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Most of the pyrotechnics concern actors, acting and recollections of productions he has appeared in since 1921, when he made his professional debut as a herald in an Old Vic production of Shakespeare's Henry V. He grew up in upper-middle-class comfort in London's South Kensington district, with a nanny, servants and private schools, and he and his brother and sister put on their own plays in a miniature home theater. His ambition was to be an actor, but he promised his stockbroker father that he would settle down and become an architect if he had not made it on the stage by the time he was 25. Success, however, was almost genetically ordained: his mother was a member of the famous Terry family, the royalty of Britain's stage, and his father's ancestry, which was Polish, included two illustrious actors as well.
For the descendant of two such families, the acting game came naturally, and Gielgud was soon receiving a wide variety of parts. "I played a lot of very neurotic young men, and they were very helpful to me," he says. "But if I hadn't been careful, I might have been typed as an hysterical juvenile. I was lucky to get Shakespeare, Chekhov and Congreve early on and develop an appetite for really good stuff that showed that I could do something outside my own range. One is inclined to trade on the qualities that brought one's reputation, you know. You take it for granted you have been hired for that personality, and you don't really work at acting any more."
With his cello-like voice, which has the richness and grandeur of Elgar's concerto, Gielgud made his greatest mark in Shakespeare; in the '20s and '30s he did Hamlet, Lear, Romeo, Prospero, Antony, Richard II, Macbeth, Hotspur and Oberon. Many critics thought he was the best Hamlet of his generation, but Gielgud's own favorite was his Richard II, the poet king. "It suited him so well," agrees Richardson. "He's the only person who has ever played it so well in my lifetime."
In his many productions, some of which he also directed, Gielgud helped change the style of Shakespearean acting, making it less declamatory and more natural. Today, he believes, that trend has gone too far, and recent interpretations fail to give sifficient emphasis to the poetry of the plays. "For a while I was the modern way, and that way lasted a long time. But now there's a new style. One thing I would still like to do is Prospero in a film of The Tempest. It would be a nice thing to leave behind as a record of my Shakespeare work."
He was also skilled in comedy and was, by all accounts, a brilliant John Worthing in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. With the classics on his mind, he did not take his few films (Insult, The Secret Agent) of the time seriously, and they were, by his own estimation, "simply awful. I was frightfully camera-conscious and worried that I was too ugly. The only thing I liked about films was looking at the back of my head, which otherwise I could only see at the tailor's."