Background and early years Gielgud was born on 14 April 1904, in
South Kensington, London, the third of the four children of Frank Henry Gielgud and his second wife, Kate Terry-Gielgud,
née Terry-Lewis. Gielgud's elder brothers were
Lewis, who became a senior official of the
Red Cross and
UNESCO, and
Val, later head of
BBC radio drama; his younger sister Eleanor became John's secretary for many years. On his father's side, Gielgud was of Lithuanian and Polish descent. The surname derives from
Gelgaudiškis, a village in Lithuania. one of his grandchildren was Frank Gielgud, whose maternal grandmother was the Polish actress,
Aniela Aszpergerowa. ,
Kate and
Ellen Terry and, far right,
Fred Terry at Ellen's
Silver Jubilee matinée,
Drury Lane, 12 June 1906. Everyone shown was a member of the
Terry family. Frank married into
a family with wide theatrical connections. His wife, who was on the stage until she married, was the daughter of the actress
Kate Terry, and a member of the stage dynasty that included
Ellen,
Fred and
Marion Terry,
Mabel Terry-Lewis and
Edith and
Edward Gordon Craig. Frank had no theatrical ambitions and worked all his life as a stockbroker in the
City of London. In 1912, aged eight, Gielgud went to Hillside
preparatory school in Surrey as his elder brothers had done. For a child with no interest in sport he acquitted himself reasonably well in
cricket and
rugby for the school. In class, he hated mathematics, was fair at
classics, and excelled at English and
divinity. Hillside encouraged his interest in drama, and he played several leading roles in school productions, including
Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar and
Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice. After Hillside, Lewis and Val had won scholarships to
Eton and
Rugby, respectively; lacking their academic achievement, John failed to secure such a scholarship. He was sent as a
day boy to
Westminster School where, as he later said, he had access to the
West End "in time to touch the fringe of the great century of the theatre". The school choir sang in services at
Westminster Abbey, which appealed to his fondness for ritual. He showed talent at sketching, and for a while thought of
scenic design as a possible career. The young Gielgud's father took him to concerts, which he liked, and galleries and museums, "which bored me rigid". Both parents were keen theatregoers, but did not encourage their children to follow an acting career. Val Gielgud recalled, "Our parents looked distinctly sideways at the Stage as a means of livelihood, and when John showed some talent for drawing his father spoke crisply of the advantages of an architect's office." On leaving Westminster in 1921, Gielgud persuaded his reluctant parents to let him take drama lessons on the understanding that if he was not self-supporting by the age of twenty-five he would seek an office post.
First acting experience Gielgud, aged seventeen, joined a private drama school run by
Constance Benson, wife of the
actor-manager Sir Frank Benson. On the new boy's first day Lady Benson remarked on his physical awkwardness: "she said I walked like a cat with
rickets. It dealt a severe blow to my conceit, which was a good thing." Before and after joining the school he played in several amateur productions, and in November 1921 made his debut with a professional company, though he himself was not paid. He played the Herald in
Henry V at the
Old Vic; he had one line to speak and, he recalled, spoke it badly. He was kept on for the rest of the season in walk-on parts in
King Lear,
Wat Tyler and
Peer Gynt, with no lines. Gielgud's first substantial engagement came through his family. In 1922 his cousin
Phyllis Neilson-Terry invited him to tour in
J. B. Fagan's
The Wheel as
understudy, bit-part player and assistant stage manager, an invitation he accepted. The actor-manager
Nigel Playfair, a friend of Gielgud's family, saw him in a student presentation of
J. M. Barrie's
The Admirable Crichton. Playfair was impressed and cast him as Felix, the poet-butterfly, in the British premiere of the
Čapek brothers'
The Insect Play. Gielgud later said that he made a poor impression in the part: "I am surprised that the audience did not throw things at me." The critics were cautious but not hostile to the play; it did not attract the public and closed after a month. After leaving the academy at the end of 1923 Gielgud played a Christmas season as Charley in ''
Charley's Aunt'' in the West End, and then joined Fagan's
repertory company at the
Oxford Playhouse. Gielgud was in the Oxford company in January and February 1924, from October 1924 to the end of January 1925, and in August 1925. He played a wide range of parts in classics and modern plays, greatly increasing his technical abilities in the process. The role he most enjoyed was Trofimov in
The Cherry Orchard, his first experience of
Chekhov: "It was the first time I ever went out on stage feeling that perhaps, after all, I could really be an actor."
Early West End roles Between Gielgud's first two Oxford seasons, the producer
Barry Jackson cast him as
Romeo to the
Juliet of
Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies at the Regent's Theatre, London, in May 1924. The production was not a great success, but the two performers became close friends and frequently worked together throughout their careers. Gielgud made his screen debut during 1924 as Daniel Arnault in
Walter Summers's silent film
Who Is the Man? (1924). with
Lilian Braithwaite, his, and later Gielgud's, co-star in
The Vortex In May 1925 the Oxford production of
The Cherry Orchard was brought to the
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. Gielgud again played Trofimov. His distinctive speaking voice attracted attention and led to work for
BBC Radio, which his biographer
Sheridan Morley calls "a medium he made his own for seventy years". He found it tiring to play because he had not yet learned how to pace himself, but he thought it "a thrilling engagement because it led to so many great things afterwards". As Konstantin in
The Seagull in October 1925 he impressed the Russian director
Theodore Komisarjevsky, who cast him as Tusenbach in the British premiere of
Three Sisters. The production received enthusiastic reviews, and Gielgud's highly praised performance enhanced his reputation as a potential star. There followed three years of mixed fortunes for him, with successes in fringe productions, but West End stardom was elusive. In 1926 the producer
Basil Dean offered Gielgud the lead role of Lewis Dodd in
The Constant Nymph, a dramatisation of
Margaret Kennedy's best-selling
novel of the same name. Before rehearsals began Dean found that a bigger star than Gielgud was available, namely Coward, to whom he gave the part. Gielgud had an enforceable contractual claim to the role, but Dean, a notorious bully, was a powerful force in British theatre. Intimidated, Gielgud accepted the position of understudy, with a guarantee that he would take over the lead from Coward when the latter, who disliked playing in long runs, left. In the event Coward, who had been overworking, suffered a nervous collapse three weeks after the opening night, and Gielgud played the lead for the rest of the run. The play ran for nearly a year in London and then went on tour. and
Edith Evans, 1920s co-stars with Gielgud By this time Gielgud was earning enough to leave the family home and take a small flat in the West End. He had his first serious romantic relationship, living with John Perry, an unsuccessful actor, later a writer, who remained a lifelong friend after their affair ended. Morley makes the point that, like Coward, Gielgud's principal passion was the stage; both men had casual dalliances, but were more comfortable with "low-maintenance" long-term partners who did not impede their theatrical work and ambitions. In 1928 Gielgud made his
Broadway debut as the
Grand Duke Alexander in
Alfred Neumann's
The Patriot. The play was a failure, closing after a week, but Gielgud liked New York and received favourable reviews from critics including
Alexander Woollcott and
Brooks Atkinson. After returning to London he starred in a succession of short runs, including
Ibsen's
Ghosts with
Mrs Patrick Campbell (1928), and
Reginald Berkeley's
The Lady with a Lamp (1929) with
Edith Evans and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. was an adaptation of an
Edgar Wallace mystery story; Gielgud played a young scoundrel who commits two murders and very nearly a third before he himself is killed.
Old Vic In 1929
Harcourt Williams, newly appointed as director of productions at the Old Vic, invited Gielgud to join the company for the forthcoming season. The Old Vic, in an unfashionable area of London south of the
Thames, was run by
Lilian Baylis to offer plays and operas to a mostly working-class audience at low ticket prices. She paid her performers very modest wages, but the theatre was known for its unrivalled repertory of classics, mostly
Shakespeare, and Gielgud was not the first West End star to take a large pay cut to work there. It was, in Morley's words, the place to learn Shakespearean technique and try new ideas. The reviewer in
The Times commented on his sensitiveness, strength and firmness, and called his performance "work of genuine distinction, not only in its grasp of character, but in its control of language". Later in the season he was cast as Mark Antony in
Julius Caesar,
Orlando in
As You Like It, the
Emperor in
Androcles and the Lion and the title role in
Pirandello's
The Man with the Flower in His Mouth. The production gained such a reputation that the Old Vic began to attract large numbers of West End theatregoers. Demand was so great that the cast moved to the
Queen's Theatre, in
Shaftesbury Avenue, where Williams staged the piece with the text discreetly shortened. The effect of the cuts was to give the title role even more prominence. Gielgud's Hamlet was richly praised by the critics.
Ivor Brown called it "a tremendous performance ... the best Hamlet of [my] experience".
James Agate wrote, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that it is the high water-mark of English Shakespearean acting of our time." , Gielgud's aunt and co-star in
The Importance of Being Earnest Hamlet was a role with which Gielgud was associated over the next decade and more. After the run at the Queen's finished he turned to another part for which he became well known, John Worthing in
The Importance of Being Earnest. Gielgud's biographer
Jonathan Croall comments that the two roles illustrated two sides of the actor's personality: on the one hand the romantic and soulful Hamlet, and on the other the witty and superficial Worthing. The formidable Lady Bracknell was played by his aunt, Mabel Terry-Lewis.
The Times observed, "Mr Gielgud and Miss Terry-Lewis together are brilliant ... they have the supreme grace of always allowing
Wilde to speak in his own voice." Returning to the Old Vic for the 1930–31 season, Gielgud found several changes to the company.
Donald Wolfit, who loathed him and was himself disliked by his colleagues, was dropped, as was Adele Dixon. Gielgud was uncertain of the suitability of the most prominent new recruit,
Ralph Richardson, but Williams was sure that after this season Gielgud would move on; he saw Richardson as a potential replacement. and "I found his clothes extravagant, I found his conversation flippant. He was the New Young Man of his time and I didn't like him." Richardson's notices, and the relationship of the two leading men, improved markedly when Gielgud, who was playing
Prospero in
The Tempest, helped Richardson with his performance as
Caliban: The friendship and professional association lasted for more than fifty years, until the end of Richardson's life. Gielgud's other roles in this season were Lord Trinket in
The Jealous Wife, Richard II again, Antony in
Antony and Cleopatra,
Malvolio in
Twelfth Night, Sergius in
Arms and the Man, Benedick in
Much Ado About Nothing – another role for which he became celebrated – and he concluded the season as
King Lear. His performance divided opinion.
The Times commented, "It is a mountain of a part, and at the end of the evening the peak remains unscaled"; in
The Manchester Guardian, however, Brown wrote that Gielgud "is a match for the thunder, and at length takes the Dover road with a broken tranquillity that allowed every word of the King's agony to be clear as well as poignant".
West End star Returning to the West End, Gielgud starred in
J. B.Priestley's
The Good Companions, adapted for the stage by the author and
Edward Knoblock. The production ran from May 1931 for 331 performances, and Gielgud described it as his first real taste of commercial success. He played Inigo Jollifant, a young schoolmaster who abandons teaching to join a travelling theatre troupe. This crowd-pleaser drew disapproval from the more austere reviewers, who felt Gielgud should be doing something more demanding, but he found playing a conventional juvenile lead had challenges of its own and helped him improve his technique. During the run of the play he made another film,
Insult (1932), a
melodrama about the
French Foreign Legion, and he starred in
a cinema version of
The Good Companions in 1933, with
Jessie Matthews. In his first volume of memoirs, published in 1939, Gielgud devoted two pages to describing the things about filming that he detested. Unlike his contemporaries Richardson and
Laurence Olivier, he made few films until after the Second World War, and did not establish himself as a prominent film actor until many years after that. As he put it in 1994, "I was stupid enough to toss my head and stick to the stage while watching Larry and Ralph sign lucrative
Korda contracts." in 1936 In 1932 Gielgud turned to directing. At the invitation of
George Devine, the president of the
Oxford University Dramatic Society, Gielgud took charge of a production of
Romeo and Juliet by the society, featuring two guest stars:
Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse. The rest of the cast were students, led by
Christopher Hassall as Romeo, and included Devine,
William Devlin and
Terence Rattigan. The experience was satisfactory to Gielgud: he enjoyed the attentions of the undergraduates, had a brief affair with one of them,
James Lees-Milne, and was widely praised for his inspiring direction and his protégés' success with the play. Already notorious for his innocent slips of the tongue (he called them "Gielgoofs"), in a speech after the final performance he referred to Ashcroft and Evans as "Two leading ladies, the like of whom I hope I shall never meet again". During the rest of 1932 Gielgud played in a new piece,
Musical Chairs by Ronald Mackenzie, and directed one new and one classic play,
Strange Orchestra by
Rodney Ackland in the West End, and
The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic, with
Malcolm Keen as Shylock and Ashcroft as Portia. In 1932 he starred in
Richard of Bordeaux by
Elizabeth MacKintosh. This, a retelling in modern language of the events of
Richard II, was greeted as the most successful historical play since Shaw's
Saint Joan nine years earlier, more faithful to the events than Shakespeare had been. After an uncertain start in the West End it rapidly became a sell-out hit and played in London and on tour over the next three years. In
The New York Times,
Charles Morgan wrote, "I have never before heard the rhythm and verse and the naturalness of speech so gently combined. ... If I see a better performance of this play than this before I die, it will be a miracle." Morley writes that junior members of the cast such as
Alec Guinness and
Frith Banbury would gather in the wings every night "to watch what they seemed intuitively already to know was to be the Hamlet of their time". The following year Gielgud staged perhaps his most famous Shakespeare production, a
Romeo and Juliet in which he co-starred with Ashcroft and Olivier. Gielgud had spotted Olivier's potential and gave him a major step up in his career. For the first weeks of the run Gielgud played
Mercutio and Olivier played Romeo, after which they exchanged roles. As at Oxford, Ashcroft and Evans were Juliet and the nurse. The production broke all box-office records for the play, running at the
New Theatre for 189 performances. Olivier was enraged at the notices after the first night, which praised the virility of his performance but fiercely criticised his speaking of Shakespeare's verse, comparing it with his co-star's mastery of the poetry. The friendship between the two men was prickly, on Olivier's side, for the rest of his life. '' (1936) In May 1936 Gielgud played Trigorin in
The Seagull, with Evans as Arkadina and Ashcroft as Nina. Komisarjevsky directed, which made rehearsals difficult as Ashcroft, with whom he had been living, had just left him. Nonetheless, Morley writes, the critical reception was ecstatic. In the same year Gielgud made his last pre-war film, co-starring with
Madeleine Carroll in
Alfred Hitchcock's
Secret Agent. The director's insensitivity to actors made Gielgud nervous and further increased his dislike of filming. The two stars were praised for their performances, but Hitchcock's "preoccupation with incident" was felt by critics to make the leading roles one-dimensional, and the laurels went to
Peter Lorre as Gielgud's deranged assistant. From September 1936 to February 1937 Gielgud played Hamlet in North America, opening in Toronto before moving to New York and Boston. He was nervous about starring on Broadway for the first time, particularly as it became known that the popular actor
Leslie Howard was to appear there in a rival production of the play. When Gielgud opened at the
Empire Theatre in October the reviews were mixed, but, as the actor wrote to his mother, the audience response was extraordinary. "They stay at the end and shout every night and the stage door is beset by fans." Howard's production opened in November; it was, in Gielgud's words, a débâcle, and the "battle of the Hamlets" heralded in the New York press was over almost as soon as it had begun. Howard's version closed within a month; the run of Gielgud's production beat Broadway records for the play.
Queen's Theatre company After his return from America in February 1937 Gielgud starred in
He Was Born Gay by
Emlyn Williams. This romantic tragedy about French royalty after the
Revolution was quite well received during its pre-London tour, but was savaged by the critics in the West End.
The Times said, "This is one of those occasions on which criticism does not stand about talking, but rubs its eyes and withdraws hastily with an embarrassed, incredulous, and uncomprehending blush. What made Mr Emlyn Williams write this play or Mr Gielgud and Miss Ffrangcon-Davies appear in it is not to be understood." The play closed after twelve performances. Its failure, so soon after his Shakespearean triumphs, prompted Gielgud to examine his career and his life. His domestic relationship with Perry was comfortable but unexciting, he saw no future in a film career, and the Old Vic could not afford to stage the classics on the large scale to which he aspired. He decided that he must form his own company to play Shakespeare and other classic plays in the West End. Gielgud invested £5,000, most of his earnings from the American
Hamlet; Perry, who had family money, put in the same sum. His company included
Harry Andrews, Peggy Ashcroft,
Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine,
Michael Redgrave and Harcourt Williams, with
Angela Baddeley and Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as guests. His own roles were King Richard, Joseph Surface, Vershinin and Shylock. Olivier said that Gielgud's Joseph Surface was "the best light comedy performance I've ever seen, or ever shall see". The venture did not make much money, and in July 1938 Gielgud turned to more conventional West End enterprises, in unconventional circumstances. He directed
Spring Meeting, a farce by Perry and
Molly Keane, presented by
Binkie Beaumont, for whom Perry had just left Gielgud. Somehow the three men remained on excellent terms. In September of the same year Gielgud appeared in
Dodie Smith's sentimental comedy
Dear Octopus.
War and post-war At the start of the Second World War Gielgud volunteered for active service, but was told that men of his age, thirty-five, would not be wanted for at least six months. The government quickly came to the view that most actors would do more good performing to entertain the troops and the general public than serving, whether suitable or not, in the armed forces. Gielgud directed Michael Redgrave in a 1940 London production of ''
The Beggar's Opera'' for the
Glyndebourne Festival. This was a chaotic affair: Gielgud's direction confused his star, and when Redgrave lost his voice Gielgud had to step in and sing the role as best he could. Gielgud felt that something serious or even solemn was necessary for
wartime London, where most entertainment was light-hearted. Together with
Harley Granville-Barker and Guthrie he reopened the Old Vic with Shakespeare. His King Lear once again divided the critics, but his Prospero was a considerable success. He played the role quite differently from his attempt on the same stage in 1930: in place of the "manic conjurer" his Prospero was "very far from the usual mixture of Father Christmas, a Colonial Bishop, and the President of the Magicians' Union ... a clear, arresting picture of a virile Renaissance notable", according to Brown. The critics singled out, among the other players,
Jack Hawkins as Caliban,
Marius Goring as Ariel,
Jessica Tandy as Miranda and Alec Guinness as Ferdinand. Following the example of several of his stage colleagues, Gielgud joined tours of military camps. He gave recitals of prose and poetry, and acted in a triple bill of short plays, including two from Coward's
Tonight at 8.30, but he found at first that less highbrow performers like
Beatrice Lillie were better than he at entertaining the troops. Gielgud made no more films for the next ten years; he turned down the role of
Julius Caesar in the
1945 film of Shaw's
Caesar and Cleopatra with
Vivien Leigh. He and Leigh were close friends, and Shaw tried hard to persuade him to play the part, but Gielgud had taken a strong dislike to the director,
Gabriel Pascal. Caesar was eventually played by Gielgud's former teacher, Claude Rains. Throughout 1941 and 1942 Gielgud worked continually, in Barrie's
Dear Brutus, another
Importance of Being Earnest in the West End, and
Macbeth on tour. His 1943 revival of
William Congreve's
Love for Love on tour and then in London received high praise from reviewers. in
Crime and Punishment, Broadway, 1947 A 1944–45 season at the
Haymarket for Beaumont included a Hamlet that many considered his finest. Agate wrote, "Mr Gielgud is now completely and authoritatively master of this tremendous part.... I hold that this is, and is likely to remain, the best Hamlet of our time." Also in the season were ''A Midsummer Night's Dream
, The Duchess of Malfi and the first major revival of Lady Windermere's Fan'' (1945). In May 1945 Gielgud bought
No.16, Cowley Street, a
Georgian townhouse in
Westminster, central London, which remained his home for the next 31 years. In late 1945 and early 1946 he toured for
ENSA in the Middle and Far East with
Hamlet and Coward's
Blithe Spirit. During this tour he played Hamlet on stage for the last time. Between these two engagements Gielgud toured North America in
The Importance of Being Earnest and
Love for Love. Edith Evans was tired of the role of Lady Bracknell, and refused to join him;
Margaret Rutherford played the part to great acclaim. Gielgud was in demand as a director, with six productions in 1948–49. They included
The Heiress in 1949, when he was brought in at the last moment to direct Richardson and Ashcroft, saving what seemed a doomed production; it ran for 644 performances. His last big hit of the 1940s was as Thomas Mendip in ''
The Lady's Not for Burning'', which he also directed. The London cast included the young
Claire Bloom and
Richard Burton, who went with Gielgud when he took the piece to the US the following year.
1950s – Film success and personal crisis (Casca, left) and Gielgud (Cassius) in
Julius Caesar (1953) At the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Gielgud did much to reclaim his position as a leading Shakespearean. His cold, unsympathetic Angelo in
Peter Brook's production of
Measure for Measure (1950) showed the public a new, naturalistic manner in his playing. He followed this with three other Shakespeare productions with Brook, which were well received. In 1953 Gielgud made his first Hollywood film, the sole classical actor in
Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
Julius Caesar, playing
Cassius.
Marlon Brando (Mark Antony) was in awe of him, and
James Mason (Brutus) was disheartened at Gielgud's seemingly effortless skill. Gielgud, for his part, felt he learned much about film technique from Mason. Gielgud enjoyed his four-month stay in California, not least, as Morley comments, for the relaxed attitude there to homosexuality. Returning to London later in 1953 Gielgud took over management of the Lyric, Hammersmith, for a classical season of
Richard II, Congreve's
The Way of the World, and
Thomas Otway's ''
Venice Preserv'd'', directing the first, acting in the last, and doing both in the second. Feeling he was too old for Richard, he cast the young
Paul Scofield; both the actor and the production were a critical and commercial success. During the season Gielgud was
knighted in the
1953 Coronation Honours. On the evening of 20 October 1953, Gielgud, usually highly discreet about casual sex, was arrested in
Chelsea for
cottaging (i.e.
cruising for sex in a public lavatory). Until the 1960s sexual activity of any kind between men was illegal in Britain. The
Home Secretary of the day,
David Maxwell Fyfe, was fervently homophobic, urging the police to arrest anyone who contravened the Victorian laws against homosexuality. Gielgud was fined; when the press reported the story, he thought his disgrace would end his career. When the news broke he was in
Liverpool on the pre-London tour of a new play,
A Day by the Sea. According to the biographer
Richard Huggett, Gielgud was so paralysed by nerves that the prospect of going onstage as usual seemed impossible, but his fellow players, led by
Sybil Thorndike, encouraged him: His career was safe, but the episode briefly affected Gielgud's health; he suffered a
nervous breakdown some months afterwards. He never spoke publicly about the incident, and it was quickly sidelined by the press and politely ignored by writers during his lifetime. Privately he made donations to
gay campaign groups, but did not endorse them in public. In his later years he said to the actor
Simon Callow, "I do admire people like you and
Ian McKellen for coming out, but I can't be doing with that myself." Between December 1953 and June 1955 Gielgud concentrated on directing and did not appear on stage. His productions ranged from a revival of ''Charley's Aunt
with John Mills to The Cherry Orchard
with Ffrangcon-Davies, and Twelfth Night
with Olivier. A revival of Much Ado About Nothing
with Ashcroft in 1955 was much better received; in The Manchester Guardian'',
Philip Hope-Wallace called it "Shakespearean comedy for once perfectly realised". In 1955 Gielgud made his second appearance in a film of Shakespeare, portraying
Clarence in Olivier's
Richard III. British theatre was moving away from the West End glamour of Beaumont's productions to more '''' works. Olivier had a great success in
John Osborne's
The Entertainer in 1957, but Gielgud was not in tune with the new wave of writers. He remained in demand as a Shakespearean, but there were few new plays suitable for him. He directed and played the lead in Coward's
Nude with Violin in 1956, which was dismissed by the critics as old-fashioned, though it ran for more than a year. He made two film appearances, playing a cameo comedy scene with Coward as a prospective manservant in
Michael Anderson's
Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and as the father of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning in
Sidney Franklin's 1957 remake of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street. He did not consider his performance as the tyrannical father convincing, and confessed that he undertook it only for the large fee ("it will set me up for a couple of years") and to keep him before the public in America, where he had not performed for over four years. '': Gielgud as Benedick and
Margaret Leighton as
Beatrice, 1959|alt= During 1957 Gielgud directed
Berlioz's
The Trojans at
Covent Garden and played Prospero at
Drury Lane, He performed it all over Britain, mainland Europe, Australasia and the US, including a performance at the
White House in 1965. His performance on Broadway won him a
Special Tony Award in
1959, and an audio recording in 1979 received a
Grammy Award. He made many other recordings, both before and after this, including ten Shakespeare plays. Gielgud continued to try, without much success, to find new plays that suited him as an actor, but his direction of
Peter Shaffer's first play,
Five Finger Exercise (1958), received acclaim. While in the US for the Shaffer play, Gielgud revived
Much Ado About Nothing, this time with
Margaret Leighton as his
Beatrice. Most of the New York critics praised the production, and they all praised the co-stars. He gave his first performances on television during 1959, in Rattigan's
The Browning Version for
CBS and
N. C. Hunter's
A Day by the Sea for
ITV. He appeared in more than fifty more plays on television over the next four decades.
1960s as Sir Peter Teazle,
The School for Scandal, 1962 During the early 1960s Gielgud had more successes as a director than as an actor. He directed the first London performance of
Britten's opera ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream'' (1961) at Covent Garden and
Hugh Wheeler's
Big Fish, Little Fish on Broadway, the latter winning him a Tony for
Best Direction of a Play in
1961. As Gaev in
The Cherry Orchard to the Ranevskaya of Ashcroft he had the best of the notices; his co-star and the production received mixed reviews. The following year Gielgud directed Richardson in
The School for Scandal, first at the Haymarket and then on a North American tour, which he joined as, in his words, "the oldest Joseph Surface in the business". In 1962 Gielgud met Martin Hensler (1932–99), an interior designer exiled from Hungary. He was temperamental, and Gielgud's friends often found him difficult, but the two became a long-term couple and lived together until Hensler's death. Under his influence Gielgud moved his main residence from central London to the South Pavilion of
Wotton House at
Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire. Gielgud received an
Oscar nomination for his performance as King
Louis VII of France in
Becket (1964), with Richard Burton in the title role. Morley comments, "A minor but flashy role, this had considerable and long-lasting importance; his unrivalled theatrical dignity could greatly enhance a film." Gielgud finally began to take the cinema seriously, for financial and sometimes artistic reasons. He told his agent to accept any reasonable film offers. His films of the mid-1960s were
Tony Richardson's
The Loved One (1965), which Croall termed a disaster despite later acclaim, and
Orson Welles's
Falstaff film
Chimes at Midnight (1966), which was unsuccessful at the time but has since been recognised as "one of the best, albeit most eccentric, of all Shakespearean movies", according to Morley. Much of Gielgud's theatre work in the later 1960s was as a director: Chekhov's
Ivanov at the
Phoenix in London and the
Shubert in New York,
Peter Ustinov's
Half Way Up the Tree at the Queen's and
Mozart's
Don Giovanni at the
Coliseum. Gielgud played Orgon in
Tartuffe and the title role in
Seneca's
Oedipus during the National's 1967–68 season, but according to Croall neither production was satisfactory. After this, Gielgud at last found a modern role that suited him and which he played to acclaim: the Headmaster in
Alan Bennett's first play,
Forty Years On (1968). The notices for both play and star were excellent. John Barber wrote in
The Daily Telegraph that "Gielgud dominates all with an unexpected caricature of a mincing pedant, his noble features blurred so as to mimic a fussed and fatuous egghead. From the great mandarin of the theatre, a delicious comic creation." Having finally embraced film-making, Gielgud appeared in six films in 1967–69. His most substantial role was
Lord Raglan in Tony Richardson's
The Charge of the Light Brigade. His other roles, in films including Michael Anderson's
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968) as a fictional pope and
Richard Attenborough's
Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) as
Count Leopold Berchtold, were cameo appearances in character roles.
1970s – Career revival In 1970 Gielgud played another modern role in which he had great success; he joined Ralph Richardson at the
Royal Court in Chelsea in
David Storey's
Home. The play is set in the gardens of a nursing home for mental patients, though this is not clear at first. The two elderly men converse in a desultory way, are joined and briefly enlivened by two more extrovert female patients, are slightly scared by another male patient, and are then left together, conversing even more emptily. The
Punch critic Jeremy Kingston wrote: The play transferred to the West End and then to Broadway. In
The New York Times Clive Barnes wrote, "The two men, bleakly examining the little nothingness of their lives, are John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson giving two of the greatest performances of two careers that have been among the glories of the English-speaking theater." The original cast recorded the play for television in 1972. In the first half of the decade Gielgud made seven films and six television dramas. Morley describes his choice as indiscriminate, but singles out for praise his performances in 1974 as the Old Cardinal in
Joseph Losey's
Galileo and the manservant Beddoes in
Sidney Lumet's
Murder on the Orient Express. In a 1971 BBC presentation of
James Elroy Flecker's
Hassan, Gielgud played the Caliph to Richardson's Hassan. The critic of
The Illustrated London News said that viewers would "shiver at a towering performance by Gielgud, as a Caliph with all the purring beauty and ruthlessness of a great golden leopard". In the theatre Gielgud directed Coward's
Private Lives and
Somerset Maugham's
The Constant Wife (both 1973, London and 1974, New York). Gielgud continued his long stage association with Richardson in
Harold Pinter's ''
No Man's Land'' (1975), directed by Hall at the National. Richardson played Hirst, a prosperous but isolated and vulnerable author, and Gielgud was Spooner, a down-at-heel sponger and opportunist. Hall found the play "extremely funny and also extremely bleak". The production was a critical and box-office success and, over a period of three years, played at the Old Vic, in the West End, at the
Lyttelton Theatre in the new National Theatre complex, on Broadway and on television. In the latter part of the decade Gielgud worked more for cinema and television than on stage. His film work included what Morley calls "his most embarrassing professional appearance", In Gielgud's ten other films from this period, his most substantial role was Clive Langham in
Alain Resnais'
Providence (1977). Gielgud thought it "by far the most exciting film I have ever made". He won a
New York Film Critics Circle award for his performance as a dying author, "drunk half the time ... throwing bottles about, and roaring a lot of very coarse dialogue". Gielgud's most successful film performance of the decade was
Steve Gordon's comedy
Arthur (1981), which starred
Dudley Moore as a self-indulgent playboy. Gielgud played Hobson, Moore's butler. He turned the part down twice before finally accepting it, nervous, after the
Caligula débâcle, of the strong language used by the acerbic Hobson. For television Gielgud played nineteen roles during the 1980s; they included Edward Ryder in an
eleven-part adaptation of
Waugh's
Brideshead Revisited (1982).
The Times said that he gave the role "a desolate and calculated malice which carries almost singlehandedly [the] first two episodes". At the decade's end he played a rakish journalist, Haverford Downs, in
John Mortimer's ''
Summer's Lease'', for which he won an
Emmy. Gielgud's final West End play was
Hugh Whitemore's
The Best of Friends (1988). He played
Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the
Fitzwilliam Museum, in a representation of a friendship between Cockerell,
Bernard Shaw and
Laurentia McLachlan, a
Benedictine nun. Gielgud had some trouble learning his lines; at one performance he almost forgot them, momentarily distracted by seeing in a 1938 copy of
The Times, read by his character, a review of his own portrayal of Vershinin in
Three Sisters fifty years earlier. In 1990 Gielgud made his last film appearance in a leading role, playing Prospero in ''
Prospero's Books'',
Peter Greenaway's adaptation of
The Tempest. Reviews for the film were mixed, but Gielgud's performance in one of his signature roles was much praised. He continued to work on radio, as he had done throughout his career; Croall lists more than fifty BBC radio productions of plays starring Gielgud between 1929 and 1994. To mark his ninetieth birthday he played Lear for the last time; for the BBC
Kenneth Branagh gathered a cast that included
Judi Dench,
Eileen Atkins and
Emma Thompson as Lear's daughters, with actors such as
Bob Hoskins,
Derek Jacobi and
Simon Russell Beale in supporting roles. He continued to appear on television until 1998; his last major role in the medium was in a BBC production in 1994 of
J. B. Priestley's rarely-revived ''
Summer Day's Dream''. Subsequently, he made further cameo appearances in films including Branagh's
Hamlet (as King Priam, 1996),
Dragonheart (as the voice of
King Arthur, 1996), and
Shine (as Cecil Parkes, 1996). His last feature film appearance was as
Pope Pius V in
Shekhar Kapur's
Elizabeth (1998). Gielgud's partner, Martin Hensler, died in 1999. After this, Gielgud went into a physical and psychological decline; he died at home on 21 May 2000, at the age of 96. At his request there was no memorial service, and his funeral at All Saints' Church,
Wotton Underwood, was private, for family and close friends. ==Honours, character and reputation==