John Gielgud

SIR JOHN GIELGUD d2000. English actor and theatre director whose career spanned eight decades. With Ralph Richardson & Laurence Olivier, he was one of the trinity of actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. During the 1930s, he 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 Queens Theatre London. He is 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". During the first half of his career he did not take the cinema seriously. He made his first film in 1924 and had successes with The Good Companions (1933) and Julius Caesar (1953), but he did not begin a regular film career until his sixties. Between Becket (1964) (for which he received an Oscar nomination) and Elizabeth (1998), he appeared in more than sixty films. As the acid-tongued Hobson in Arthur (1981) he won an Academy Award for best supporting actor. He has the rare distinction of winning an Oscar / an Emmy / a Grammy and a Tony. He was knighted in 1953 and the Gielgud Theatre is named after him.