His was a career that spanned most of the 20th century and had its roots in the 19th. Arthur John Gielgud was born on April 14, 1904 in South Kensington, London, England, into the pre-eminent British theatrical family of the age: the Terrys. His mother Kate Terry-Lewis was the niece of Dame Ellen Terry (whose only rivals in the 19th century were Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse) and an actress in her own right. His father Frank was a stockbroker whose grandparents had come to England from a town in Lithuania named after the family: Gielgaudskis. As his friend Sheridan Morley would write in his biography of Gielgud, the year of his birth "was also the year that J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan was born, and it is tempting to see the real-life Gielguds as a counterpart to the Darling family – Bohemian, eccentric, sometimes short of ready cash, but always individually and collectively fascinating, precisely because they were an extraordinary family on an apparently very ordinary London street, with John as the perennially youthful, starry Peter and his father as the recalcitrant Mr. Darling."

Growing up surrounded by theatrical people one would think that John Gielgud would have had his parents' blessing to become an actor and in a sense join the family business. But Gielgud's brother Val (who was himself to become the head of BBC Radio in the 1950s) later explained that "The Terrys lay all about us in our infancy...a toy playhouse pillared and elaborately gilded, was the pride and joy of our nursery...but John was to owe his career to nothing but his own persistence. Our parents looked distinctly sideways at the stage as a means of livelihood, and when John showed some talent for drawing, our father spoke crisply of the advantages of an architect's office. One of our more managing aunts even extolled the Navy, saying that John would look very nice in the white tabs of a youthful cadet. What John possessed from the very beginning was singleness of heart and mind, together with a remarkable capacity for hard work. When he was not acting in the theater, going to the theater, or talking about the theater, he was to all intents and purposes not living. All through his life, he was only to experience genuine happiness either on stage or in a dressing-room".

His love of acting began to manifest itself at Hillside preparatory school where he made his stage debut in The Merchant of Venice which led to his professional debut at the Old Vic Theater in 1921 in a small role in Henry V. Determined to have a serious career, Gielgud studied first at Lady Benson's Dramatic Academy and later the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon graduation he joined several traveling theatrical troupes and honed his craft on the boards of regional theaters throughout Britain.

Throughout most of his life, John Gielgud was a stage actor and is considered by many the greatest Shakespearian actor of the 20th century, but he began to dabble in motion pictures as early as 1924 when he appeared fourth-billed in an adaptation of a Louis Verneuil play Who Is the Man? co-starring Isobel Elsom. As Morley would write, "[H]e also played the title role in Komisarjevsky's Jules Verne silent, Michael Strogoff (1926), and the lead in an early Edgar Wallace thriller The Clue of the New Pin (1929), in all of which John found himself so embarrassingly inept that he could not ever bear even to watch the rushes, let alone the finished films."

Gielgud would spend the 1930s becoming a stage star rather than a movie star. In 1930 he played Hamlet for the first time and was a sensation. No less a critic than James Agate wrote "At twenty-six, Gielgud is the youngest Hamlet in living memory, and I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that it is the high-water mark of English Shakespearean acting in our time. This actor is young, thoughtful, clever, and sensitive. His performance is subtle, brilliant, vigorous, imaginative, tender and full of the right kind of ironic humor." It is almost tragic that Gielgud's Hamlet was never filmed for posterity. During this decade he made only three films; the best known of these is Secret Agent, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and co-starring Madeleine Carroll and Peter Lorre. It was released in 1936, the same year that Gielgud played Hamlet on Broadway opposite Lillian Gish as Ophelia. He would revisit the role several times in his career and eventually played the Ghost of Hamlet's Father opposite Richard Burton in 1964 and for the final time on radio opposite his protégé Kenneth Branagh in 1994. His popularity as a stage actor attracted the attention of the movies but the parts never seemed to materialize as he once remembered, "Before the war, they used to send me all the scripts that Leslie Howard had turned down, just as Larry [Olivier] was always getting Ronald Colman castoffs. Then there was the possibility of my playing Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette (1939) but Robert Morley got that, and then one day when Charles Laughton was proving difficult they even suggested I should be The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)."

During World War II, Gielgud volunteered for the service but was deferred by the military because he was thirty-five. "I was extremely lucky not to be called up, the authorities taking the view that I could do a better job by staying in the theater. But I found myself living somewhat precariously, always moving from one production to another and never quite knowing what was going to happen next." In between theatrical assignments, he did manage two movies; starring as Benjamin Disraeli, in The Prime Minister (1941) and narrating a propaganda film directed by Michael Powell, An Airman's Letter to His Mother (1941). It was not until 1953 that Gielgud once more stepped in front of a camera to play Cassius in Julius Caesar opposite Marlon Brando, James Mason and Louis Calhern. From 1953 until his death in 2000, John Gielgud worked in either a film or television production nearly every year. Several of these were filmed adaptations of Shakespeare plays such as Romeo and Juliet (1954), Richard III(1955), Chimes at Midnight (1965), directed by Orson Welles, Julius Caesar again, in 1970 this time with Gielgud in the title role, King Richard II for television in 1978, a retelling of The Tempest called Prospero's Books in 1991, and his final Shakespearian film role as Priam in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996).

After World War II, the theater in England had a definite movement away from classical plays like those of Shakespeare and Chekov and more towards the "kitchen sink" dramas of writers like John Osbourne which left many actors of Gielgud's generation feeling out of place. Rather than give up his theatrical career Gielgud continued to appear onstage but began to expand his film roles into other genres such as the comedy-adventure Around the World in Eighty Days (1956) and Tony Richardson's black farce about the funeral industry in America, The Loved One (1965); and films based on popular fiction such as Frankenstein, the True Story (1973) and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).

At a time when most actors his age were either dying off, retiring, or having trouble finding roles, John Gielgud was still going strong both in the theater, performing in plays by Edward Albee, Harold Pinter and Alan Bennett and in films. When he was 77, he won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Hobbs the valet in Arthur (1981). (He had previously been nominated once before in 1964 for Becket.) Having been a stage star, John Gielgud was now a movie star. Throughout the 1980s he seemed to be everywhere on the big screen and small, earning four Emmy nominations in that decade, winning two Golden Globes, and numerous other critical awards and nominations for his performances in films such as Plenty (1985), and television appearances in War and Remembrance (1988), Brideshead Revisited (1981), and The Master of Balantrae (1984).

Amazingly, John Gielgud continued his career almost up to his last minute. In the 1990s he made at least 25 appearances in television and films, including The Power of One (1992), First Knight (1995), Shine (1996), and Elizabeth (1998). John Gielgud made his last appearance a few weeks before his death in the 2000 film short Catastrophe written by Samuel Beckett and directed by David Mamet. His role of The Protagonist is without dialogue so his film career came full circle, having began in silent films.

John Gielgud was also an author, having written three volumes of his memoirs An Actor and His Time, Early Stages, and Distinguished Company, as well as Acting Shakespeare with John Miller. He was also a campaigner for animal rights, receiving the "Humanitarian of the Year" Award in 1994 and 1999 by the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, for whom he had narrated a video exposing the force-feeding of geese and duck to make foie gras. His involvement led to many restaurants and chefs refusing to serve the dish.

When John Gielgud died at the age of ninety-six on May 21, 2000, he left a life filled with honors. He was considered the greatest Shakespearian actor of the Twentieth Century, had been nominated and won Academy, Emmy, Tony and Grammy Awards, been knighted as a Companion of Honour in 1953 and elevated to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth in 1996. In 1994 the Globe Theater in London was renamed the Gielgud Theater. The Shakespeare Guild frequently presents the Sir John Gielgud Award for "Excellence in the Dramatic Arts" in his honor.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Sheridan Morley, John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography (2002)
John Gielgud An Actor and His Time (1979)
The New York Times Obituary, May 22, 2000
The Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia.org