated Hamlets. ‘I was very young. I simply threw myself at the part like a man learning to swim and I found the text would hold me up if I sought the truth in it.’

When I last saw Sir John I asked him to name a favourite performance. He simply shook his head and closed his eyes. I know he had a particular place in his heart for Gordon Daviot’s Richard of Bordeaux, 1933 (‘My first “smash hit”. There were queues around the block. Quite wonderful.’) and for the successes he enjoyed on stage in the 1970s with Sir Ralph Richardson (‘Dear Ralph. Dear, dear Ralph.’) Outside Shakespeare, he had a special fondness for John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest and Sir Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal. Laurence Olivier called it ‘the best light comic performance I’ve ever seen, or ever shall.’

Sir John said (in a way Olivier might not have done): ‘I am lacking in ambition for power, large sums of money or a passionate desire to convince other people that they are wrong or I am right, but I have a violent and sincere wish to be a good craftsman and to understand what I try to do in the theatre, so as to be able to convince the people I work with.’ Rightly, the obituaries published after his death on 21 May 2000 celebrated Gielgud as the great interpreter of Shakespeare, but to people of my generation, born after the Second World War, it is in modern work that he will best be remembered.

Aged ninety-six, in April 2000, his last professional engagement was to be in a piece by Samuel Beckett. Aged fifty-four, in 1958, he was asked to play in the British première of Beckett’s Endgame. He told me he turned the offer down because he hated the play, ‘really hated it’: he yearned to be in something ‘modern’, he wanted to be ‘in vogue’, but ‘Beckett back then simply wasn’t for me. Most of it I couldn’t understand and what I did comprehend I didn’t like.’

The sense of being out of touch (‘I was old hat for quite a while, you know’), unable to relate to the writers of his time, lasted for several unnerving years from the mid-1950s, really, until 1968, when, aged sixty-four, he accepted the part of the Headmaster in Alan Bennett’s play-cum-revue Forty Years On. ‘It was hardly avant-garde, it was a nostalgic pastiche’, but it was the vehicle that brought him back into the vanguard. It led him to the then home of ‘new writing’, the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square, and to playing with Ralph Richardson in David Storey’s Home (directed by Lindsay Anderson) and, later, Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land (directed by Peter Hall) – for many the definitive modern Gielgud performances.

In 1984, when I published my first account of Sir John’s career, Lindsay Anderson wrote to me, questioning my chronic enthusiasm for No Man’s Land (I saw the production three times): ‘You won’t be surprised to hear that I disagree when you say that John and Ralph’s collaboration in No Man’s Land had “a magical dimension that their earlier stage encounters had lacked”. “An obtrusive virtuosity” I’d have said … But then I’ve never been able to understand the enthusiasm aroused by pretentious but essentially hollow pieces like No Man’s Land and I can think of several others. Really, you know, I think the turning point in John’s career in the sixties was his appearance in The Charge of the Light Brigade. It made him feel for the first time that he could act successfully on film – and he got on so well with Tony Richardson that he lost his fear and suspicion of the Sloane Square “avant-garde”.’

The affection between Gielgud and Tony Richardson, who directed The Charge of the Light Brigade (and who, at the Royal Court, had directed the original productions of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and The Entertainer), was mutual. John Gielgud, said Tony Richardson, ‘is quite simply the nicest, most human actor I’ve ever worked with, and, together with Jack Nicholson, the most intelligent. John adores the theatre, theatre gossip, actors, actresses – he is steeped in them – but he equally adores books, poetry, music, films, travel. What he likes delights him, and he can delight you with his delight. And what he loathes he can amuse you with. He is a constant responder, a constant enjoyer. That is what has kept him so perpetually young, and perhaps is why he has outlasted so many of his great contemporaries who have fallen by the wayside.’

On Gielgud’s eightieth birthday, I organised a party in his honour at the Old Vic. I persuaded the actor Christopher Reeve to bring on the birthday cake. ‘Oh,’ cooed Sir John, ‘Superman. Thank you, Gyles. You really have thought of everything.’ I got the impression that Sir John was quite comfortable with his own homosexuality. His manner, the stories he told, the way in which he told them, the company he kept – all suggested (at least from the late 1960s when I knew him) that he accepted his sexuality without either anxiety or remorse, and expected that others would know of it and accept it too. It was not something he discussed. As a rule, people of his generation did not. He was brought up (in Kenneth Williams’ memorable phrase) ‘long before the-love-that-dare-not-speak-its-name started shouting the odds from the rooftops’. He guarded his privacy. He stopped allowing journalists to come to his home (‘Invasion of one’s private life really is rather trying, don’t you agree?’), but not because he was unduly secretive or because he was hypocritical. He believed in discretion (and good manners) and felt that if the public knew too much about ‘you as a person’ it could get in the way of their ‘appreciation of your work’.

Sir John told me, without much conviction, that there had once been the possibility of his marrying Lillian Gish, the American silent film star and actress who played Ophelia to his Hamlet on Broadway in 1936. She was beautiful, they enjoyed each other’s company, but she was eleven years his senior and, frankly, I do not believe Gielgud was ever the marrying kind. Sir Harold Hobson, drama critic of the Sunday Times from 1947 to 1976 and a self-professed ‘good friend’ of Gielgud’s since the 1920s, marked the great actor’s eightieth birthday with a bizarre essay regretting the fact that Gielgud had never married:3 ‘Marriage steadies a man. Gielgud’s career has certainly been erratic; it could well have done with that bit of steadying and of common sense which a wife may bring. It has reached some tremendous heights more than once, and also fallen to some sickening depths. A touch of regularity would have saved a lot of unhappiness.’

Gielgud met the first serious love of his life in 1926 when he was appearing in The Constant Nymph