Gielgud was in rehearsal for a new play called A Day by the Sea in October of 1953, shortly after he had been knighted. No longer involved with John Perry, Gielgud had become accustomed to seeking sex in public lavatories, a necessarily furtive gay sexual culture of the time called cottaging that was celebrated by Joe Orton in his diaries.
On October 20, 1953, Gielgud was arrested by a plainclothes policeman who had propositioned him; this was a clear case of entrapment, but Gielgud was deeply ashamed, telling the cop, “I am so terribly sorry.” At the station, he gave his real name, Arthur Gielgud, and said he was a clerk; he had been advised to always give a false name under these circumstances. He was ordered to come back the next day.
Gielgud told his biographer Sheridan Morley that he considered suicide after getting back home, but not seriously; he also said that he should have called Binkie Beaumont, the powerful theatrical producer who was now living with John Perry, because Beaumont could have done something to fix things, but he was too ashamed (“Not of what I had done but of being caught”) and did not want to hear Beaumont’s reaction. Deeper down than this, Gielgud had a very stoic English schoolboy attitude and thought that this was a mess but he would just have to get through it.
The next morning at the police station, Gielgud was told by a judge to “see your doctor the moment you leave this court,” and when he responded, a reporter heard that unmistakable voice of his. At this crucial moment, it seems clear that Gielgud should have somehow disguised his famous speaking voice, but he was never one for characterization, and so the voice that made him famous is also the voice that nearly did him in, for the case got reported and hit the papers, and total disaster seemed imminent. There were factions of the theatrical community, particularly the jealous second-rater Donald Wolfit, who would have loved to have seen Gielgud ruined and run out of his profession, and this seemed the perfect opportunity.
In 1953 in Britain, homosexuality was regarded with revulsion by most people if it was regarded at all. In the best-case scenario, you might get sympathy for being a kind of medical case, but even this was shaky. Which is why the reaction of Sybil Thorndike, who was co-starring with Gielgud in A Day by the Sea, must be stressed as unusually brave and exemplary. Gielgud feared the worst when he walked back into rehearsal after the headlines, but Thorndike put him and everyone else immediately at ease when she said, “Well, John, what a very silly bugger you have been.” Thorndike requested that all the hate mail Gielgud was starting to receive at the theater be re-directed to her, and she wrote back to everyone that they should practice Christian charity regarding someone who was different from themselves.
A Day by the Sea was scheduled to open soon, and there was an emergency meeting called at Binkie Beaumont’s place to discuss how they should handle this problem and even if they should open the play at all. Present at this meeting were Ralph Richardson and his wife Meriel Forbes, Glen Byam Shaw and his wife Angela Baddeley, and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, who had become a close friend to Gielgud. Everyone was in favor of the play opening as scheduled except for Olivier, who advised that they should wait at least three months.
Seeing this as a ploy on Olivier’s part to damage or kill the career of his closest rival, Leigh immediately struck back verbally at her husband, saying that he had always been jealous of Gielgud and that his advice should be discounted by the group, which it was. This was as dramatic a scene as any of them ever played on stage or screen, and surely Gielgud was grateful to Leigh for standing up for him like this. Gielgud’s brother Val, who worked at BBC Radio, went to Beaumont and said that if the producer did not back his brother totally that he would go to the press and name Beaumont and all the other gay men in their circle.
The time came for the first performance of A Day by the Sea in Liverpool, and Gielgud was terrified. He knew that whatever reaction he got from that audience he had always wanted love and sympathy from would seal the fate of his life and his career, for they were one; there could be no life at all for him away from the theater. He had to wait 15 minutes before his first entrance, and this wait was agonizing for him. At the moment he was supposed to enter, he found that he was too scared to do anything and just stood there shaking.
Thorndike finished her scene and saw Gielgud standing in the wings, unable to enter, and she went into action, going up to him and saying, “Come on, John darling, they won’t boo me.” They went out on stage together, and to Gielgud’s surprise and relief the audience stood up and cheered him. Thorndike beamed, and Gielgud wept with gratitude before the applause died down and he delivered his first line, “Oh dear, I’d forgotten we had all those azaleas,” which was greeted by a wave of laughter and more applause.
When the actor Edward Chapman went around trying to get signatures to get Gielgud kicked out of the Equity council and barred from acting, a chastened Olivier had Chapman summoned to his dressing room. “If you persist in this resolution I shall make sure that you never appear on any British stage again,” Olivier told him.
Gielgud’s career continued, yet the arrest did cause him some problems. When he began to do his one-man Shakespeare show Ages of Man, there were four years when he was not allowed to enter the US with it because his record made him an undesirable, but this eventually was worked out. He undertook a movie part he was wrong for, the tyrant father in The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957), mainly because the salary would allow him to live comfortably for a few years and do theater roles.
This was the time, when he was approaching the age of 60, that Gielgud recorded some of his best Shakespeare performances, including his delightfully quick-witted Benedick opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s even more quick-witted Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, which remains the gold standard for the playing of those roles; his delivery of the line, “The world must be peopled!” is particularly hilarious coming from him, as if he is relaxing some stringent personal standard only reluctantly.
His recording of Leontes in The Winter’s Tale is proof that Gielgud was willing to stretch his range to the breaking point, and the extremely rough sounds he makes as his Leontes spews jealous tirades are so vocally risky that it is beyond anything that even Olivier or Richardson might have tried. Anyone attempting to perform Shakespeare should listen to Gielgud to hear how he keeps the energy of the verse going at all times even when he lowers the tone of his voice at the end of a line.
His Angelo in a recorded Measure for Measure is cold until his voice breaks in a desperate adolescent way when he demands Isabella’s body. There were some Shakespeare roles Gielgud played and recorded, like Macbeth and Othello, that he was comically wrong for, but in roles that suited him he had no peer. The nuts and bolts of physical acting on screen sometimes showed him at a loss, though this might not have been true on stage, and so perhaps it is for the best that cameras were not put on these precious Gielgud performances of his best Shakespeare roles, particularly on his Leontes, for vocally they are unparalleled, sublime.
Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft got to film for TV his adaptation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard in 1962 along with the young Judi Dench and Ian Holm, and though the production is visually primitive and the sets are threadbare, this is about as good as it will get for this play, which they had rehearsed for eight weeks, Russian style. Gielgud does all kinds of complicated things well as the dandy-ish Gaev, especially in the very Chekhovian moment when Gaev tries and clearly fails to summon a sense of nostalgia for a 100-year-old bookcase on their estate, a very tricky thing to play and get across as clearly as Gielgud does.
“They say I’ve eaten up my entire fortune…in caramels,” he says in The Cherry Orchard, defiantly, as he sits on a bench and plops another caramel into his mouth, and in moments like this Gielgud captures the essence of Chekhov in ways that actors very often have trouble with. His Gaev is both haughty old queen and naughty boy, and the naughty boy is finally punished when his family is forced the leave their estate, which clearly agonizes him. This was proof that Gielgud could now express things with his face on camera that he usually could only express with his famous voice on stage and on records.
Gielgud rejected the work of Samuel Beckett because it was too bleak for him and offered no sense of redemption, and Ralph Richardson never forgave him for advising Richardson to turn down Waiting for Godot. He did not take at all to the new angry young man and kitchen sink plays being done in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and whenever he was out of work he would just tour again somewhere with his Ages of Man show, which was recorded in 1966 for TV.
This was a case where you do not need to see the now-bald Gielgud in his suit reciting Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech and various Shakespeare sonnets, a vocally impressive and unexpected Hotspur, and several speeches from Richard II, for that voice of his is splendidly self-sufficient; who needs a body, who needs gestures, when you have such a various instrument at your command? He calls Hamlet “a forthright Renaissance prince” and still seems youthfully impetuous and rather active when he gives some speeches from his Hamlet.
In this period Gielgud also had the luck to get cast in the best Shakespeare film of all time, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1967), a masterpiece that was mainly ignored in its moment because of technical problems with the sound and limited distribution. In the restored copy that circulates now, what’s thrilling is that Gielgud is at the height of his creativity as Henry IV and Welles is doing everything in his considerable power to frame and aid this performance with the most expressive lighting and camera angles, and Gielgud is also of course an ideal actor for the radio-trained Welles because of his emphasis on vocal expressiveness. Even his physical stiffness seems kingly here, and it is fitting that he offers the definitive film version of a character who deprives his definitive Richard II of his crown; even when he stands oddly on the battlefield, with one knee bent, this might be chalked up to kingly eccentricity.
In the glimpses of Gielgud’s face and bodily deterioration here as the king begins to die, it even feels as if Welles is helping Gielgud give a physical performance by cutting to just the right fragments of movement, and when Gielgud gives Henry IV’s famous speech of unrest his face is molded by such dramatic lighting that the lighting does a lot of the work for him, but not all of it. There is a sense in Chimes at Midnight that everything we see is actually happening and this is not just actors speaking in a fancy manner, and surely this is what Gielgud himself was always aiming for in the theater: total belief, no distancing whatsoever.
Gielgud was now living with his second major partner, a belligerent and rather mysterious Hungarian named Martin Hensler, and to keep up the cottage they bought in the country Gielgud began to take on all manner of one-to-three day paydays in vast quantities of junky commercial movies, which need not detain us. In the theater in the 1970s, he did two popular pairings with Ralph Richardson, David Storey’s Home and Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, and on television he was in his element as the amoral Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1976) opposite a young and beautiful Peter Firth.
“All influence is immoral,” Gielgud’s Henry says as he holds a cigarette just so, and in this production Gielgud is uninhibitedly offering a glimpse of a culture that had all but vanished but that he knew firsthand. He was old enough to have known some of the men in Oscar Wilde’s circle, and he had played a starring role in his own version of that circle for years. Noël Coward and Christopher Isherwood privately lamented that his arrest in 1953 might have set back acceptance of gay people, yet in retrospect the arrest seems to have been a small step in the right direction given the mainly positive public reaction to it.
The elderly Gielgud has developed into a camera actor in The Picture of Dorian Gray whose face is alive with calculating thought that might belie the things he says; this is a contrast that it looks like he wanted to try for as far back as his two surviving 1930s movies, but he didn’t have the support to do so then. As a distinguished old queen actor, certainly the most distinguished of them all, Gielgud by the mid-1970s does not have to worry unduly about how he may be coming across. His arrest was never mentioned in the press he got, as if it had never happened.
“I love acting,” he says in The Picture of Dorian Gray. “So much more real than real life.” Of all the many lines of dialogue Gielgud ever delivered, this one is the one that defines his achievement, and the expressions on his face here are as fascinatingly ambiguous as his vocal delivery. He had developed an “I’m considering this” facial mannerism now that was ever-effective whenever he needed a fallback for his many screen parts, for it suggested a certain type of hothouse English gay-aesthete snobbery that often tickled American audiences precisely because it was so outside their own experience.
And yet, the following year, Gielgud very unexpectedly proved the full range of his mature talent as the dying, raging, profane, and monstrously selfish novelist Clive Langham in Providence (1977), an Alain Resnais film of a florid David Mercer script in which at first Gielgud is set up, effectively, as all mind on the soundtrack as Langham narrates various versions of a novel he is writing; there is a kind of butchness to that voice that recalls his Leontes, and it is of a slightly lower class vocally.
When Resnais starts showing us Langham in bed in his red pajamas as he lustfully empties bottles of red wine, Gielgud is the very opposite here of his poetic Richard II accepting his death. Gielgud’s Clive Langham is a very particular sort of heterosexual dynamo who is so brutally alive and so intent on his own pleasure that he inspires awe and pity in others even as their lives are destroyed by him. Gielgud is very good at humorously morbid reverie here as Langham gets drunker and drunker, which has elements of Richard II, yet in the main this role could not be further from Gielgud himself or any of his own experience or viewpoints on life, and that he gets away with it and even thrives with it is a profound feat of actorly imagination. In a long shot of Langham drunkenly weeping, these are not those facile Terry tears but the real thing dredged up from the deep.
Gielgud was on firmer ground with his butler Hobson in the hit comedy Arthur (1981), for which he won a best supporting actor Oscar for being bitchy yet loving, and he stole the show from Olivier once again as the father to Jeremy Irons in the series Brideshead Revisited (1981), firing off a series of hilarious non-sequiturs that very much eclipsed Olivier’s later extended death scene in the series, which Olivier himself realized too late.
Gielgud had not been in sympathy or step with the rebellions in England in the 1960s, but in the more conservative 1980s he found a regular berth for himself in costume pictures of all kinds, some trashy, some distinguished, like his finely discriminating diplomat in Plenty (1985), where he sparred with Meryl Streep, a kind of female Olivier he expressed some admiration for. Ralph Richardson died in 1983, and Olivier died in 1989, but Sir John just went on and on, even returning to the stage in his late eighties to do a modest epistolary play called The Best of Friends, where at one point he merrily said, “The angel of death seems quite to have forgotten me.”
He even managed to get his Prospero on film for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), in which in spite of all manner of visual distraction from Greenaway he managed to make the key lines very moving: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep.” In this moment, where he stands simply in front of a curtain and stares out at us and closes his eyes when he is done speaking, Gielgud has reached yet another level in his art, a totally unprotected and fathoms-deep and sincere level of pain and wonder shot through with the innocence of childhood in spite of his great age.
As he entered his nineties, Gielgud still worked constantly, thundering about playing “the Rach (maninoff) Three!” as the music teacher in Shine (1996), showing up as the Pope in Elizabeth (1998), and at last succumbing to Samuel Beckett in the short film Catastrophe (2000), in which he was very distressed not to have one word to speak in what he knew was the greatest and most expressive speaking voice of the twentieth century, the voice that had helped him attain the highest glory in his profession and the voice that had betrayed him when he was unjustly entrapped and arrested in 1953. “They won’t let me have any lines,” he said, plaintively, hardly diminished by all the time that had passed, ever fresh, ever happy to hear the new gossip about colleagues.
It was noted by his friends that Gielgud only lost his eternal cheerfulness when Martin Hensler died shortly before his own death in 2000. They had both been ill, and Gielgud was seen moving himself painfully over to where Hensler lay dying to stare at him with tears on his face. He had managed to have two long-running and solid relationships with men during his lifetime, against all odds, and many other pleasurable encounters here and there; lust was important to him, and he was always good-humored about it.
Though he admired Ian McKellen for coming out publicly in 1988, Gielgud was too much of his time and too afraid to consider that step himself, though he did give money to McKellen for gay causes and watched the gay rights movement with interest and sympathy. When I wrote a tribute piece to him at his death for a newspaper called Show Business Weekly, which is the first of these sorts of pieces I ever wrote at my first job in journalism, Gielgud’s gayness was vaguely assumed, including by me, but not mentionable in print, and so a lot has changed since then.
The Olympian Gielgud had his vitally trashy side. He appeared with some amusement in the pornographic Caligula (1980) and adored novels by Judith Krantz and Harold Robbins for their sex scenes and reveled in what he called “all the filthy details,” and he even managed to encroach upon the far more open and even crude twenty-first century with a script he supposedly wrote in the mid-1970s for the gay porno filmmaker Peter de Rome called Trouser Bar. This was made into a film in 2016 to the displeasure of the Gielgud estate, which did not want his distinguished record in the theater and then on film to be sullied or enriched by the open discussion of his fetish for men in tight corduroy pants.
That Sir John was mad for men in corduroy should of course make us love him more, not less. What finally is left to us regarding Gielgud must be awe at his stamina and the many different levels of his achievement. He would be immortal in theater history even if he had stopped acting in 1953, but he went on and on and always saw room for improvement, which even his rival Olivier finally had to admire and bow to in respect.
What makes Gielgud live today? His Hamlet, particularly the abbreviated 1951 radio version where he takes such impulsive risks. His Richard II, his Benedick, his Angelo, his Leontes, his Cassius on screen. His John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest and his Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. His Gaev in The Cherry Orchard, the recording of Chekhov’s Ivanov opposite Vivien Leigh where the quicksilver speed of his delivery is particularly scintillating, his one-man Shakespeare show Ages of Man, his father in Brideshead Revisited in the same year as his butler in Arthur, the scene in The Elephant Man (1980) where he seems to so tactfully turn away from the sight of the deformed John Merrick (John Hurt) that it is as if he is willing us to negate the movement we have seen immediately after he makes it. His deeply uneasy John Middleton Murry in the little-seen Leave All Fair (1985), which contains some of his most expressive silent acting in close-up, the way he says, “Ingmar Bergman is not a bloody Norwegian, he is a bloody Swede!” in Plenty, singing the vowel sounds as if he knows so deeply what etiquette is that he gets a great thrill by tossing it so totally aside, the sweetness and childlike joy and pain of his Prospero on screen amidst many random nude people in the saturated colors of Prospero’s Books. Above all, every anguished yet hard-hearted moment Gielgud has on screen as Henry IV in Chimes at Midnight and that most unexpected triumph he has as the cruelly selfish ladies’ man novelist in Providence, in both of which he stretched his imaginative talent to its limit.
In all his greatest work Gielgud contemplated the poles of the highest success and the lowest failure with existential poise and blessedly sexy speed of thought and perception, each word, each phrase savored as if by a connoisseur of the most exacting taste, the most exquisite discrimination. Go on aural trips with him and reflect and think and feel all you can, and then experience all this again and again just for the pleasure of it, for pleasure was something he took very seriously and pleasure is something he held on to until his very last breath before his massive-scale life and achievement was rounded out with a sleep.
PS: Here is the 1962 TV production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard with Gielgud and Peggy Ashcroft, the 1966 recording of his Ages of Man recital, and the 1976 TV movie of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Oops, it was there in front of my eyes. Sorry.
I can't find Part I... ?