Mariah Gale
Michael Gambon
Romola Garai
Jimmy Gardner
William Gaskill
John Gay
Peter Geddis
Pam Gems
The General from America
Jean Genet
Michel de Ghelderode
Ghosts
John Gielgud
The Gift of the Gorgon
Alexandra Gilbreath
Peter Gill
Jean Giraudoux
Iain Glen
Robert Glenister
Jamie Glover
Julian Glover
The Glowing Manikin
God Bless
Derek Godfrey
Patrick Godfrey
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nikolai Gogol
Golden Girls
Carlo Goldoni
Stella Gonet
Good
Buzz Goodbody
Henry Goodman
Goodnight Children Everywhere
Rupert Goold
Marius Goring
Maxim Gorky
Gordon Gostelow
Orlando Gough
The Government Inspector
Fraser Grace
Nickolas Grace
Michael Grandage
Harley Granville-Barker
Günter Grass
Trystan Gravelle
Simon Gray
Great Expectations
The Great White Hope
The Greeks
Graham Greene
Paul Greenwood
David Greig
Richard Griffiths
Trevor Griffiths
Pippa Guard
Vladimir Gubaryev
Peter Guinness
Mike Gwilym
John Gielgud was born into a well-to-do London family in 1904. His father, of Lithuanian descent, was a stockbroker. His maternal great-aunt was the actress Ellen Terry. Theatre-obsessed from an early age, Gielgud enrolled at Lady Benson's private drama academy as soon as his schooldays (at Westminster) came to an end in 1921, the year he made his unpaid debut as the Herald in Henry V at the Old Vic. Two years later he won a scholarship to RADA. Although tall, distinguished-looking and immaculately dressed, Gielgud was, as his first teachers noted, physically uncomfortable on the stage, which was not to say that he lacked style or presence, only that he was unconvincing as a man of action. This limitation would have damaged his prospects had he not been blessed with the century's most magisterial voice, and had he not been a member of the clique that ran West End theatre from the 1930s to the 50s.
Gielgud's early progress included Charley's Aunt at the Comedy Theatre (1923); a season at the Oxford Playhouse (1924); Romeo to Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies's Juliet for Barry Jackson at the Regent (1924); Nicky in Noël Coward's controversial The Vortex at the Little Theatre (1925); and leading roles in the English theatre's first significant productions of Chekhov—Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard (J.B. Fagan, Oxford Playhouse and Lyric Hammersmith, 1925), Konstantin in The Seagull (A.E. Filmer, Little Theatre, 1925), and Tusenbach in Three Sisters (Theodore Komisarjevsky, Barnes Theatre, 1926). Performing in these plays the young Gielgud discovered a naturalistic style of acting. In contrast, as a Shakespearean, Gielgud's awareness of the musicality of his voice initially encouraged a declamatory style that, although matchlessly lyrical and of wide appeal (his 1930 Hamlet at the Old Vic was considered to be the deepest and most intelligently-spoken of the era), made him seem a more traditional actor than Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave or Laurence Olivier. Gielgud's 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet at the New, in which he alternated the leading roles with Olivier, allowed playgoers to compare his asexual romanticism with Olivier's physical approach. The majority of reviewers favoured Gielgud because Olivier's verse-speaking was unpolished. They never shared a stage again and their rivalry became a constant subtext of British theatrical life, with Olivier, somewhat maliciously, scoring points at every opportunity.
While Olivier travelled to Hollywood, Gielgud moved further into direction and management, forming a company to perform an ambitious programme of classical work at the Queen's Theatre (1937-38). Here was a prototype national theatre, an ensemble of actors working on a common project under the direction of artists of the calibre of Michel Saint-Denis and Tyrone Guthrie. After the war, both stars appeared at Stratford, but Gielgud was the more prominent, transformed by the young Peter Brook into a darker, more edgy and less rhetorical performer than was felt possible (Angelo in Measure for Measure, 1950; Prospero in The Tempest, 1957), and regularly directing—Much Ado About Nothing (1949-55, Gielgud's Benedict was partnered by Peggy Ashcroft and Diana Wynyard), his own King Lear (1950), Ralph Richardson in Macbeth (1952), and, traumatically, Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Twelfth Night (1955). However, it was Olivier, on the back of his movie versions of Henry V and Richard III, who was chosen to lead the National Theatre. He had embraced the new theatre of the late 1950s, creating the role of Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer at the Royal Court (1957), whereas Gielgud, slower to adapt, was tied to those declining giants Binkie Beaumont, Terence Rattigan and Noël Coward. Gielgud accepted Peter Hall's invitation to join the new RSC, but acted (both on the stage and in the rehearsal room) as if the 1950s had never ended. The old hierarchies that separated stars from the rest were breaking down, at least at the RSC, and Gielgud, living in a Cotswold cottage with his valet, found the process difficult. Hall had been so determined to bring Gielgud into the RSC that he had allowed him to choose the play (Othello) and the director (Franco Zeffirelli), and to approve the casting of Iago (Ian Bannen). Recollection of Gielgud's success as the jealous Leontes in Brook's The Winter's Tale at the Phoenix (1951) gave Hall reason to think that he would similarly defy expectations as Othello. Zeffirelli, not unreasonably, thought that a master Shakespearean would perform without direction. He was no Brook and left the actors floundering within the grand folly of his operatic staging (see
Franco Zeffirelli).
In public Gielgud responded with typical dignity, but his letters reveal that
he blamed the director and particularly Bannen for the debacle. Although the
same season's Cherry Orchard (RST, Aldwych), reuniting the 1930s team of
Michel Saint-Denis, Gielgud (Gaev) and Peggy Ashcroft, was a happier
experience, Gielgud never returned to a RSC theatre. He continued to work as a
critically-underrated director, responsible for at least one landmark
premiere—Benjamin Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream at
Covent Garden (1961).Olivier, of course, decided who worked at the National. Gielgud was excluded until 1967/68, and then miscast as Orgon in Molière's Tartuffe (Guthrie), and wasted in Brook's disappointing Oedipus. When Peter Hall replaced Olivier as director, Gielgud was at the centre of his first season, playing Prospero in The Tempest (1974) and Spooner in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975). This last was the culmination of Gielgud's belated acceptance of the avant-garde, a final phase of theatre appearances that included the premieres of David Storey's Home (1970), Charles Wood's Veterans (1972) and Edward Bond's Bingo (1974) at the Royal Court, and which amounted to his most daring, original and relevant work since the early 1950s.
Education: Hillside Preparatory School, Farncombe, Surrey; Westminster School; RADA
RSC: Joined 1949
Seasons: 1950 (Strat.); 1952 (Lond.); 1955 (Strat./Lond./European Tour); 1957 (Strat.)-57 (Lond.); 1961 (Strat.)-61/62 (Lond.)
Productions (as director): Much Ado About Nothing (RST, 1949/Australian Tour, 1949/RST, 1950/Phoenix, 1952/RST, Palace, and European Tour, 1955); King Lear (RST, 1950); Macbeth (RST, 1952); Twelfth Night (RST, 1955)
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