At 79, John Gielgud is the hottest young talent around
Question: Is it possible to make a movie or TV series without John Gielgud? Answer: Yes. But it is not easy.
Since 1980 his face has been seen on more screens than the MGM lion. Famous to serious theatergoers for more than 50 years, the reserved, sometimes frosty-appearing Gielgud has, in his 70s, suddenly assumed a new role—that of Major Movie Star. "Isn't it amazing?" he exclaims, as surprised and delighted as anyone else who has suddenly hit the jackpot. "It's the most extraordinary piece of luck!"
He played the austere, ironic butler in Arthur, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1982, and he was Charles Ryder's comically aloof father in TV's Brideshead Revisited. But he was also, to give only a partial list, the anti-Semitic Cambridge don in Chariots of Fire, Lord Irwin in Gandhi, a doge of Venice in NBC's Marco Polo, Albert Speer's father in ABC's Inside the Third Reich, Pope Pius XII in CBS's The Scarlet and the Black, a crooked art dealer in Sphinx, a German scientist in The Formula, and the British censor who prosecuted D.H. Lawrence in Priest of Love.
And the list goes on. This fall he will be seen as an aristocratic con man, a crook of many faces, in Orion Pictures' mystery-comedy Scandalous; early next year he will be on TV again, as an officer of the British Raj in HBO's adaptation of M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions. ''Once again I had to ride a horse," he says. "I've been in so many films where I had to ride. And I can't ride at all, not at all. It's dreadful work!"
He is also on TV these days as an amusingly supercilious huckster for Paul Masson wines. In the funniest of the commercials, he bursts into a locker room as a group of huge football players are about to give themselves a ritual champagne shower after a winning game. "Gentlemen!" he says reprovingly, as he expropriates a bottle and glass from a giant paw. "This is Paul Masson champagne." Holding a bottle close to one dull-looking jock, he asks, "Can you read?" "Vintage 1980," the (cowed) player replies. "Remarkable," responds Gielgud with good-natured sarcasm.
And that, doubtless, is how Sir John—he was knighted in 1953—is perceived by most people around the world: bright blue eyes looking condescendingly down a luxuriant nose at the unruly, almost always inelegant world around him. "I have a natural kind of hauteur and arrogance," he admits, "but actually I'm very shy and humble." On this warm summer day, sitting over lunch at the Ivy, an old theatrical restaurant in London's West End, he is none of those things, however. He is instead the Gielgud his friends say they see, the irrepressible Mr. Chat, full of observations, anecdotes and gossip. "You needn't say a word when you're with him," says Ralph Richardson, a close friend for 53 years. "Sometimes I will say yes or no or really? Afterward he will tell someone, 'I had a wonderful talk with Ralph.' And I didn't say anything! He's a continual firework of words."