It is extraordinary to be celebrating the centenary of a man who died a mere four years ago, one who, up to the moment he died, seemed so very present. John Gielgud's life covered the whole of the 20th century; for all of his adult life he was a significant figure in the British theatre, either as an active force or as an influence, emblematic and inspirational. Despite the occasional professional and personal misjudgment, his position was uncontested, his genius acknowledged. In addition, he received that rarest of tributes, the universal affection of his fellow professionals, something never quite received by his coeval and polar opposite, the other great stage actor of the past century: Laurence Olivier.
Of course, he had his critics, some of them very eloquent (Kenneth Tynan claimed he was our greatest actor only "from the neck up", adding, somewhat capriciously, that he had the most meaningless legs on the British stage) and some merely malicious: a famous old actor-manager observed rather loudly at the first night of Gielgud's Merchant of Venice that his Shylock was "a remarkable portrait of a Jewish lesbian, but scarcely what the Swan of Avon intended".
Such criticism barely adhered to him. He had about him a quality that soared above it, partly because of his painful awareness, freely expressed, of his own shortcomings, but mostly because of an integrity, a truthfulness to himself, that amounted to nobility: a naturally aristocratic ease, gorgeously allied to an irrepressible sense of humour. Surprisingly - in light of his exquisite technique, his melodious voice and his refined sense of phrasing - his most striking quality as an actor was spontaneity: thoughts sprang from his brain as if just coined, while his heart was almost dangerously wide open to the feelings of the character. He was a conduit for the life of the part.
These qualities fitted him superbly for the role of Hamlet, of which he proved himself, in his four productions of the play, to be the supreme exponent. Even in his late 80s, he could be prevailed upon, at a gala or memorial service, to speak one of the great soliloquies and when he did it was always a revelation, words pouring out of him in perfectly articulate torrents, thoughts vertiginously breeding thoughts, the brain astonishing itself at its own inventions. Hamlet the man stood before us.
Moreover - and this is a trickier thing to try to describe, much less explain - we somehow gained access to Hamlet's soul. Or was it Gielgud's? Certainly, one's emotions were engaged at a level beyond the merely rational, the simply conscious. Some years ago, I interviewed Dustin Hoffman and he told how, as a young actor in New York sharing a flat with Gene Hackman, Hackman had woken him up in the middle of the night to tell him that he had just seen "this old English guy" performing a programme of Shakespeare speeches and that Hoffman must go. Hoffman, acolyte of Lee Strasberg and his version of Stanislavsky's method, scorned the idea of going to see Gielgud: he was just a fruity old ham, exemplar of everything he and Hackman and Strasberg despised. But Hackman insisted, and Hoffman found himself in the audience the following night, expecting the worst. Gielgud started speaking and Hoffman mentally rejected everything he heard. But after about five minutes, he became aware of an unaccustomed sensation: as he was listening, rejecting, tears started running down his cheeks.
This direct line of Gielgud's to the unconscious was nothing studied, nothing learned. It was his, it seemed, by birthright. His aunt was the great mid-Victorian actress, Ellen Terry, Henry Irving's leading lady for over 20 years; she was the mother of Edward Gordon Craig, the visionary director and theorist. His grandmother and many of his cousins were actors. So theatre was in his blood and all around him, though he was scarcely born in a skip: his upbringing was one of solid middle-class comfort and respectability.
He was not precocious; he went to Rada, and started to make his way on stage in the usual manner. His great early break was in 1925 as Noël Coward's understudy in The Vortex, eventually taking over the part; but a Romeo the year before had given a sense of his real quality, despite a somewhat inexpressive physique. In 1929 he went to the Old Vic and within a year he had played Macbeth, Hamlet, Oberon, Orlando, Romeo again and Richard II, and was instantly established as an outstanding and a very modern Shakespearean, eschewing the ponderous and orotund vocal manners of tradition, astonishing audiences with the celerity of his thinking and the directness of his emotional response. Many years later, Lee Strasberg, of all people, described the great characteristic of Gielgud's classical acting: "When Gielgud speaks, I hear Shakespeare think." His gift was to make blank verse seem the most natural form of communication while never compromising its musical values.
Gielgud's letters have just been published, lovingly collected and sparingly (perhaps a little too sparingly) annotated by Richard Mangan, and to read them through is get the full measure of the man. From the earliest age, Gielgud had an instinctive elegance, buoyancy and sense of shape in his own use of language. To the very end, there is scarcely a paragraph that is not perfectly phrased and gracefully turned, even when - especially when - the subject is frivolous or smutty.
The sensation of the letters is, inevitably, the large cache addressed to Paul Anstey, Gielgud's former boyfriend, which reveal his giggly delight in naughty sexual exploits - louche bars, porn movies, a grope here, an all-boys' party there - as well as an occasional and deeply felt tendresse for someone that momentarily threatens to upset the emotional apple-cart. What is really striking about the letters, and this whole side of Gielgud's life, is that his response to a pretty face, a well-filled packet, or (more bewilderingly) the erotic charge of corduroy trousers, is of a piece with his response to the beauties of verse, to the shape of a speech, to the rapid development of an image. His untiring joy, well into his 60s, in these simple, saucy delights was part of what kept him so fresh as an actor. In his acting, there was no censorship, no conscious intervention: the response was immediate and real, without cynicism, calculation or any great striving for effect.
Here, too, is the day-by-day record of his extraordinary achievements as director and actor on both sides of the Atlantic. This seeming butterfly of a man was astoundingly industrious in every department of the theatre; his workload is punishing, playing in huge auditoriums in gruelling cross-country tours of America, wrestling with the problems of staging Les Troyens at Covent Garden, nipping down to Stratford for a summer season in which he plays Angelo, Cassius, Benedick and Lear (no actor today would dream of such an undertaking). With that bubbling humour so typical of him, he throws out brilliant aperçus, hilarious indiscretions, wicked gossip to his correspondents - but all the while he is focused on serving the play, the actors, the theatre itself.
As a director, he was radical only insofar as he believed in simplicity, elegance and a judicious blending of elements. But in terms of the general level of achievement, of production standards, he (in conjunction with the design team Motley) encouraged a degree of finish and finesse hitherto unknown. He also made a point as an actor of working with challenging directors whenever he could.
Of course, it is his achievements as an actor on stage in which his greatest glory resides. Of these achievements, more and more people, inevitably, will have no personal experience. I saw his work from the mid-1960s, among it some of his most wonderful performances: a series of great comedy appearances (the headmaster in Forty Years On, Spooner in No Man's Land, himself, more or less, in Veterans), a last Prospero at the National, an anguished Oedipus in Seneca's play, directed by Brook. But for anyone of my age or younger to know his work in his golden prime, one has to rely on critics and historians.
How wonderful, then, to come across a letter in Mangan's volume addressed to the 20-year-old Richard Sterne, who had asked for advice about playing Romeo, which contains in essence everything that characterised Gielgud as a classical actor. The whole letter should be inscribed on any actor's heart; brief extracts may convey some of the passion and urgency that Gielgud still felt in his late 50s: "The evanescence of youth and passion - the hectic hopelessness of the moment they are strangely aware of - then in the Mantua scene he grows up in a single moment 'Then I defy you stars!' he is suddenly a man and not a boy, no longer affected (Rosaline scene), not rash (encounter with Tybalt at the Ball and Mercutio) ... The first entrance - from a distance - is very important for the first impression, and grace of manner and deportment must be blended to a feline sensuality and sudden violence at a few important moments. You need to relax with a Latin indolence, but always with an underlying athleticism and a power that is ready to strike - like a flame - in the moments of fury and expressed emotion. So full of feeling at one moment - and an emptiness at others for contrast - the utter spontaneity which Latin people have when they are very attractive - and very young!" With characteristic modesty, he adds: "It is a wonderful part. I know how to play it well now, but I could never convey it on the stage."
It is salutary to be so vividly reminded of the force of passion, the mental energy, the lyrical complexity of what Gielgud achieved at his height. These letters, an irresistible 60-year-long gossip about life and art, give us as never before the generosity, the vivacity and the instinctive genius of the man. This is above all why he needs to be celebrated, not simply as a great talent, but as a great man. Bigness of spirit is the real life-blood of the theatre. As Dickens remarked: "The more real the man, the better the actor."
Some 20 years ago, Harold Pinter directed a gala to raise funds for imprisoned writers. A number of us - Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins, Timothy West, Prunella Scales, Alan Bates, Michael Bryant, many more - performed pieces connected with imprisonment. At the end of the first half, Gielgud was to speak Richard II's great soliloquy: "I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world." After the rest of us had run through our pieces in the first half, we all quietly slipped through into the darkened auditorium to watch Gielgud. He stood there on the stage of the Duke of York's Theatre with that inimitably erect posture of his, head held at a slight angle as if he were listening to an inner voice, and spoke again the words he had first acted more than 50 years earlier. As he spoke, he wept, and as he wept, so did we all, knowing that we were in the presence of a kind of purity and perfection of the art we all struggle to practise.
He finished. There was a brief silence, then Pinter stepped forward. "Lovely, John. Bit sentimental." "Oh dear," said Gielgud, briskly, "That's always been my downfall. Thank you, Harold. I do so need to have people to tell me these things." And on the night, the speech was indeed more restrained and finally more effective; but the over-generosity of that private performance was of the essence of the man. It was nothing to do with impressing us - why on earth would he want or need to do that? - it was simply that in speaking the familiar text, he fell in love with it all over again.