John Gielgud

The silver clarinet and the weight of tradition

John Gielgud lacked the physical fury of Laurence Olivier or the danger of Ralph Richardson. His strength was his voice. A voice that Alec Guinness described as a silver clarinet and that for decades defined how prestigious British theater should sound.

In 1921 he made his debut at the Old Vic in a supporting role in Henry V. That marked the start of an almost obsessive relationship with the classics. Before turning thirty, he was already the absolute benchmark for Shakespeare in London, and his performance in Hamlet in 1930 is still considered the gold standard of the West End.

And that was only the beginning.

But film held little appeal for him, due to matters of ego and technique. Gielgud believed the camera was an intrusive device that stole the essence of the actor. In 1936 he starred in The Secret Agent under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. It was a tense shoot, since the director could not stand the actor's stage mannerisms, and Gielgud hated having no control over the final cut.

So he chose to retreat to the stage for almost twenty more years. During that time he produced his own productions and surrounded himself with the leading acting aristocracy of his era. He made audiences forget that there was a man behind the character and hear only the music of the words.

The public downfall in the Chelsea baths

In October 1953, police arrested him in a public bathroom in Chelsea for what was then called persistent importuning. It was a euphemism used to punish homosexuality. The press of the day was merciless, and the scandal threatened to end his career abruptly.

That support saved his mental health.

When he walked onstage for his next play, the audience greeted him with a standing ovation that lasted several minutes. There were no moral judgments in the stalls. But the trauma made him a much more reserved man, and it pushed him to accept roles he would once have turned down out of sheer professional pride.

During the 1960s he came to see that film was not an enemy but a financial refuge. He appeared in Becket in 1964 as King Louis VII of France. That performance earned him an Oscar nomination and opened the doors of an industry that was beginning to value his British reserve as a luxury asset.

The butler who scorned the script

John Gielgud won the Oscar for playing a sarcastic butler in Arthur in 1981. He had turned down the role several times, finding it a vulgar film full of cheap jokes. In the end he accepted it for the money and at the insistence of his agents.

And the gamble paid off.

His chemistry with Dudley Moore proved unexpected and refreshing. Gielgud discovered that his talent for delivering cutting lines with supreme elegance worked wonders in modern comedy. From then on, his presence in Hollywood films became steady, though always on his own terms of quality.

In 1991, he starred in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. It was an experimental production where the actor was able to pour all his accumulated experience into The Tempest. It was a complex project that blended early digital technology with a suffocating baroque aesthetic.

He kept working until his body gave out. In 2000 he recorded his last on-camera appearance in the short film Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet. He died weeks later, at age 96, at his home in Wotton Underwood from a respiratory infection. His will left an estate valued at more than two million pounds of the time.