Sir John Gielgud

"John Gielgud can steal a scene by simply wearing a hat" - Pauline Kael

FULL NAME	Arthur John Gielgud
BORN	14 April 1904, London, UK
DIED	22 May 2000 (aged 96), London, UK
ASSOCIATION	Actor
NATIONALITY	British
knighted	1953
reviewed entries	8 (7)
max. rating	(Shine)
min. rating	½
average rating	4.21
strengths	Aristocratic and captivating presence Exceptional speaking voice.

FILMOGRAPHY (ONLY REVIEWED ENTRIES)

BIO (IN NORWEGIAN)

John Gielgud’s exceptional career stretched across nearly 80 years. His undisputed talent flourished on stage, on television, and on the big screen from the early 1920s until the late 1990s. When Gielgud died aged 96 in May 2000, he had been working almost to the very end, and his passing was a natural, undramatic one. One of the 20th century’s greatest acting talents had passed.

Although Gielgud appeared in well over a hundred films, in his younger years he was first and foremost a man of the theatre. With acting in his blood for generations, he made his stage debut at just 17 in 1921 and soon became a leading attraction. Throughout his career he most often played Shakespearean characters: Romeo, Richard II, Macbeth, Prospero, and Antony. The role he truly had in his fingertips, however, was Hamlet. First taking on the part in 1930, he went on to play Hamlet more than 500 times, and is regarded by many as perhaps the greatest interpreter of the role.

Gielgud made his film debut as early as 1924, but appeared only sporadically in films until the 1950s. He was always a man of the stage, yet in the latter half of his career he increasingly took on film and television roles, in fact becoming most active in his final decades. Few actors can look back on a filmography like his in old age: in 1996, the year he turned 92, Gielgud appeared in seven film and TV productions. Resting on his laurels never interested him.

Because Gielgud worked largely in Britain, he was not a regular at the Academy Awards. Nor did he receive many leading roles on film – a likely result of his advancing years and less conventional looks. Though handsome, he lacked the classic features of the romantic lead, and he played such a role only once, in Hitchcock’s early Secret Agent (1936). As a character actor, however, his performances were numerous and distinguished. Most often he was cast as wise, aristocratic gentlemen. He earned his first Oscar nomination in 1964 as King Louis VII in Becket alongside his friend and colleague Richard Burton, and ultimately won the statuette for Best Supporting Actor in 1981 opposite Dudley Moore in Arthur.

The 1970s were arguably his most productive decade, filled with memorable roles, but his 1990s work was no less remarkable. He stood out in Scott Hicks’s Shine (1996) as an ageing piano teacher, and again in the Oscar-nominated Elizabeth (1998). At the age of 90, a London theatre was named in his honour.

For the last 25 years of his life, Gielgud lived with his partner, the Austrian Martin Hensler, though he chose not to speak publicly on matters of homosexuality.

AWARDS

WHAT DO THE CRITICS SAY?

"(...) and Gielgud is equally humorous and surprising." - Leonard Maltin on The Good Companions.

"(...) but John Gielgud's refined, monkish Henry IV gives the film the austerity it needs for the conflict within Hal to be dramatized." - Pauline Kael on Chimes at Midnight.

"(...) a London-set romantic thriller about espionage that's tolerably amusing whenever John Gielgud is on the screen demonstrating his flair for self-parody." - Pauline Kael on Sebastian.

"(...) Arthur turns for help to his loyal butler, Hobson, who is played by John Gielgud with an understated elegance and a naughty tongue." - Roger Ebert on Arthur.

"John Gielgud can steal a scene by simply wearing a hat; it's so crisply angled that you can't take your eyes off him—you want to applaud that perfect hat. As Hobson, the valet to a drunken millionaire playboy, he may be the most poised and confident funnyman you'll ever see." - Pauline Kael on Arthur.

"Gielgud is a particular delight as aging career diplomat" - Leonard Maltin on Plenty.

"John Gielgud has three brief scenes and steals them all." - Roger Ebert on Plenty.

"(...) on the sound track we hear one of the great voices in theater history, Sir John Gielgud's." - Roger Ebert on Prospero's Books.

"Sir John Gielgud at 86, in a virtuoso performance as a most regal Prospero, the master manipulator of people and events, is a wonder. Age has not withered him. It's his film all the way. Mellifluously, resonantly speaking some of the most famous lines in the history of theater, Gielgud functions as a sort of onscreen chorus—an intermediary between the action and audience to give form and fabric to the film. Throughout, Gielgud also portrays the Bard who, like the veteran actor himself, is nearing the end of his long career. (The Tempest was Shakespeare's 36th and final play.) In a triple conceit of Greenaway's, we see Gielgud-Shakespeare-Prospero writing the play in elegant Elizabethan script. Concurrently, he conjures onscreen the images and characters he has just created on paper. He recites all their dialogue. Their voices are dimly overlaid with his, as if by echo. Only at the film's very end, when Prospero has given up all thoughts of revenge and reconciled with his enemies, are the other characters allowed to speak for themselves in their own voices. Symbolically, as revenge made them fictional, so forgiveness makes them real.
         Gielgud breathes life into a difficult role and makes it look natural and easy. Richly garbed in embroidered cowl and cloak, looking like a cross between a Venetian doge and Dame Edith Sitwell, it's as if he were born to it. ("The most difficult part," he jested, "was the cloak—beautiful to look at but extraordinarily heavy to wear. It took four people to put it on me.") Actually, it was at his suggestion that Greenaway undertook the project, designing the film for him in that role. He even used some ideas Gielgud jotted down years before—observations made as a result of the many times he's performed the role on stage. As Gielgud noted: "For example, I had the idea that the long dialogue between Prospero and Miranda, often so boring on the stage, could be enormously heightened by showing some of the events leading up to his exile. I think Peter achieved this to great dramatic effect." - Cinebooks Review on Prospero's Books.

"And I enjoyed John Gielgud, in yet another of the farewell performances we have come to treasure." - Roger Ebert on First Knight.

QUOTES

"When you're my age, you just never risk being ill - because then everyone says, 'Oh, he's done for.'" - som 84-åring.

"It's like visiting other planets" - om å spille i film og TV-produksjoner. 

"Like all professions acting has terrible drawbacks.It can be fearfully boring, fearfully unglamorous...But what is fun about the theatre is that We get our prizes while We are alive to enjoy them.We have the pleasure of the audience's reaction, We have the applause, We have the publicity, We have the tribute and the honours and whatever it may be.Much more than We probably deserve."

"I also did a film called Providence for Alain Resnais which I thought was rather successful. I enjoyed Brideshead Revisited very much and also Prospero's Books, although it was very exhausting. Those three films are the ones I would say I'm most pleased with. Arthur was also great fun and came at a time in my life when I really didn't imagine that I would be wanted for a leading role. And what luck! I got my Academy Award for that."

Etter at Gielgud hadde gjort Julius Caesar med Marlon Brando i 1953, var engelskmannen blitt så imponert over det unge amerikanske talentet, at han inviterte ham over til London for å spille sammen med Gielgud og andre respekterte Shakespeare-skuespillere på scenen. Brando avslo høflig, fordi han måtte reise til Bahamas og dykke...

CHARACTER QUOTES

Arthur

Arthur: "Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take a bath."
Hobson (Gielgud): "I'll alert the media."
Arthur: "Do you want to run my bath for me?"
Hobson (Gielgud): "It's what I live for. Perhaps you would like me to wash your dick for you? You little shit."

Shine

Cecil Parkes (Gielgud): "The page, for god's sake! The notes!"
David Helfgott: "Sorry, professor. I was forgetting about them, professor"
Cecil Parkes (Gielgud): "Would it be asking too much to learn them first?"
David Helfgott: "And then forget them?"
Cecil Parkes (Gielgud): "Precisely!"

Cecil Parkes (Gielgud): "Don't you just love those big, fat chords. You've got to tame the piano, David, or it will get away from you. It's a monster. Tame it, or it will swallow you whole!"

Cecil Parkes (Gielgud): "And you must play... as if there was no tomorrow"