Sir Arthur John Gielgud ( GHEEL-guud; 14 April 1904 – 21 May 2000) was an English actor and theatre director. With his contemporaries Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and Ralph Richardson, he made up a quartet of male actors who dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. A member of the Terry family theatrical dynasty, his career spanned eight decades, and 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), Gielgud worked in repertory theatre and in the West End before establishing himself at the Old Vic as an exponent of Shakespeare from 1929 to 1931.
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 avant-garde 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 Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony (EGOT). 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. The Counts Gielgud had owned the Gelgaudiškis Manor on the Nemunas river, but their estates were confiscated after they took part in a failed uprising against Russian rule in 1830–31. Jan Gielgud took refuge in England with his family; one of his grandchildren was Frank Gielgud, whose maternal grandmother was the 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". He saw Sarah Bernhardt act, Adeline Genée dance and Albert Chevalier, Vesta Tilley and Marie Lloyd perform in the music halls. 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 invited him to tour in J. B. Fagan's The Wheel as understudy, bit-part player and assistant stage manager, an invitation he accepted. A colleague, recognising that the young man had talent but lacked technique, recommended him to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). Gielgud was awarded a scholarship to the academy and trained there throughout 1923 under Kenneth Barnes, Helen Haye and Claude Rains.
The actor-manager Nigel Playfair, a friend of Gielgud's family, saw him in a student presentation of J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton. Playfair was impressed and cast him as Felix, the poet-butterfly, in the British premiere of the Čapek brothers' The Insect Play. Gielgud later said that he made a poor impression in the part: "I am surprised that the audience did not throw things at me." The critics were cautious but not hostile to the play; it did not attract the public and closed after a month. While still continuing his studies at RADA, Gielgud appeared again for Playfair in Robert E Lee by John Drinkwater. After leaving the academy at the end of 1923 Gielgud played a Christmas season as Charley in Charley's Aunt in the West End, and then joined Fagan's repertory company at the Oxford Playhouse.
Gielgud was in the Oxford company in January and February 1924, from October 1924 to the end of January 1925, and in August 1925. He played a wide range of parts in classics and modern plays, greatly increasing his technical abilities in the process. The role he most enjoyed was Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard, his first experience of Chekhov: "It was the first time I ever went out on stage feeling that perhaps, after all, I could really be an actor."