Word: sirred
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...word out into a long cello note or quaver like the lead fiddle in the pit of a Victorian melodrama. It made Shakespeare's verse immediately comprehensible and ethereal: perfectly analyzed, beautifully felt. Declaiming the final scene from King Lear in his solo Shakespeare show The Ages of Man, Sir John sounded like a noble basset. "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" The tone was mournful, then (an octave higher) deranged, then weirdly ecstatic and finally strangulated, stilled...
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...
...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 and get on with...
...lover Martin Hensler and his beloved Times crosswords, this old theatrical cat was often on a film set, spinning anecdotes of the legendary actor-managers Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. "When I was young," he said, "we wore our best suits to rehearsal and called the leading man 'Sir.' Now they wear jeans and call me John...
...Method kids in jeans, Sir John's classical diction might seem as fuddy a theater relic as tights and gaslights. Yet on the night after his death, on a West End stage, Edie Falco and her American co-stars in the gritty play Side Man paused at the end to pay tribute, leading a final standing ovation, to a man whose love of the theater was so artful and ardent...