Sir John Gielgud [1904 - 2000]
“Here is the number of the slaughter’d French”.
With these words John Gielgud’s professional stage career began – badly - in November 1921. He was playing the tiny part of the English Herald in an Old Vic production of Henry V, directed by Robert Atkins. He had only those eight words to speak, and wasn’t credited in the programme. Perhaps he’d been thinking of the unkind comment of his drama teacher Constance Benson who had, barely weeks before, told him he walked “like a cat with rickets”. For whatever reason, he contrived to make a poor impression even in the space of eight words, and found himself swiftly relegated to non-speaking parts.
But nine years later, he played Hamlet for the first time aged only 26, when the great actors of previous generations had been in their late 30s and early 40s. His success was a sensational one, not just with the public but with the critics and his fellow professionals. In his 70s and 80s, when other actors might have thought of slowing down or retiring, Gielgud played some of the most challenging roles of his life, even playing Lear, for radio, to celebrate his 90th birthday in 1994 under the direction of Kenneth Branagh, with a spectacular cast including Judi Dench, Richard Briers and Emma Thompson, and Simon Russell Beale and Derek Jacobi in minor roles.
This archive covers all aspects of John Gielgud’s career, from his “apprenticeship” with repertory theatre in Oxford, and his early West End appearances following in the footsteps of Noël Coward in The Vortex and The Constant Nymph, to his very last professional engagement only six weeks before his death in May 2000, for two days’ filming in London for Samuel Beckett’s play Catastrophe, directed by David Mamet for Irish television. There is a spectacular series of more than 50 cuttings books, enlivened with letters, programmes and photographs, and nearly 100 albums of photographs, many annotated by Gielgud himself. A representative selection of working scripts used by Gielgud as actor and as director ranges from Ronald Mackenzie’s The Maitlands of 1934, through distinguished and not-so-distinguished cameos in Hollywood films, to his late successes in Home by David Storey and No Man’s Land, by Harold Pinter (in which he forged an unforgettable partnership with Ralph Richardson), Forty Years On, by Alan Bennett, and his final appearance on the London stage, The Best of Friends, by Hugh Whitemore.
Although this is most definitely a record of Gielgud’s professional career, there is a fascinating collection of letters from Gielgud to his mother dating from his prep-school days in 1910 right up to his tour of the English provinces with Coward’s Nude With Violin in 1956, in which Gielgud is frequently more honest than tactful or polite about the surroundings and professional company he found himself in. And there is the complete set of “theatrical diaries” compiled by Gielgud’s mother, Kate Terry Gielgud, of her reviews and impressions of plays she attended from 1897 to 1903, but ending triumphantly with an account of her son’s performances as Lear in 1950 and 1955.
The catalogue description was researched by Dr Ewan Jeffrey and Kathryn Johnson, and edited by Kathryn Johnson. It is also available online through MOLCAT, the British Library’s online manuscripts catalogue.
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