Word: gielgud
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...nearly 80 years in theater, film, radio and TV, Gielgud, who died last week at 96, gave such passionately acute readings in works sublime and not so; what other actor would be pleased both to be the definitive romantic Hamlet, which he acted some 500 times, and to lend regal pedigree to Bob Guccione's pornific Caligula? Who else could earn critic Kenneth Tynan's prickly compliment "the finest actor on earth, from the neck...
Which is to say, Sir John was not Laurence Olivier. Gielgud lacked his rival's physicality and physique. The Gielgud visage was squinty, Magoo-like, and he didn't care to wear tights because of his knock-knees. As a stage presence, Olivier was all sexy, pyrotechnical danger, a swashbuckler and a rogue, a bounding bounder. Gielgud was more remote, passionate mainly in melancholy. If theater is drama, then Olivier is your man of the century. If it is poetry, the mining of meaning from sound, then Gielgud fits another phrase Tynan applied to him: "Not so much an actor...
...teamed with the third great theater knight, Ralph Richardson, in two modern mystery plays: David Storey's Home, in which two old gents chat thrillingly into their dotage; and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, with Gielgud superbly seedy as a down-on-his-art writer. Yet his first love was Shakespeare, and one imagines the feeling was mutual. In the celebratory book Sir John, Guinness recalls a dinner in the '30s when Gielgud dithered about which of many projects to do next. One chum finally said, "Oh, shut up, dear! Just stick a crown on your head...
Outlasting the century he brilliantly ornamented, Gielgud will live longer still, as long as the melody of his voice and vision resound in films, recordings and grateful memories...
DIED. SIR JOHN GIELGUD, 96, towering Shakespearean actor; in Buckinghamshire, England. (See Appreciation, page...