John Ezard Obituary
Sir John Gielgud, the peerless verse speaker of 450 years of British theatre and one of its two greatest Shakespearean performers, died on May 21, aged 96.
His end came “simply of old age” at his home near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, on Sunday, 79 years after his first London stage appearance.
His last performance, filmed just weeks ago, was for Samuel Beckett’s play Catastrophe, part of a marathon Channel Four and RTE-funded project to film all the playwright’s works.
This week’s tributes to the actor were suffused with awe and regret at the passing of an unprecedented long-active genius, the last of a group of titanic actors who graced theatres for much of the 20th century.
The National Theatre director, Trevor Nunn, and actor Corin Redgrave reached for epitaphs from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to do him justice.
Nunn said: “There’s a great spirit gone.” Redgrave – whose father, Sir Michael, was deeply influenced by Gielgud – said: “The odds is gone/And there is nothing left remarkable/Beneath the visiting moon.”
Immediate reaction to the news was more profound than for his great contemporary and lifelong rival Lord Lawrence Olivier’s death 11 years ago.
As recently as the 1990s, he played an outstanding radio Hamlet, a part he first played on stage in the 1920s in what a critic then called “the highwater mark of acting in our time”.
His former agent Laurence Evans, who also represented Olivier and Sir Ralph Richardson, said: “I suppose that, of the three, Sir John was really the greatest actor.”
The stage director Peter Brook said that comparisons “could not matter less. His one aim was to reach the highest level of quality. And the word went very deep. It was in his blood. This very endearing, lovable man touched everyone by this purity in him, which was reflected in his work.”
The playwright Christopher Fry, 92, said the magnificence of Gielgud’s verse speaking as Richard ll in 1929 “released something in me” which helped him write plays. “Olivier was the greater comedian but Gielgud was greater as a tragic actor,” he said.
Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice director, said: “We live in an age when we talk minimally to each other. We have television on and the internet. Yet we still have these big feelings inside us. There is something in us which responds to cadence and makes us want to listen.
“He had the gift of entering into language and taking us into another world.”