Sir John Gielgud

Sir John's Desert Island Disc

He won a Supporting Actor Oscar for Arthur

Didn't he attend a screening of "Caligula" and tell Helen Mirren he just saw her arsehole?!

He must be a great actor since he never worked with G.

Size meat verificatia?

R4 with G?

Is M supposed to be Meryl? He was in Plenty with her.

R2 He is one of the few in the EGOT club

Old actor story: Gielgud was having lunch with Dame Athene Syler. 'How are you, John?', 'Oh my dear, absolutely terrible! I'm doing nothing but wine and dine the old bags of stage and scree! Monday Sybil Thorndyke, Tuesday Faye Compton, Wednesday Athene Syler (beat), but of course I don't mean you, Athene.'

R8 That's funny. I know he had an affair with Peggy Ashcroft, despite being a practicing homosexual.

He used to remove his dentures to 'perform' oral.

Did he go up in the man?

I rejected him at a urinal at the 55th Street Playhouse in 1975! I know I was an idiot! Sir John loved to cottage!

Isn't it rumored that he had a big dick? Am I mixing him up with Sir Ian?

Who cares? He was a genius on the stage

"Hayter! I seem to have dropped my book."

When he got busted for cruising, Donald Wolfitt tried to circulate a petition to get him blackballed from the theater....but he was so loved by his peers that it didn't have any effect

R16 It is Donald Wolfit

And Wolfit was the generational bridge between the Sir Charles Hawtreys and Gielguds.

[quote] Sir John loved to cottage!

Sorry, what does that mean?

R18 He was a whore, darling!

What? When did he have an affair with Peggy Ashcroft. Never heard that

R20 In the 1920's I believe

Where did you hear that?

[quote]Sorry, what does that mean?

Cottaging is cruising in public washrooms.

As a theater actor he was always broke, so Gielgud accepted an offer to direct a big Broadway musical so he could get the check every week after it opened. Sadly, his complete lack of knowledge and experience got him fired, as he was completely in over his head.

Still, in his letters he gushed about the one person he decided could do absolutely everything well, who tried to save him before he got canned by staging some numbers for him, but it wasn't to be. He never stopped talking about her consummate work ethic and major talents as a theater artist!

That person? Debbie Reynolds.

Gielgud was the original director of the "Irene" revival in 1973 and was replaced by Gower Champion.

I always thought of him as the male version of Maggie Smith.

Very dry with a side eye that could cut you in half. Love them both.

Jeremy Irons said that during the filming of Brideshead, he learned much about acting from Laurence Olivier, but nothing from Gielgud. I wonder why he said that?

R26 Maybe they just did not click?

R26

Irons has had, at least in the past, issues with gays.

[italic]...Irons mused over the benefits of a change in the law, which he said might lead to fathers marrying sons in order to pass on property without incurring tax penalties. "I worry that it means we change or debase what marriage is," he said. "Tax-wise it's an interesting one. Could a father not marry his son? It's not incest between men. Incest is there to protect us from inbreeding. But men don't breed, so incest wouldn't cover that".[/italic]

DL Fave Joan Crawford was a fan. But Gielgud wasn't a fan of Ingrid Bergman, and was infamously quoted as saying this about her:

“Ingrid Bergman speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.”

He was never a fan of cinema and only chose great films to appear in...

...like Caligula?

I guess we can't hold it against him. Most of the highly-esteemed cast had no idea what that movie would turn into.

He played Aaron in War and Remembrance, powerful performance, voice and dialect

Wasn’t he close with Kenneth Branagh? As an American gayling, I was obsessed with Branagh and that was the first I heard of him - from all Branagh’s gushing about him.

He directed Vivien Leigh more than once on the stage and admitted she had very little talent. This surprised me and you wonder if he revealed that to Olivier.

After he was released from prison for cottaging one of the Great Dames told him not to do it again, or at the very least, not to be caught again.

[quote]Arguable

OP, if you're going to posture by starting a sentence this way, at least be sure you are using the right word.

Oh, dear.

We all love Gielgud and those of us who aren't children or fools do not need a cut-and-paste "bio." But ARTHUR was not a great movie. And the poor thing won an Oscar for it.

Oh, dear.

Oh, dear. Oh, dear

[quote] But ARTHUR was not a great movie.

Oh my, I read this too quickly, twice, and thought you wrote that Bea Arthur was not a great movie and wondered how did I ever miss this biopic?

He was never a fan of cinema and only chose great films to appear in...

Like Lost Horizon…

R35 Calm down Nancy.

He was very good friends with Lauren Bacall. She must have loved his negative appraisal of Ingrid Bergman's talents given that Bergman took the lead in the film version of Cactus Flower that Bacall originated on Broadway.

[quote] "Bergman took the lead in the film version of Cactus Flower that Bacall originated on Broadway."

For some reason, I never knew fhat, R39!

R33, Leigh and Gielgud were friends. Vivien saved his life when they went on holiday together and she rescued him from drowning. Gielgud was not especially close with her husband-- he said that he had always found Olivier intimidating. Olivier's intense competitiveness would have made a real friendship between the two men impossible, but they seem to have had respect for one another, at least professionally.

As for Gielgud's low opinion of Vivien's acting (on stage as opposed to her work on film), this was shared by many of his contemporaries who invariably criticised Vivien for having a weak voice and an inability to dominate the stage (something Olivier could do in his sleep).

I first saw him in Murder on the Orient Express. My mother knew who he was, but I had no idea. She said he was pretty much playing himself

One of my favorite recordings is Gina Bachauer playing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit with each of the three pieces preceded by John Gielgud reciting the poem that inspired it.

What a voice!!!

R43 classy

Nice thighs in OP’s picture.

[quote] He was never a fan of cinema and only chose great films to appear in- [quote] Lost Horizon,

!!!!!

I worked on a low budget straight to video film 30 years ago. Part of my job was to drive this super old actor to and and from set. This was a creepy old man, who would hit on me relentlessly, smelled even after he just showered, (alcoholism) but I tolerated it because he had such great stories. He knew all the old stars of Hollywood, like Marilyn, and James Dean, and Marlon, and Tennessee Williams, etc.

But his story about Sir John, was interesting. This actor was a teenager, and doing theater in the early 1930s in London. Sir John was in his late 20s or early 30s and seduced this guy. Sir John would show up at this young teen's house and they would run off (in spite of parents protests) on Sir John's motorcycle and end up out in the country and make love in a meadow amongst the tall grass! He said Sir John was "a very passionate lover!" LOL.

Their relationship ended when this guy showed up uninvited to Sir Johns home and he answered the door naked and perturbed, for being interrupted, and there was some other "teen boy actor" from the theater in his "parlor". Oopsie.

This is my only reference for Sir John Guilegud. Otherwise, I would have no idea who he is.

He was a great actor, always in period pieces as the old man

He WAS Sir John Gielgud!

John Gielgud and Eric Porter had a long history. Gielgud directed Porter in various plays in the 1950s, and they were both in 1980 television movie "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" an Agatha Christie adaptation.

I vaguely remember an old Splitting Image episode with Gielgud and Olivier graciously debating over whose death would be a greater tragedy for the nation.

R33 if you knew, I suppose Olivier knew. Just a hunch.

R36 that’s how good Sir John was—he played Bea playing Dorothy. Positively Shakespearean!

"On that summer evening led by him, I first appreciated how quiet life can be, in the midst of yahoos and hullaballoos. He exerted on me a quite uniquely . . . calming influence, without exertion, without any . . . desire to influence. He was so much older than me. My expectations in those days, and I confess I had expectations in those days, did not include him in their frame of reference. I meandered over to Hampstead Heath, a captive of memories of a more than usually pronounced grisliness, and found myself, not much to my surprise, ordering a pint at Jack Straw's Castle. This achieved, and having negotiated a path through a particularly repellent lickspitting herd of literati, I stumbled, unseeing, with my pint, to his bald, tanned, unmovable table. How bald he was."

YouTube has both an audio recording of Gielgud's Hamlet in its entirety (albeit from the late 1940s, not the early 30s when he made it famous), and a full video of the Burton Hamlet that JG directed. The one that is the subject of The Motive and the Cue on NT-Live. They are both easy to search.

The critic Kenneth Tynan was always fanboying Olivier and sharply criticizing Leigh when they were on stage together. Olivier got quite upset with him about it, but the fact is that her voice wouldn't be admired on the classical stage even today, and then voices were much more admired. But Olivier would keep convincing her to do Shakespeare. I'm sure she also suffered from playing opposite Olivier so regularly: he not only had a large stage presence, but he wasn't immune to a bit of upstaging either and he would NOT have liked her brilliance and massive success in GWTW happening so early in their relationship. He didn't film all that well himself, as we know. He never would have been called the world's greatest actor for his work in film, even including Hamlet.

Fun to see a JG thread on DL, because I've recently had a little glut of the great man. Watched 'Julius Caesar' again with pleasure, where JG intones the verse flawlessly of course, in the fine company of James Mason and Marlon Brando. (It was inevitably on DL where I read that Brando sought Gielgud's advice on how best to speak Shakespeare. JG was glad to oblige, on the understanding that Brando returned the favour, by bestowing his own especial gift.)

Also I caught the screening of 'The Motive and the Cue', a fine play about Gielgud directing Burton as Hamlet on Broadway. Directed by Sam Mendes, it's one of the best things I've ever seen. Mark Gatiss was superlative as Gielgud, and deservedly just won an Olivier award for his performance. The simmering friction between JG and Johnny Flynn as Burton, just married to the ambient Elizabeth Taylor, is thrilling to watch. Recommended!

I saw “The Motive and the Cue” in a National Theatre Live screening and enjoyed it a lot, Mark Gatiss was indeed terrific, managing to suggest Gielgud’s gentleness, elegance, the sound and cadence of his voice without resorting to outright impersonation.

I enjoyed it so much, I downloaded the late actor William Redfield’s book of letters written during the production of the Burton/Gielgud “Hamlet.” The book has evidently been re-issued by Redfield’s son on the occasion of the play, since the Redfield memoir was od two major sources for it.

In the letters, I thought Redfield most often came across like a pompous windbag, his portrait of Sir John is detailed and well-observed, full of respect, tenderness and frustration in equal parts. As a director, Gielgud comes across as rather passive-aggressive and entirely too hands-off for much of the company, but full of hilarious bon mots and with a knack for creating a scene and mood, expectin the actor to fill in the lbanks for himself. It’s worth reading for the Gielgud observations if not much else. Though his portrait of Elizabeth Taylor is also good — she comes across as overwhelmingly magnetic and feminine, but also direct, intelligent, sensible, nurturing.

[quote]Jeremy Irons said that during the filming of Brideshead, he learned much about acting from Laurence Olivier, but nothing from Gielgud. I wonder why he said that?

Gielgud couldn't talk when his mouth was full of Irons' dick.

Having watched “Brideshead Revisited” during lockdown, Gielgud played the father of the Irons character as a typical upper middle class striver, a stiff upper lip type who had no clue how to talk to his son, and who seemed to find his son’s constant presence at the dinner table an unpleasant surprise.

Maybe their on-camera non-relationship spilled over into their off camera interactions.

He's so one note.

[quote] Jeremy Irons said that during the filming of Brideshead, he learned much about acting from Laurence Olivier, but nothing from Gielgud. I wonder why he said that?

Gielgud's performance as Charles Ryder's father is classic Gielgud, and it's enormously enjoyable, but it's just Gielgud doing his dry sarcastic shtick. He could have done that part in his sleep, especially since Mr. Ryder never changes (he's mocking from beginning to end). But Laurence Olivier really got to sink his teeth into the part of Lord Marchmain, which is a genuinely great part--he starts out gruff and distant, and then becomes very vulnerable towards the end of his life because of his great fear of death.

btw, the performances in Brideshead are universally first-rate. Claire Bloom is also really great as the brittle, unloved Lady Marchmain.

I saw “the motive and the cue” in London and was mesmerised, such a great play

Mark Gatiss won an Olivier award for his portrayal of SJG

If it is still on NT Live, I would def watch it again

I'll alert the media.

When it comes to Gielgud's films career, it's strange that Providence was not mentioned even once here (it's an American board, I know, but still). A very rare leading role and probably his finest film performance (for which he won the NY film critics award. The Academy went with Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl that year, so what do I know).

I loved him as Obi-Wan Kenobi