Ralph Richardson

A Sleight of Hand

Of the three great British actor knights of the 20th century, Ralph Richardson was the most unmoored, the most particular, the most unaccountable. Not for him were the poetic roles that John Gielgud scored in like Hamlet or Richard II, or the active parts that made the name of Laurence Olivier like Richard III, Macbeth, or Henry V. Richardson was reputed to be the greatest Falstaff on stage with the Old Vic in the mid-1940s, and he also made successes with Caliban, Sir Toby Belch, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Cyrano de Bergerac.

In retrospect, it seems a shame Richardson never worked for Alfred Hitchcock, as Gielgud and Olivier did, for he is an ideal Hitchcock actor, someone who can make simple actions like scratching his face or lighting a cigarette riveting. There was a “don’t test me” oddness about his behavior, which is what got him cast as the dictator in the sci-fi movie Things to Come (1936), but he wasn’t easily cast on film in his youth and often played supporting or small roles in his 1930s pictures, on the edges of crowds, or dressed up to be older than he was. His facial transitions in close-ups between gentleness and menace were so seamless that they often disturbed any attempt to place or judge him and his characters, for with Richardson good and bad impulses so clearly flowed from the same lightly bent source.

Richardson’s mother left his father for unexplained reasons (“She eloped with me, then aged four,” said Richardson). He hated school, and at age 16 he found himself in an office job, which also didn’t suit him, but then something happened that changed his life, and it feels like a plot twist in a novel; his paternal grandmother left him 500 pounds in her will because she remembered and admired his stubbornness when as a boy he insisted on taking his pet mouse into her house.

The money from his grandmother allowed Richardson to escape from the office job, and he studied art and thought about what he might do. When he saw Sir Frank Benson play Hamlet, he all at once knew that he wanted to be in the theater, and he worked his way up in the repertory companies that flourished in Britain in the 1920s, ideal training for any actor. His colleague Gielgud later observed that Richardson was unhappy in this period because he wanted to be a leading man, a matinee idol, but he had the looks of a character actor, and there was further strain when the woman he had married, a fellow player named Muriel Hewitt, became seriously ill with a slowly progressing disease that eventually killed her in 1942. His first wife was bedridden for quite some time before her death, and Richardson needed to work to take care of her.

He started winning notice from critics on stage for his comedy playing in small parts in Shakespeare. When he tried to play Prince Hal in Henry IV with Gielgud as Hotspur, reviewers felt he was more suited to modern comedy, yet he had successes as Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night and as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where he emphasized the animal nature of the character after he has been transformed into a creature with the head of a donkey. Richardson also made an impression on Broadway as Mercutio in a production of Romeo and Juliet with Katharine Cornell.

In his 1930s movies in Britain, Richardson has a swaggering physical authority that he would lose or at least temper later. In The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934), which has a rather right-leaning political attitude, Richardson gets into all kinds of surprisingly violent physical fights and approaches them like a real rough-and-ready brawler. He is one of the few actors who can pop his eyes and get away with it, for with him it feels elemental, like some charge of anger or excitement or some revelation that runs through him and seems to come from some higher source of knowledge or power, which is why he was at home in fantasy and science fiction.

As a conservative man in South Riding (1938), Richardson’s face sometimes takes on a gentle look, and he makes the basically unsympathetic person he is playing attractive and appealing because there is always a touch of amusement and kindness behind his eyes, but do not trifle with it or you might get a punch in the face. He has a low speaking voice that seems to come from a deep cavern; it is so resonant that it practically has an echo.

Richardson and Olivier both served in World War II, but it was clear that they were not meant for flying or combat, and they got back to the stage as soon as they could. In a famous first season with the Old Vic where he played with Olivier, Richardson made a particular impression as Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, which he made a radio recording of that carries a deep sense of anguish in the scenes that his lusty and optimistic hero has with his mother towards the end. In 1945 Richardson played Falstaff on stage in Henry IV Parts I and II, a performance that even he was satisfied with, and he had the highest standards; for many people who saw him in this role, Richardson’s Falstaff was definitive, so much so that he did not want to risk returning to the role in later years.

“Of the performances I’ve seen in my life I’m gladdest I saw that,” said the director Peter Hall of his Falstaff. Olivier said, “I had always dreamt of his Falstaff, and he succeeded in bettering my wildest dreams…the voice and above all the diction, like a great music-hall comedian’s, had every consonant hitting the back wall of the pit like a whiplash; the richness and the detail of his characterization, the presence, bearing, walk, voice, humanity, wicked lovableness, the dictionary of the man’s humors, the sharp salt of his wit and the sudden blinding sadness of “Peace, good Doll…Do not bid me remember mine end”—it may be guessed that this mighty performance is strongest among my favorites.”

It was after the war that Richardson really came into his own as an actor, and he was happily married now to Meriel Forbes, who sometimes acted with him and gave him a son they named Charles. On screen he played the haughty and nearly inhumanly cruel husband Karenin in Anna Karenina (1948) opposite Vivien Leigh, who in life was wary of Richardson’s tendency toward physical blundering. There is everything you need to know about the man he is playing in this picture by the way Richardson holds his hand out expectantly for a servant to place a drink in it.

When Richardson’s Karenin goes to see his lawyer, he is offended by the sight of a tea cup on the lawyer’s desk and will not speak until it is swept aside, for his sense of etiquette is so pronounced that it has made him utterly intolerant of others with less strict standards. There comes a point when Karenin tries to cry and finds that he can’t, and this is a bold choice from Richardson because it could easily look like bad acting, but it is actually what happens to people when they are so emotionally frozen and distant that emotions are no longer available to them.

Richardson’s movements are contained and springy as the butler in The Fallen Idol (1948), which has a screenplay from Graham Greene, and he is very likable at first as he smiles and winks at a wealthy little boy whose parents are away most of the time, but there is a darker side to this man, a selfishness and an anguish that Greene will test and probe with a plot that leaves us in suspense about his fate. “I would much rather be able to terrify than to charm,” Richardson later told Kenneth Tynan. “I like malevolence.”

As Dr. Sloper in The Heiress (1949), Richardson wears a goatee that gives him a chin, and he holds himself as tensely as his Karenin does. Richardson’s Dr. Sloper is all too aware of an unfortunate situation regarding his hapless daughter Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) and a fortune hunter named Morris Townsend (Montgomery Clift), and we can see Richardson holding in Sloper’s gathering anger until it is finally unleashed in a brutal scene where he tells his daughter exactly what he thinks of her, detailing all her faults until he concludes with her one seeming virtue, “You embroider…neatly!” Richardson pushes this last line out in a rough bass tone of voice like someone shoving a knife into a stomach and twisting it before fleeing.

The way Richardson plays Sloper, his dead wife really was marvelous, and the hurt he feels deep down about her death is always there, but just because he is right about Morris Townsend and sees through his flattery from the first doesn’t mean he isn’t an inflexible jerk about his position, as heartless in his different and more understandable way as Karenin. Clift was suspicious because Richardson seemed to have his role all worked out and never varied his performance from take to take, which led Clift to wonder plaintively, “Can’t this man ever make a mistake?” But maybe Richardson was also just behaving in character, for Dr. Sloper himself would never do an incorrect thing, just as he would never see that Catherine is being hoodwinked by Morris but might still have some pleasure with him. Then again, Dr. Sloper has been put in an impossible position even for a more easy-going man.

It was noted by fellow actors that Richardson rarely or never made eye contact and was very much in his own world with his characterizations, which got increasingly private and threatening, as in his near ogre-like father in David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952), in which he sometimes looks and acts like a hairy troll in a fairy story. Richardson continued to have his successes and some notable failures on the stage, but it was in 1962 that he took the screen part that demanded the most of him, the actor father James Tyrone in a film of Eugene O’Neill’s great autobiographical play Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). His director Sidney Lumet tried to offer detailed advice on the role until one day when Richardson said, “Ah, I think I know what you want…a little more flute and a little less cello,” at which point Lumet let him be.

Richardson is meticulous here about building the character, getting an Irish lilt into his delivery and letting us know at key moments that James Tyrone is a man who cannot stop acting; at times of extreme stress he detaches from his suffering family members and views them in the terms of the melodrama that made his name and cheapened his talent. This is a role that relies on Richardson’s gift for rapid transitions, for the Tyrones are constantly shifting between blame and excuse, and his sense of lofty disconnection.

Richardson’s James Tyrone strides around his drab summer home in an ill-fitting summer suit and attempts to ignore the fact that it is his pathological miserliness that has led to disaster for his wife Mary (Katharine Hepburn) and his sons Jamie (Jason Robards Jr) and Edmund (Dean Stockwell). It is made clear that Richardson’s James loves all three of them and would like to save them, but there is another part of him that has washed his hands of them, and not without reason.

Richardson is often at his best in Long Day’s Journey into Night when James watches his tortured and guilt-tripping family members like an unusually engaged audience member who is wondering what trick they might come up with next. Richardson’s James is the most active and hopeful member of the Tyrone family, but even he is reduced to a puddle of childlike despair when his physically ill son Edmund believably accuses his father of sending him to the cheapest clinic to treat his tuberculosis because there is a part of James that sees the disease as likely incurable and not worth fighting with more money.

This is his most vulnerable point in the film, and Richardson unsparingly offers it up in extreme close-up, but in the big monologue where James explains his failure as an actor to Edmund and how he sold out for commercial success, Richardson’s James is partly acting it for effect. His James has warm impulses, but he is at root hopeless as father and husband because he is so detached at least 70% of the time.

Richardson played a piratical Sir Toby Belch in a TV movie of Twelfth Night in 1969, which is as close as we will get to his supposedly definitive Falstaff. He got vaguer and vaguer but had successes on stage with Gielgud and contrived to keep their relations in balance while growing ever-stranger and more menacing as a public figure. “He loves the craftsmanship of his art, he prepares his work and then exhibits it with utmost finesse,” said Gielgud in the 1970s. “My own tendency is always to show too much, too soon, whereas Ralph has acquired such control of movement, such majesty. Of course, he does have a violent side to his nature—a powerful sadistic streak, sudden outbursts of temper.”

Grandly dressed for an extended 1972 TV interview called Acting is Dreaming, Richardson cannot help getting up to act out any story he is telling, and there is a strong sense that this man is not rooted to any kind of reality or normality. He seeks to dominate attention yet also has a sense of vagueness and disconnection that can be somewhat off-putting, but then at moments Richardson seems the soul of reasonableness and good humor, just inclined to wool-gather and wander, or dream. He says in this interview that acting is partly daydreaming and that you must believe near-totally in what you are doing on stage or on camera in order to climb to the highest heights of creativity. Richardson was noted for the research he did on his characters and his insistence on accuracy in details of costume and manner, which helped him really believe in what he was doing.

It is impossible to really try to know or figure out a man like Richardson, a man who is always in flight and urging himself into elaborate stalls for time and stories that might not go anywhere at all; it is like he is guarding a secret and guarding it with his life, and he cannot be pinned down to anything for even a moment. Richardson is the eternal bad student and outcast, looking to evade responsibility of any kind until he is absolutely forced to commit to a choice. “He was a realistic actor, laboring to find the core of a character, and until he had time to study a role, he didn’t want to be looked at, or even criticized,” said John Gielgud.

Richardson was still capable of the finest and most startlingly deep-hearted work, as in the scene where his Dr. Rank confesses his feelings to Nora (Claire Bloom) in a 1973 movie of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Before his death, he was as commanding as ever as the grandfather in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), in which he seemed dotty, but probably dotty like a fox. Kenneth Tynan wondered if Richardson might not be or be like God himself: whimsical, capable of huge mistakes, magnetic, unexplainable.