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...
