Word: gielguds
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...elegant mahogany bar to the cozy wicker furniture on its gingerbread verandas, Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was a place for artists and writers to relax and reflect in style. Graham Greene set part of his novel The Comedians at the hotel, and Sir John Gielgud, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and Mick Jagger were also guests...
...effort. While Brando was sweating or mumbling to himself for two hours before each performance, Olivier could slap on a putty nose and blow the house away. The people Guinness describes are not quite larger than life but simply more grand than you and I are used to. John Gielgud really is as acerbic and sophisticated as he is on screen, and Ernie Kovacs was indeed the funniest person Guinness ever met. During the making of Our Man in Havana, Guinness saw Kovacs sitting typing in his dressing room with the door wide open--and surrounded by half-a-dozen...
...know too much about already. The strengths of this very pleasant book lie in its private perspective on the lives of the men and women we know only as images in films. It is fascinating to know, for example, that Ralph Richardson was obsessed with being mistaken for John Gielgud, and that he once without warning socked Guinness in the jaw. "Who can one hit," he shouted, "if not one's friends...
Although the knighthood was granted in 1959, Guinness does not consider himself on the same level as England's great aristocrats of the theater: John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and the late Ralph Richardson. "I'm just not," he says. "It's as simple as that. It doesn't worry me. I never pretended to be." But he has known and, with characteristic detachment, admired all three...
...Gielgud directed a Hamlet in which Guinness had a small part, and he can still hear that berating voice -- "like a silver trumpet muffled in silk." "Go away," he told Guinness crossly. "Come back in a week. Get someone to teach you how to act." Guinness did nothing except mope for seven days, but his absence was enough. Gielgud was now delighted with the young actor's new interpretation...