New Notes from an Old Cello

By Gerald Clarke

At 79, John Gielgud is the hottest young talent around

Question: Is it possible to make a movie or TV series without John Gielgud? Answer: Yes. But it is not easy.

Since 1980 his face has been seen on more screens than the MGM lion. Famous to serious theatergoers for more than 50 years, the reserved, sometimes frosty-appearing Gielgud has, in his 70s, suddenly assumed a new role--that of Major Movie Star. "Isn't it amazing?" he exclaims, as surprised and delighted as anyone else who has suddenly hit the jackpot. "It's the most extraordinary piece of luck!"

He played the austere, ironic butler in Arthur, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1982, and he was Charles Ryder's comically aloof father in TV's Brideshead Revisited. But he was also, to give only a partial list, the anti-Semitic Cambridge don in Chariots of Fire, Lord Irwin in Gandhi, a doge of Venice in NBC's Marco Polo, Albert Speer's father in ABC's Inside the Third Reich, Pope Pius XII in CBS's The Scarlet and the Black, a crooked art dealer in Sphinx, a German scientist in The Formula, and the British censor who prosecuted D.H. Lawrence in Priest of Love.

And the list goes on. This fall he will be seen as an aristocratic con man, a crook of many faces, in Orion Pictures' mystery-comedy Scandalous; early next year he will be on TV again, as an officer of the British Raj in HBO's adaptation of M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions. ''Once again I had to ride a horse," he says. "I've been in so many films where I had to ride. And I can't ride at all, not at all. It's dreadful work!"

He is also on TV these days as an amusingly supercilious huckster for Paul Masson wines. In the funniest of the commercials, he bursts into a locker room as a group of huge football players are about to give themselves a ritual champagne shower after a winning game. "Gentlemen!" he says reprovingly, as he expropriates a bottle and glass from a giant paw. "This is Paul Masson champagne." Holding a bottle close to one dull-looking jock, he asks, "Can you read?" "Vintage 1980," the (cowed) player replies. "Remarkable," responds Gielgud with good-natured sarcasm.

And that, doubtless, is how Sir John--he was knighted in 1953--is perceived by most people around the world: bright blue eyes looking condescendingly down a luxuriant nose at the unruly, almost always inelegant world around him. "I have a natural kind of hauteur and arrogance," he admits, "but actually I'm very shy and humble." On this warm summer day, sitting over lunch at the Ivy, an old theatrical restaurant in London's West End, he is none of those things, however. He is instead the Gielgud his friends say they see, the irrepressible Mr. Chat, full of observations, anecdotes and gossip. "You needn't say a word when you're with him," says Ralph Richardson, a close friend for 53 years. "Sometimes I will say yes or no or really? Afterward he will tell someone, 'I had a wonderful talk with Ralph.' And I didn't say anything! He's a continual firework of words."

Most of the pyrotechnics concern actors, acting and recollections of productions he has appeared in since 1921, when he made his professional debut as a herald in an Old Vic production of Shakespeare's Henry V. He grew up in upper-middle-class comfort in London's South Kensington district, with a nanny, servants and private schools, and he and his brother and sister put on their own plays in a miniature home theater. His ambition was to be an actor, but he promised his stockbroker father that he would settle down and become an architect if he had not made it on the stage by the time he was 25. Success, however, was almost genetically ordained: his mother was a member of the famous Terry family, the royalty of Britain's stage, and his father's ancestry, which was Polish, included two illustrious actors as well.

For the descendant of two such families, the acting game came naturally, and Gielgud was soon receiving a wide variety of parts. "I played a lot of very neurotic young men, and they were very helpful to me," he says. "But if I hadn't been careful, I might have been typed as an hysterical juvenile. I was lucky to get Shakespeare, Chekhov and Congreve early on and develop an appetite for really good stuff that showed that I could do something outside my own range. One is inclined to trade on the qualities that brought one's reputation, you know. You take it for granted you have been hired for that personality, and you don't really work at acting any more."

With his cello-like voice, which has the richness and grandeur of Elgar's concerto, Gielgud made his greatest mark in Shakespeare; in the '20s and '30s he did Hamlet, Lear, Romeo, Prospero, Antony, Richard II, Macbeth, Hotspur and Oberon. Many critics thought he was the best Hamlet of his generation, but Gielgud's own favorite was his Richard II, the poet king. "It suited him so well," agrees Richardson. "He's the only person who has ever played it so well in my lifetime."

In his many productions, some of which he also directed, Gielgud helped change the style of Shakespearean acting, making it less declamatory and more natural. Today, he believes, that trend has gone too far, and recent interpretations fail to give sifficient emphasis to the poetry of the plays. "For a while I was the modern way, and that way lasted a long time. But now there's a new style. One thing I would still like to do is Prospero in a film of The Tempest. It would be a nice thing to leave behind as a record of my Shakespeare work."

He was also skilled in comedy and was, by all accounts, a brilliant John Worthing in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. With the classics on his mind, he did not take his few films (Insult, The Secret Agent) of the time seriously, and they were, by his own estimation, "simply awful. I was frightfully camera-conscious and worried that I was too ugly. The only thing I liked about films was looking at the back of my head, which otherwise I could only see at the tailor's."

As the '30s drew to a close, it became clear that there were three great actors in England: the triumvirate of Gielgud, Richardson and Laurence Olivier that has now ruled the British theatrical world for 50 years. "Larry is the lion, the hero who can play Oedipus, Henry V and Lear," says Derek Granger, the producer of Brideshead Revisited, who has worked with all of them. "Ralph is the transmuted common man, Peer Gynt and Falstaff. John is the poet, the one with the finest and most aristocratic sensibility. He is Hamlet, Richard II and Prospero. It is an amazing coincidence that we have got all three at once. It is something that will go down in theatrical history."

Olivier and Gielgud played many of the same parts, however, and a rivalry developed. In one famous 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet they went so far as to alternate parts, Gielgud playing Romeo while Olivier played Mercutio, then reversing roles. "I thought John's extraordinary, darting imagination made him the better Mercutio," recalls Peggy Ashcroft, who was Juliet to both of them, "but Larry was the definitive Romeo, a real, vigorous, impulsive youth. There is the most charming story about John. He once said, talking about Othello, 'I don't really know what jealousy is.' Then he caught himself. 'Oh, yes. I do! I remember! When Larry had a success as Hamlet, I wept.' "

The two are mannerly toward each other, but there are hints that the rivalry is not altogether friendly these days. "I saw a few extracts from Larry's memoirs (Confessions of an Actor)," says Gielgud, "and I wouldn't read any more. I couldn't bear what he said about Vivien Leigh [Olivier's late wife]. People are very shocked by the book. They all say it's very ungenerous." With Richardson, on the other hand, there has been not only friendship, but collaboration in memorable productions of David Storey's Home (1970) and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975).

Gielgud had his share of flops, including a notable Othello, but by the '40s he had portrayed so many kings in blank verse that, as he puts it, "my old management would say: 'Just stick a crown on his head and send him onstage.'" Then in 1950, under the inspired direction of Peter Brook, he found a new interpretation of Angelo in Measure for Measure. Instead of portraying him as an extravagant sensualist, as others had done, he played him as a repressed Puritan under a veneer of sanctimony. The role revitalized a career that, reversing the usual rule, has grown larger as he has grown older. "I always did pretty well financially," he says, "but I never made very big money, the way movie stars do, until about 15 years ago. Thank God it happened. I only wonder how long it will last. One dreads the moment when nothing is offered."

Like Olivier, who also has a busy old age, Gielgud sometimes gives the impression that out of that dread he will go anywhere, do anything, so long as he has a speaking part. He is probably the only great actor ever to appear in a porno pic, Bob Guccione's Caligula. "They offered me the part of the Emperor Tiberius, and I turned it down, saying, 'This is pure pornography.' Gore Vidal, who wrote the original script, then wrote me a terrifically rude letter, saying how impertinent it was of me to refuse it and that if I knew what Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee said about me, I wouldn't be so grand. Terrible vituperation. Then they offered me another smaller part that wasn't dirty, and I rather shamefacedly took it. I played a whole scene in a bath of tepid water. It took three days to shoot, and every two hours some terrible hags dragged me out, rubbed me down and put me back into the water again. Most extraordinary proceedings."

Until ten years ago, Gielgud had a house behind Westminster Abbey. A lifelong bachelor, he was a constant on the London scene, going to all the good parties, seeing the new shows and attending important art exhibitions. Then he moved to an elegant 18th century carriage house near Oxford, where he gardens, keeps an aviary of parakeets and cockatoos and looks after two Shih Tzus. "I used to love parties and meeting new people," he says. "Now I'm amazed to find how little I miss the bright lights. You make a new life for yourself when you're old. I sleep in the afternoon, I play my records, do my crossword puzzles, read masses of books, watch television for an hour after dinner, then go to bed early. I'm a very contented man."

Though he seems to read almost everything, what he enjoys most is "trashy American novels. Harold Robbins is a great read, and Judith Krantz is a joy! Have you read Mistral's Daughter? Oh, you should, you know. I can't wait for the next. One always wonders how many pages the publisher demands between sex scenes. I've never managed to read Barbara Cartland. She is too pure. I like all the filthy details."

Such thoughts turn him to the partly eaten cold crab on his plate. It is too tough, he pronounces, and if he finishes it, he will probably get hiccups--"so humiliating." At that his quicksilver mind jumps to his Victorian parents and to Victorians in general, who, by his estimation, ate so much that they must have burped, belched and behaved rather badly after every meal. "When I first went to America in 1928," he remembers, speaking of bad manners, "there were spittoons everywhere. I remember avoiding spit as it flew past me in Times Square. Very unattractive." Still, that did not prevent him from learning to like the U.S. and New York City. "I adore New York. It's still rather wondrous to me."

Peggy Ashcroft thinks of Gielgud as one of the last of the Edwardians, not just in age, but in temperament. It is not a judgment with which he will quarrel. He fondly remembers the London of his youth as a bright and magical city. "I do think with great nostalgia of the old days," he says "But I wouldn't want them back. I'd rather be taken back to a somewhat later period when I first saw my name in lights on marquee and said, 'I'm going to be star.' "

--By Gerald Clarke This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.