Артур Гилгуд: Өмір және сахна жолы

English actor and theatre director (1904–2000)

Sir Arthur John Gielgud, ('/g//iː//l//g//ʊ//d///; 14 April 1904 – 21 May 2000) was an English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades. With Ralph Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, he gained his first paid acting work as a junior member of his cousin Phyllis Neilson Terry's company in 1922. After studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA), he worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare in 1929–31. During the 1930s Gielgud was a stage star in the West End and on Broadway, appearing in new works and classics. He began a parallel career as a director, and set up his own company at the Queen's Theatre, London. He was regarded by many as the finest Hamlet of his era, and was also known for high comedy roles such as John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. In the 1950s Gielgud feared that his career was threatened when he was convicted and fined for a homosexual offence, but his colleagues and the public supported him loyally. When [[Experimental theatre plays began to supersede traditional West End productions in the later 1950s he found no new suitable stage roles, and for several years he was best known in the theatre for his one man Shakespeare show The Ages of Man. From the late 1960s he found new plays that suited him, by authors including Alan Bennett, David Storey and Harold Pinter. During the first half of his career Gielgud did not take the cinema seriously. Though he made his first film in 1924, and had successes with The Good Companions (1933) and Julius Caesar (1953), he did not begin a regular film career until his sixties. He appeared in more than sixty films between Becket (1964), for which he received his first Academy Award nomination for playing Louis VII of France, and Elizabeth (1998). As the acid tongued Hobson in Arthur (1981) he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. His film work further earned him a Golden Globe Award and two BAFTAs. Although largely indifferent to awards, Gielgud had the rare distinction of winning an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He was famous from the start of his career for his voice and his mastery of Shakespearean verse. He broadcast more than a hundred radio and television dramas between 1929 and 1994, and made commercial recordings of many plays, including ten of Shakespeare's and three recordings from his own "Ages of Man." Among his honours, he was knighted in 1953 and the Gielgud Theatre was named after him in 1994. From 1977 to 1989, he was president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Gielgud was born on 14 April 1904 in South Kensington, London, the third of the four children of Frank Henry Gielgud and his second wife, Kate Terry Gielgud, née Terry Lewis. Gielgud's elder brothers were Lewis, who became a senior official of the Red Cross and UNESCO, and Val, later head of BBC radio drama; his younger sister Eleanor became John's secretary for many years. On his father's side, Gielgud was of Lithuanian and Polish descent. The surname derives from Gelgaudiškis, a village in Lithuania.|group=n Jan Gielgud took refuge in England with his family; one of his grandchildren was Frank Gielgud, whose maternal grandmother was a famous Polish actress, Aniela Aszpergerowa. Frank married into a family with wide theatrical connections. His wife, who was on the stage until she married, was the daughter of the actress Kate Terry, and a member of the stage dynasty that included Ellen, Fred and Marion Terry, Mabel Terry Lewis and Edith and Edward Gordon Craig. Frank had no theatrical ambitions and worked all his life as a stockbroker in the City of London. In 1912, aged eight, Gielgud went to Hillside preparatory school in Surrey as his elder brothers had done. For a child with no interest in sport he acquitted himself reasonably well in cricket and rugby for the school. In class, he hated mathematics, was fair at classics, and excelled at English and divinity. Hillside encouraged his interest in drama, and he played several leading roles in school productions, including Mark Antony in Julius Caesar and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. After Hillside, Lewis and Val had won scholarships to Eton and Rugby, respectively; lacking their academic achievement, John failed to secure such a scholarship. He was sent as a day boy to Westminster School where, as he later said, he had access to the West End "in time to touch the fringe of the great century of the theatre". The school choir sang in services at Westminster Abbey, which appealed to his fondness for ritual. He showed talent at sketching, and for a while thought of scenic design as a possible career. The young Gielgud's father took him to concerts, which he liked, and galleries and museums, "which bored me rigid". Both parents were keen theatregoers, but did not encourage their children to follow an acting career. Val Gielgud recalled, "Our parents looked distinctly sideways at the Stage as a means of livelihood, and when John showed some talent for drawing his father spoke crisply of the advantages of an architect's office." On leaving Westminster in 1921, Gielgud persuaded his reluctant parents to let him take drama lessons on the understanding that if he was not self supporting by the age of twenty five he would seek an office post.

Gielgud, aged seventeen, joined a private drama school run by Constance Benson, wife of the actor manager Sir Frank Benson. On the new boy's first day Lady Benson remarked on his physical awkwardness: "she said I walked like a cat with rickets. It dealt a severe blow to my conceit, which was a good thing." Before and after joining the school he played in several amateur productions, and in November 1921 made his debut with a professional company, though he himself was not paid. He played the Herald in Henry V at the Old Vic; he had one line to speak and, he recalled, spoke it badly. He was kept on for the rest of the season in walk on parts in King Lear, Wat Tyler and Peer Gynt, with no lines. Gielgud's first substantial engagement came through his family. In 1922 his cousin Phyllis Neilson Terry This, billed as "the first British full length talkie", was an adaptation of an Edgar Wallace mystery story; Gielgud played a young scoundrel who commits two murders and very nearly a third before he himself is killed.

In 1929 Harcourt Williams, newly appointed as director of productions at the Old Vic, invited Gielgud to join the company for the forthcoming season. The Old Vic, in an unfashionable area of London south of the Thames, was run by Lilian Baylis to offer plays and operas to a mostly working class audience at low ticket prices. She paid her performers very modest wages, but the theatre was known for its unrivalled repertory of classics, mostly Shakespeare, and Gielgud was not the first West End star to take a large pay cut to work there. It was, in Morley's words, the place to learn Shakespearean technique and try new ideas. The reviewer in The Times commented on his sensitiveness, strength and firmness, and called his performance "work of genuine distinction, not only in its grasp of character, but in its control of language". Later in the season he was cast as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, Orlando in As You Like It, the Emperor in Androcles and the Lion and the title role in Pirandello's The Man with the Flower in His Mouth. The production gained such a reputation that the Old Vic began to attract large numbers of West End theatregoers. Demand was so great that the cast moved to the Queen's Theatre, in Shaftesbury Avenue, where Williams staged the piece with the text discreetly shortened. The effect of the cuts was to give the title role even more prominence. Gielgud's Hamlet was richly praised by the critics. Ivor Brown called it "a tremendous performance  the best Hamlet of [my] experience". James Agate wrote, "I have no hesitation whatsoever in saying that it is the high water mark of English Shakespearean acting of our time." Hamlet was a role with which Gielgud was associated over the next decade and more. After the run at the Queen's finished he turned to another part for which he became well known, John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. Gielgud's biographer Jonathan Croall comments that the two roles illustrated two sides of the actor's personality: on the one hand the romantic and soulful Hamlet, and on the other the witty and superficial Worthing. The formidable Lady Bracknell was played by his aunt, Mabel Terry Lewis. The Times observed, "Mr Gielgud and Miss Terry Lewis together are brilliant  they have the supreme grace of always allowing Wilde to speak in his own voice." Returning to the Old Vic for the 1930–31 season, Gielgud found several changes to the company. Donald Wolfit, who loathed him and was himself disliked by his colleagues, was dropped, as was Adele Dixon. Gielgud was uncertain of the suitability of the most prominent new recruit, Ralph Richardson, but Williams was sure that after this season Gielgud would move on; he saw Richardson as a potential replacement. and "I found his clothes extravagant, I found his conversation flippant. He was the New Young Man of his time and I didn't like him." Richardson's notices, and the relationship of the two leading men, improved markedly when Gielgud, who was playing Prospero in The Tempest, helped Richardson with his performance as Caliban:

The friendship and professional association lasted for more than fifty years, until the end of Richardson's life. Gielgud's other roles in this season were Lord Trinket in The Jealous Wife, Richard II again, Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Sergius in Arms and the Man, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing – another role for which he became celebrated – and he concluded the season as King Lear. His performance divided opinion. The Times commented, "It is a mountain of a part, and at the end of the evening the peak remains unscaled"; in The Manchester Guardian, however, Brown wrote that Gielgud "is a match for the thunder, and at length takes the Dover road with a broken tranquillity that allowed every word of the King's agony to be clear as well as poignant".

Returning to the West End, Gielgud starred in J. B. Priestley's The Good Companions, adapted for the stage by the author and Edward Knoblock. The production ran from May 1931 for 331 performances, and Gielgud described it as his first real taste of commercial success. He played Inigo Jollifant, a young schoolmaster who abandons teaching to join a travelling theatre troupe. This crowd pleaser drew disapproval from the more austere reviewers, who felt Gielgud should be doing something more demanding, but he found playing a conventional juvenile lead had challenges of its own and helped him improve his technique. During the run of the play he made another film, Insult (1932), a melodrama about the French Foreign Legion, and he starred in a cinema version of The Good Companions in 1933, with Jessie Matthews. The film was well received by critics; Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times got Gielgud mixed up with his brother Val but thought his performance "a joy to behold  extraordinarily real".|group=n A letter to a friend reveals Gielgud's view of film acting: "There is talk of my doing Inigo in the film of The Good Companions, which appals my soul but appeals to my pocket." In his first volume of memoirs, published in 1939, Gielgud devoted two pages to describing the things about filming that he detested. Unlike his contemporaries Richardson and Laurence Olivier, he made few films until after the Second World War, and did not establish himself as a prominent film actor until many years after that. As he put it in 1994, "I was stupid enough to toss my head and stick to the stage while watching Larry and Ralph sign lucrative Korda contracts." In 1932 Gielgud turned to directing. At the invitation of George Devine, the president of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, Gielgud took charge of a production of Romeo and Juliet by the society, featuring two guest stars: Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the Nurse. The rest of the cast were students, led by Christopher Hassall as Romeo, and included Devine, William Devlin and Terence Rattigan. The experience was satisfactory to Gielgud: he enjoyed the attentions of the undergraduates, had a brief affair with one of them, James Lees Milne, and was widely praised for his inspiring direction and his protégés' success with the play. Already notorious for his innocent slips of the tongue (he called them "Gielgoofs"), in a speech after the final performance he referred to Ashcroft and Evans as "Two leading ladies, the like of whom I hope I shall never meet again". During the rest of 1932 Gielgud played in a new piece, Musical Chairs by Ronald Mackenzie, and directed one new and one classic play, Strange Orchestra by Rodney Ackland in the West End, and The Merchant of Venice at the Old Vic, with Malcolm Keen as Shylock and Ashcroft as Portia. In 1932 he starred in Richard of Bordeaux by Elizabeth MacKintosh. This, a retelling in modern language of the events of Richard II, was greeted as the most successful historical play since Shaw's Saint Joan nine years earlier, more faithful to the events than Shakespeare had been. After an uncertain start in the West End it rapidly became a sell out hit and played in London and on tour over the next three years. In The New York Times, Charles Morgan wrote, "I have never before heard the rhythm and verse and the naturalness of speech so gently combined. If I see a better performance of this play than this before I die, it will be a miracle." Morley writes that junior members of the cast such as Alec Guinness and Frith Banbury would gather in the wings every night "to watch what they seemed intuitively already to know was to be the Hamlet of their time". The following year Gielgud staged perhaps his most famous Shakespeare production, a Romeo and Juliet in which he co starred with Ashcroft and Olivier. Gielgud had spotted Olivier's potential and gave him a major step up in his career. For the first weeks of the run Gielgud played Mercutio and Olivier played Romeo, after which they exchanged roles. As at Oxford, Ashcroft and Evans were Juliet and the nurse. The production broke all box office records for the play, running at the New Theatre for 189 performances. refn|The previous record was 161 performances, by Henry Irving and Gielgud's great aunt Ellen Terry in 1882. In May 1936 Gielgud played Trigorin in The Seagull, with Evans as Arkadina and Ashcroft as Nina. Komisarjevsky directed, which made rehearsals difficult as Ashcroft, with whom he had been living, had just left him. Nonetheless, Morley writes, the critical reception was ecstatic. In the same year Gielgud made his last pre war film, co starring with Madeleine Carroll in Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent. The director's insensitivity to actors made Gielgud nervous and further increased his dislike of filming. The two stars were praised for their performances, but Hitchcock's "preoccupation with incident" was felt by critics to make the leading roles one dimensional, and the laurels went to Peter Lorre as Gielgud's deranged assistant. From September 1936 to February 1937 Gielgud played Hamlet in North America, opening in Toronto before moving to New York and Boston. He was nervous about starring on Broadway for the first time, particularly as it became known that the popular actor Leslie Howard was to appear there in a rival production of the play. When Gielgud opened at the Empire Theatre in October the reviews were mixed, but, as the actor wrote to his mother, the audience response was extraordinary. "They stay at the end and shout every night and the stage door is beset by fans." Howard's production opened in November; it was, in Gielgud's words, a débâcle, and the "battle of the Hamlets" heralded in the New York press was over almost as soon as it had begun. Howard's version closed within a month; the run of Gielgud's production beat Broadway records for the play.

After his return from America in February 1937 Gielgud starred in He Was Born Gay by Emlyn Williams. This romantic tragedy about French royalty after the Revolution was quite well received during its pre London tour, but was savaged by the critics in the West End. The Times said, "This is one of those occasions on which criticism does not stand about talking, but rubs its eyes and withdraws hastily with an embarrassed, incredulous, and uncomprehending blush. What made Mr Emlyn Williams write this play or Mr Gielgud and Miss Ffrangcon Davies appear in it is not to be understood." The play closed after twelve performances. Its failure, so soon after his Shakespearean triumphs, prompted Gielgud to examine his career and his life. His domestic relationship with Perry was comfortable but unexciting, he saw no future in a film career, and the Old Vic could not afford to stage the classics on the large scale to which he aspired. He decided that he must form his own company to play Shakespeare and other classic plays in the West End. Gielgud invested £5,000, most of his earnings from the American Hamlet; Perry, who had family money, put in the same sum. His company included Harry Andrews, Peggy Ashcroft, Glen Byam Shaw, George Devine, Michael Redgrave and Harcourt Williams, with Angela Baddeley and Gwen Ffrangcon Davies as guests. His own roles were King Richard, Joseph Surface, Vershinin and Shylock. Olivier said that Gielgud's Joseph Surface was "the best light comedy performance I've ever seen, or ever shall see". The venture did not make much money, and in July 1938 Gielgud turned to more conventional West End enterprises, in unconventional circumstances. He directed Spring Meeting, a farce by Perry and Molly Keane, presented by Binkie Beaumont, for whom Perry had just left Gielgud. Somehow the three men remained on excellent terms. In September of the same year Gielgud appeared in Dodie Smith's sentimental comedy Dear Octopus.

At the start of the Second World War Gielgud volunteered for active service, but was told that men of his age, thirty five, would not be wanted for at least six months. The government quickly came to the view that most actors would do more good performing to entertain the troops and the general public than serving, whether suitable or not, in the armed forces. Gielgud directed Michael Redgrave in a 1940 London production of The Beggar's Opera for the Glyndebourne Festival. This was a chaotic affair: Gielgud's direction confused his star, and when Redgrave lost his voice Gielgud had to step in and sing the role as best he could. Gielgud felt that something serious or even solemn was necessary for wartime London, where most entertainment was light hearted. Together with Harley Granville Barker and Guthrie he reopened the Old Vic with Shakespeare. His King Lear once again divided the critics, but his Prospero was a considerable success. He played the role quite differently from his attempt on the same stage in 1930: in place of the "manic conjurer" his Prospero was "very far from the usual mixture of Father Christmas, a Colonial Bishop, and the President of the Magicians' Union  a clear, arresting picture of a virile Renaissance notable", according to Brown. The critics singled out, among the other players, Jack Hawkins as Caliban, Marius Goring as Ariel, Jessica Tandy as Miranda and Alec Guinness as Ferdinand. Following the example of several of his stage colleagues, Gielgud joined tours of military camps. He gave recitals of prose and poetry, and acted in a triple bill of short plays, including two from Coward's Tonight at 8.30, but he found at first that less highbrow performers like Beatrice Lillie were better than he at entertaining the troops. Gielgud made no more films for the next ten years; he turned down the role of Julius Caesar in the 1945 film of Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra with Vivien Leigh. He and Leigh were close friends, and Shaw tried hard to persuade him to play the part, but Gielgud had taken a strong dislike to the director, Gabriel Pascal. Caesar was eventually played by Gielgud's former teacher, Claude Rains. Throughout 1941 and 1942 Gielgud worked continually, in Barrie's Dear Brutus, another Importance of Being Earnest in the West End, and Macbeth on tour. His 1943 revival of William Congreve's Love for Love on tour and then in London received high praise from reviewers. A 1944–45 season at the Haymarket for Beaumont included a Hamlet that many considered his finest. Agate wrote, "Mr Gielgud is now completely and authoritatively master of this tremendous part I hold that this is, and is likely to remain, the best Hamlet of our time." Also in the season were A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Duchess of Malfi and the first major revival of Lady Windermere's Fan (1945). In late 1945 and early 1946 Gielgud toured for ENSA in the Middle and Far East with Hamlet and Coward's Blithe Spirit. During this tour he played Hamlet on stage for the last time. Between these two engagements Gielgud toured North America in The Importance of Being Earnest and Love for Love. Edith Evans was tired of the role of Lady Bracknell, and refused to join him; Margaret Rutherford played the part to great acclaim. Gielgud was in demand as a director, with six productions in 1948–49. They included The Heiress in 1949, when he was brought in at the last moment to direct Richardson and Ashcroft, saving what seemed a doomed production; it ran for 644 performances. His last big hit of the 1940s was as Thomas Mendip in The Lady's Not for Burning, which he also directed. The London cast included the young Claire Bloom and Richard Burton, who went with Gielgud when he took the piece to the US the following year.

At the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Gielgud did much to reclaim his position as a leading Shakespearean. His cold, unsympathetic Angelo in Peter Brook's production of Measure for Measure (1950) showed the public a new, naturalistic manner in his playing. He followed this with three other Shakespeare productions with Brook, which were well received. In 1953 Gielgud made his first Hollywood film, the sole classical actor in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Julius Caesar, playing Cassius. Marlon Brando (Mark Antony) was in awe of him, and James Mason (Brutus) was disheartened at Gielgud's seemingly effortless skill. Gielgud, for his part, felt he learned much about film technique from Mason. Gielgud enjoyed his four month stay in California, not least, as Morley comments, for the relaxed attitude there to homosexuality. Returning to London later in 1953 Gielgud took over management of the Lyric, Hammersmith, for a classical season of Richard II, Congreve's The Way of the World, and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd, directing the first, acting in the last, and doing both in the second. Feeling he was too old for Richard, he cast the young Paul Scofield; both the actor and the production were a critical and commercial success. During the season Gielgud was knighted in the 1953 Coronation Honours. On the evening of 20 October 1953, Gielgud, usually highly discreet about casual sex, was arrested in Chelsea for cottaging (i. e. cruising for sex in a public lavatory). Until the 1960s sexual activity of any kind between men was illegal in Britain. refn|The principal law against homosexual acts was the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, in which Section 11 made any kind of sexual activity between men illegal. It was not repealed until the passage of the Sexual Offences Act 1967. Gielgud was fined; when the press reported the story, he thought his disgrace would end his career. When the news broke he was in Liverpool on the pre London tour of a new play, A Day by the Sea. According to the biographer Richard Huggett, Gielgud was so paralysed by nerves that the prospect of going onstage as usual seemed impossible, but his fellow players, led by Sybil Thorndike, encouraged him:

His career was safe, but the episode briefly affected Gielgud's health; he suffered a nervous breakdown some months afterwards. He never spoke publicly about the incident, and it was quickly sidelined by the press and politely ignored by writers during his lifetime. Privately he made donations to gay campaign groups, but did not endorse them in public. In his later years he said to the actor Simon Callow, "I do admire people like you and Ian McKellen for coming out, but I can't be doing with that myself." Between December 1953 and June 1955 Gielgud concentrated on directing and did not appear on stage. His productions ranged from a revival of Charley's Aunt with John Mills to The Cherry Orchard with Ffrangcon Davies, and Twelfth Night with Olivier. A revival of Much Ado About Nothing with Ashcroft in 1955 was much better received; in The Manchester Guardian, Philip Hope Wallace called it "Shakespearean comedy for once perfectly realised". In 1955 Gielgud made his second appearance in a film of Shakespeare, portraying Clarence in Olivier's Richard III. British theatre was moving away from the West End glamour of Beaumont's productions to more [[Experimental theatre works. Olivier had a great success in John Osborne's The Entertainer in 1957, but Gielgud was not in tune with the new wave of writers. He remained in demand as a Shakespearean, but there were few new plays suitable for him. He directed and played the lead in Coward's Nude with Violin in 1956, which was dismissed by the critics as old fashioned, though it ran for more than a year. He made two film appearances, playing a cameo comedy scene with Coward as a prospective manservant in Michael Anderson's Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and as the father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sidney Franklin's 1957 remake of The Barretts of Wimpole Street. He did not consider his performance as the tyrannical father convincing, and confessed that he undertook it only for the large fee ("it will set me up for a couple of years") and to keep him before the public in America, where he had not performed for over four years. During 1957 Gielgud directed Berlioz's The Trojans at Covent Garden and played Prospero at Drury Lane, He performed it all over Britain, mainland Europe, Australasia and the US, including a performance at the White House in 1965. His performance on Broadway won him a Special Tony Award in 1959, and an audio recording in 1979 received a Grammy Award. He made many other recordings, both before and after this, including ten Shakespeare plays. Gielgud continued to try, without much success, to find new plays that suited him as an actor, but his direction of Peter Shaffer's first play, Five Finger Exercise (1958), received acclaim. While in the US for the Shaffer play, Gielgud revived Much Ado About Nothing, this time with Margaret Leighton as his Beatrice. Most of the New York critics praised the production, and they all praised the co stars. He gave his first performances on television during 1959, in Rattigan's The Browning Version for CBS and N. C. Hunter's A Day by the Sea for ITV. He appeared in more than fifty more plays on television over the next four decades.

During the early 1960s Gielgud had more successes as a director than as an actor. He directed the first London performance of Britten's opera A Midsummer Night's Dream (1961) at Covent Garden and Hugh Wheeler's Big Fish, Little Fish on Broadway, the latter winning him a Tony for Best Direction of a Play in 1961. As Gaev in The Cherry Orchard to the Ranevskaya of Ashcroft he had the best of the notices; his co star and the production received mixed reviews. The following year Gielgud directed Richardson in The School for Scandal, first at the Haymarket and then on a North American tour, which he joined as, in his words, "the oldest Joseph Surface in the business". In 1962 Gielgud met Martin Hensler (1932–99), an interior designer exiled from Hungary. He was temperamental, and Gielgud's friends often found him difficult, but the two became a long term couple and lived together until Hensler's death. Under his influence Gielgud moved his main residence from central London to the South Pavilion of Wotton House at Wotton Underwood in Buckinghamshire. Gielgud received an Oscar nomination for his performance as King Louis VII of France in Becket (1964), with Richard Burton in the title role. Morley comments, "A minor but flashy role, this had considerable and long lasting importance; his unrivalled theatrical dignity could greatly enhance a film." Gielgud finally began to take the cinema seriously, for financial and sometimes artistic reasons. He told his agent to accept any reasonable film offers. His films of the mid 1960s were in Tony Richardson's The Loved One (1965), which Croall termed a disaster despite later acclaim, and Orson Welles's Falstaff film Chimes at Midnight (1966), which was unsuccessful at the time but has since been recognised as "one of the best, albeit most eccentric, of all Shakespearean movies", according to Morley. He placed little value on awards, and avoided presentation ceremonies whenever he could: "I really detest all the mutual congratulation baloney and the invidious comparisons which they evoke." For television Gielgud played nineteen roles during the 1980s; they included Edward Ryder in an eleven part adaptation of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1982). The Times said that he gave the role "a desolate and calculated malice which carries almost singlehandedly [the] first two episodes". At the decade's end he played a rakish journalist, Haverford Downs, in John Mortimer's Summer's Lease, for which he won an Emmy Award after its 1991 American broadcast. Gielgud's final West End play was Hugh Whitemore's The Best of Friends (1988). He played Sir Sydney Cockerell, director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in a representation of a friendship between Cockerell, Bernard Shaw and Laurentia McLachlan, a Benedictine nun. Gielgud had some trouble learning his lines; at one performance he almost forgot them, momentarily distracted by seeing in a 1938 copy of The Times, read by his character, a review of his own portrayal of Vershinin in Three Sisters fifty years earlier. In 1990 Gielgud made his last film appearance in a leading role, playing Prospero in Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway's adaptation of The Tempest. Reviews for the film were mixed, but Gielgud's performance in one of his signature roles was much praised. He continued to work on radio, as he had done throughout his career; Croall lists more than fifty BBC radio productions of plays starring Gielgud between 1929 and 1994. To mark his ninetieth birthday he played Lear for the last time; for the BBC Kenneth Branagh gathered a cast that included Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins and Emma Thompson as Lear's daughters, with actors such as Bob Hoskins, Derek Jacobi and Simon Russell Beale in supporting roles. He continued to appear on television until 1998; his last major role in the medium was in a BBC production in 1994 of J. B. Priestley's rarely revived Summer Day's Dream. Subsequently, he made further cameo appearances in films including Branagh's Hamlet (as King Priam, 1996), Dragonheart (as the voice of King Arthur, 1996), and Shine (as Cecil Parkes, 1996). His last feature film appearance was as Pope Pius V in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1998). Gielgud's partner, Martin Hensler, died in 1999. After this, Gielgud went into a physical and psychological decline; he died at home on 21 May 2000, at the age of 96. At his request there was no memorial service, and his funeral at All Saints' Church, Wotton Underwood, was private, for family and close friends.

Based on a translation by Edward Nicolaeff.