It was the unparalleled beauty and range of his speaking voice that made John Gielgud the major Hamlet of his era and the ultimate Richard II. In the recordings he made of those roles, the voice can be cello mournful, yet capable of rough notes, sensitive and enclosed, yet eager to reach up to the expressive tremolo of the violin section of the best symphony orchestra. In a three-and-a-half-hour version of the play recorded for the BBC in the 1940s, Gielgud is somewhat reserved, as if husbanding his resources, yet in a cut-down version done for radio in 1951 he takes far more chances and sounds impassioned and young at age 47, so upset that he even stumbles over words. When he does “To be or not to be” and gets to “to die, to sleep,” Gielgud makes the word “die” sound lovely and relaxing, like sinking into a warm bath, yet his “O vengeance!” is not to be trifled with.
In his best work, where he feasted on some of the greatest writing for the theater and literature, the kingly Gielgud confronts the largest philosophical and moral issues and the most diverting hedonistic possibilities with a speed of thought and delivery that is pathfinding, thrilling, an antidote to all dark confusion and slow-mindedness. This aesthetic, special speed of his could shade into areas of morbidity, self-pity, and even amoral evil, but it is in the main a grand and inspiring and cheerful thing, as cheerful as his long life and unflagging love for his profession and all its pleasures. He was born in 1904 and lasted until the year 2000, and so Gielgud was there at the dawn of two centuries, about as eternal as an actor has ever been, and maybe still there somewhere, all voice, all mind, ready to read us more of the Bible or Shakespeare’s sonnets.
His mother was descended of a famous acting family that included Ellen Terry, one of the finest actresses of her day. Gielgud was compared to Terry all the time at the start of his stage career, and even when he himself had become a distinguished ornament and arbiter for his profession journalists regularly wrote about how he possessed “the Terry charm” or had easy access to “the Terry tears.” His father’s Polish side of the family, which was called Gelgaudiškis and spent centuries living in a manor in Lithuania, had theatrical forbears, too, and Gielgud often said his propensity for Russian authors, particularly Chekhov, grew out of this paternal influence. “If your great-aunt happens to be Ellen Terry, your great-uncle Fred Terry, your cousins Gordon Craig and Phyllis Neilson-Terry, and your grandmother the greatest Shakespearean actress in all Lithuania, you are hardly likely to drift into the fish trade,” observed Gielgud.
The young Gielgud was physically delicate, but he said that he played this up a lot of the time for attention or sweets. At age seven he was taken to Peter Pan and was critical enough to disapprove of the way the wallpaper at the top of the room had to open up in order for the kids to fly; he wanted to be transported at the theater, wanted to believe in what he was seeing. He saw Bernhardt and Duse and reveled later that he was “in time to touch the fringe of the great century of the theatre.” Gielgud dominated the twentieth century and even made it into the twenty-first, but it was the nineteenth century and its traditions that first “englamoured” him, to use his unique wording.
At home the conceited Gielgud would wander about with a rug over his shoulders and pretend to be a king, but he moved badly and was physically clumsy, and he was so bad at math that it effectively barred him from college and made the choice of a theatrical career easier to accept to his parents, particularly his father. His first drama teacher, Lady Benson, told him that he moved “like a cat with rickets,” and the first time he played a Shakespeare role, Orlando in As You Like It, he tripped while delivering his first line and fell on his face.
His grandmother Kate Lewis Terry told Gielgud to be kind and affable to his colleagues “but if possible be intimate with none of them,” and this kept him aloof as a young man. At the Old Vic, he said his one line in Henry V so badly that he wasn’t given another one all season, and Sybil Thorndike even took him aside and advised him to quit; she was more enthusiastic when she saw him in a class at RADA, but that might have been because the rest of the class was so poor.
Gielgud studied at RADA with Claude Rains, a key vocal influence on him. Rains’s voice could be far raspier than Gielgud’s would ever be, but that cello note of mournfulness that Rains had in his 1940s films is something that Gielgud certainly pocketed for himself. In spite of a lack of technique, emotional scenes came easily to Gielgud, but he himself was sharp-witted and already an aesthete, writing incisive little critical reviews of everything he was seeing in the theater, including John Barrymore’s Hamlet, which would eventually be eclipsed by his own.
A young Emlyn Williams first noticed Gielgud in a production of Congreve’s Love for Love. “When he got going, all nose and passion and dragging calves, and unbridled oboe of a voice…the tall, haughty creature held the stage all right.” But when at age 19 Gielgud tried to play Romeo, he got a particularly vicious review from Ivor Brown: “Mr. Gielgud is niminy-piminy and from the waist downwards he looks absolutely nothing. He has the most meaningless legs imaginable, a sort of hysterical laugh and generally lacks experience…he is also scant of virility.” This was a warning sign that the homosexual Gielgud was an open target and needed to figure out strategies to make himself less so.
He made his film debut as a drug-addicted sculptor in Who Is the Man? (1924), which is lost, and though he said later that he overplayed this part wildly, the young Gielgud looks fetchingly depraved in surviving stills. James Agate, the Kenneth Tynan of his time as a drama critic, loved Gielgud as Trofimov in a 1925 production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and Gielgud also made an impression with the role of the hapless and doomed Tuzenbach in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and the anguished Treplev in The Sea Gull, and so it was his sad-happy playing of Chekhov that made him first stand out in the theater, and this was at a time when Chekhov was not yet generally known or accepted as a great playwright by the British public. From the Russian director Komisarjevsky, who was a disciple of Stanislavsky and married his best acting partner Peggy Ashcroft, Gielgud learned the art of creating a role from the inside out.
Seeking popularity with a wider public that same year, Gielgud chose to understudy Noël Coward in The Vortex and eventually took over the role of a young man confronting drug addiction and his vain mother during the Jazz Age, a kind of warm-up for his Hamlet. Gielgud had loved Coward in this play and described his performance vividly: “In that tiny auditorium the atmosphere was extraordinarily tense, and the curtain of the second act, with Noël sitting in profile to the audience, his white face lifted, chin jutting forward, head thrown back, playing that infuriating little tune over and over, louder and louder, until the curtain fell, was one of the most effective things I had ever seen in the theatre.” And then there was Gielgud’s description of his family’s reaction afterward: “After the performance, clattering back in the half-empty tube on the long journey home to South Kensington, my parents and I all sat silent in that state of flushed exhaustion that only a really exciting evening in the theatre can produce.”
Gielgud loved how the excitement of live theater could pierce through the manners and evasions of life and leave people happily drained and silent, and surely he took a lot from the example of Coward’s speed of delivery of lines and his whole heartless yet romantic attitude. Gielgud would do long theatrical runs throughout his life, staying with a play for a year or so when the demand was there, but he always had a ravenous appetite for work and rarely turned down any job offer as an actor. The milieu of the theater offered protection and escape and a chance to create a world that pleased him and that he was absolute ruler of.
Though he had easy access to emotion, Gielgud found the emotional demands of The Vortex taxing because he had not yet learned how to pace himself. He played almost a year on stage in The Constant Nymph after Coward dropped out of it, and it was at this point that he took up with the actor John Perry, who would be his live-in lover during most of his youth. “There was something very sexy about his passion for the theatre,” Perry said, “but it made him difficult to live with. John never really understood relaxation, and I think that although we enjoyed a few foreign holidays together, he was only really ever happy in rehearsal or performance.”
Gielgud had a rare fling with Ibsen when he played Oswald in Ghosts opposite Mrs. Patrick Campbell in 1928, and he sought to prove himself in the classics at the Old Vic. His Hamlet was immediately canonized by James Agate (“I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that it is the high-water mark of English Shakespearian acting of our time”) and he would define both this role of roles and Richard II for the next 30 years at least. Audiences at the Old Vic were at first disconcerted with the speed of his treatment of the verse in Hamlet, being more accustomed to a slower and grander style of delivery, but Gielgud was sometimes doing the full text of the play, which ran for nearly five hours for what his company called “the eternity version,” and so speed was of the essence for several reasons.
This was a signal that Gielgud wanted to stay on stage in his theatrical kingdom for as long as possible, and he acquired the physical stamina for it. At this time he also added a key role to his repertoire, John Worthing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, which was later praised as definitive by Wilde’s lover and betrayer Lord Alfred Douglas. Gielgud would revive both this play and Hamlet for many years. In a 1951 radio recording of the Wilde play with Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, Gielgud plays the key scene where Evans’s Bracknell wonders about his parentage on a note of rather wounded sincerity, which deepens the high comedy of her reactionary viewpoints.
He began to work on stage with Ralph Richardson, who kept his wary distance from Gielgud’s gossipy, social butterfly antics, his expensive clothes, and his flippant conversation. They only started to get on when Gielgud offered Richardson some ideas on how to play Caliban in The Tempest, and Richardson learned to tune out the many bad ideas that Gielgud restlessly offered and keep the few that might work for him.
Gielgud liked to leap right into a first reading of a play and try things out, and he kept himself fresh throughout long runs by continuing to give new ideas a go, whereas Richardson was far more cautious and methodical, of the earth and practical while Gielgud was airy and a creature of impulse, so much so that he became famous for his social faux pas, what he termed his “Giel-goofs,” those moments where he would unthinkingly insult someone and then make it worse by trying to unconvincingly backtrack. His tendency to put his foot in his mouth with others was eventually so well known that it became part of theatrical lore, a cause for the relaying of anecdotes rather than anything truly harmful; nearly all of his victims saw the humorous side of his lack of tact.
Gielgud had a success in The Good Companions, an adaptation of a J.B. Priestley source about traveling British players, and this was made into a film in 1933 that offers a rare chance to view Gielgud on screen in his youth. He has an odd kind of beauty in his late twenties and a shy and furtive quality, and Gielgud is surprisingly physically expressive here in his lanky way, even going so far as to leap up on a table, but the film keeps him on the sidelines too much for his charm and skill and willingness to experiment to really register.
Part of the speed of his vocal delivery is the seeking of pleasure, part of it is distinctly British of its time and class, and part of it is surely “you’ll never catch me.” Made to give a film fan magazine interview for The Good Companions, Gielgud was asked what he wanted in a wife and had to speak about how he was dedicated to his career, and this is one of the reasons why he did not pursue a film career in his youth or middle age.
Gielgud had his biggest popular success on stage in the 1930s in Richard of Bordeaux, in which he played Richard II in sumptuous gold costumes. Reviewers still wrote about how he possessed “the Terry voice in all its loveliness” and even “the hereditary Terry radiance,” but there was another unhappy film experience when he played the lead in Alfred Hitchcock’s Secret Agent (1935) and tried to hold the eye by underplaying around the overplaying of Peter Lorre and the perfect blonde beauty of Madeleine Carroll.
Gielgud is unusual in Secret Agent and nearly unplaceable as a type; he has a quick morbid humor but can sometimes look stiff and apprehensive. There is something disdainful yet sweet about his manner, a very unusual combination that catches his unusualness as a person; there is something still schoolboy-ish about him, yet also something that says, “I will make more sense when I am older.”
Only when he was in his sixties could Gielgud really start to let himself go on screen and stop worrying about seeming heterosexual enough in clinches. “I had the feeling that no one thought I was sufficiently good-looking to be very successful,” Gielgud said of himself in the films. He turned down one of his few offers from Hollywood, the role of Romeo opposite Norma Shearer’s Juliet, because he felt that he didn’t want to risk his Shakespearean reputation on a movie that was not likely to be a success. (He walked out of the finished film, which appalled and offended him with its cuts to the text and its unsuitability in every way.)
Gielgud revived his Hamlet in the West End, and he was hard on a young Alec Guinness during that production, but his impatience was understood by everyone as the helpless prerogative of his particular nature and talent, which depended so much on quicksilver vocal effects. This Hamlet in the West End marked what he thought of as the happiest time of his life, a time when he bought a cottage to live in with John Perry and was at the peak of his early career, with a happy though necessarily very private personal life.
Gielgud then recruited a man who would become his closest rival, Laurence Olivier, to alternate the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with him in a production he directed of Romeo and Juliet with Peggy Ashcroft as their Juliet, and some critics were in the Gielgud camp, disliking Olivier’s rougher and more passionate reading of the verse, while others saw that Olivier’s ambition and physicality were immensely impressive already.
Gielgud solidified his standing as the great Hamlet of his time by playing it on Broadway opposite Judith Anderson as Gertrude and Lillian Gish as Ophelia, and surely this was the one time he played this role where these two roles were also so formidably played or filled. Gielgud saw Olivier in his first Hamlet in 1937 and went backstage and praised him but also sent out a warning that was serious: “This is still my role,” a lordly utterance that the Machiavellian Olivier would not soon forget. Gielgud was hopeless when it came to swordplay and sometimes clumsily injured himself and other actors, whereas Olivier was always expert and hungry for the fencing when he took on Hamlet and other parts that required it.
When Gielgud proposed a Richard II for Broadway to the gay and closeted director Guthrie McClintic, who was married to Katharine Cornell, McClintic said, “A pansy king will never go down well in America.” So Gielgud sank his own and Perry’s money into a season of classics back in England that would receive a Russian-like seven-to-nine weeks of rehearsal and received rave reviews. He did a Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal that Olivier called “the greatest light comedy performance” he had ever seen, but every utterance from Olivier about his deadliest rival needs to be examined for competitive barbs, and the same holds true, in a somewhat lighter way, for the times that Gielgud spoke of Olivier.
His Richard II received raves again in Britain (“Mr. Gielgud is always incomparable when handling neurosis and instability,” said The Tatler), but Edith Evans advised him to weep less so that his audience might weep more. The war years of the 1940s found him rather out of fashion, and left out by Olivier and Richardson when they did their famous Old Vic productions. A propaganda film from 1941, The Prime Minister, found him giving a very poor and fussy performance as Benjamin Disraeli, all external, like Paul Muni at his worst, but then characterization that relied on externals was never his strong suit.
Gielgud lost his lover John Perry to the powerful theatrical producer Hugh “Binkie” Beaumont, but it seems to have been a somewhat amicable business, with Gielgud continuing to see and work with Beaumont and even occasionally living with Beaumont and Perry. Though he was dedicated to an all-male gay bohemian life, Gielgud observed the salutary effects of the female version of that life when comparing two of his frequent on-stage co-stars, Celia Johnson and Peggy Ashcroft: “Look at Celia, totally happy, lots of money, nice husband, lovely daughter, beautiful house, big success, yet she looks like the back of a London bus. Whereas Peggy has been in and out of every bed in London, and not a line on her face. That must be what a really active sex life can do for a woman.”
Cecil Beaton wrote vividly of Gielgud in this period. “In his appearance off-stage, John Gielgud looks, at first glance, anything but an artist. But by degrees, one senses his poetic quality, his innate pathos. The large bulbous nose is a stage asset; the eyes, always tired, have a watery blue wistfulness that is in the Terry tradition of beauty. He is not altogether happy that he has inherited so many family characteristics, and praise of his mellifluous voice and superb diction always embarrasses him. But with the good manners that come from his true spirit, and not only on the stage, he has the grand manner…Often he appears to be deeply unhappy, and seems to make life hard for himself. Then one wonders if he does not take, from the parts he plays on the stage, the compensatory life he misses in private.”
He directed Judith Anderson’s monumental Medea and played Jason opposite her in 1947, but he badly faltered when he directed Helen Hayes in the London production of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie in 1948, which served as a warning that the new plays were often not for him. Gielgud had a period of renewal when he worked with Peter Brook at Stratford in 1950, a season where Brook helped Gielgud to shed some of his more audience-pleasing mannerisms and get to the core of hard, unpleasant Shakespeare men like Angelo in Measure for Measure and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. It had always been said by critics that the young and even middle-aged Gielgud was incapable of playing evil, that he was too intent on sympathy, but at this point in his career he reached a new and deeper level of skill and portraiture, something more like what his colleague Ralph Richardson could achieve at his best.
In 1953, when he was nearly 50, Gielgud returned to the screen as Cassius in Julius Caesar, an all-star Shakespeare picture where he easily dominates amongst relative Shakespearean novices. In this picture Gielgud at first offers an intense visual image of warrior-like concentration to go with the matchless beauty and expressiveness of his voice, and he even manages to seem like a soldier, folding his arms, striding purposefully off screen, and so forth.
But there comes a point when it is noticeable in Julius Caesar that he doesn’t quite know what to do with his hands, which is why Kenneth Tynan dubbed him the greatest actor Britain had from the neck up. Tynan also observed that Gielgud had two basic gestures on stage, right hand up or left hand up, to which Gielgud asked an interviewer late in life, “What did he want me to do, get out my prick?” Surely part of his stiffness was fear of looking feminine, and the critical brickbats that could result.
Olivier and Richardson had been knighted at this point, and it was partly at their urging that Gielgud himself was finally knighted in 1953; this had been withheld, many thought, because his homosexuality was an open secret. It would be brought out into the open, alas, in the greatest crisis and scandal of his career shortly after he was knighted, on a day in October of 1953 when he was arrested for solicitation in a public lavatory. This was a setback from which his career very easily might not have recovered.
PS: Here are recordings of Gielgud’s Hamlet from 1951, his The Importance of Being Earnest from the same year, and a later Richard II.