Gielgud Quotes

John Gielgud told us this story about Mae West. She was asked, ‘Do you ever smoke after you’ve had sex?’ She answered, ‘I never looked.

Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself.

N MY early boyhood I was enraptured by the great fairytale illustrators of the period: Arthur Rackham, Edmond Dulac, Kay Nielsen. As a schoolboy, I was to discover Aubrey Beardsley, and I was extremely fond of an edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream with most imaginative drawings by Heath Robinson,

O John Gielgud dizia que às vezes ele tinha vontade de ser pintor ou escritor. Aí ele podia pegar o desempenho ruim de uma determinada noite e trabalhar nele até tarde e consertar. Mas isso era impossível. A coisa tinha que ser feita na hora. O Gielgud passou por um período muito ruim, em que nada que ele fazia dava certo. O Olivier também. O Olivier teve uma fase horrorosa. Um problema horroroso. Não conseguia encarar os outros atores, olhos nos olhos. Ele dizia aos outros atores: ‘Por favor, não olhe pra mim, senão eu desabo’. Passou um tempo sem conseguir ficar sozinho no palco. Ele dizia aos outros atores: ‘Não me deixem sozinho’.

Sir John is probably touched with some sort of genius, but genius does not normally stimulate me to speculation, since it cannot be held in the hand any more than quicksilver. More important than Gielgud's genius are the years of work and thought which drape about his shoulders almost visibly. He is a lifetime of experience and of practice. On the quieter, less electric days, he sits behind a rehearsal table and interrupts the staging of of a scene with a murmured apology. He then removes his spectacles and rubs his reddened eyes. Perhaps he thinks for a moment. The silence is taut. Rarely does anyone move or speak. He then delivers himself of no more than a sentence or two, but these brief remarks are cornucopias filled with forty years of reading, studying, considering and analysing Shakespearean verse. The words are tightly packed, but Gielgud knows more than what can be gleaned from even the most serious reading, playgoing, and analysis. He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one; of guiding or acting with... Peggy Ashcroft... Sybil Thorndike... Alec Guinness... Paul Scofield... Richard Burton... on through every degree of accomplishment and competence. At the centre of him there sits a firmness, a certainty. Indeed he is so fundamentally assured that he can admit the most serious doubts and confusions. At times, after delivering himself of what would seem a total idea, he will smile his Gioconda smile and say, 'Of course, you yourself may find a better way.' One might reasonably suspect the words to be disingenuous, but it is an attitude which can work psychic wonders on an actor - most especially a cagey one. Gielgud disarms the actor of his self-protective weapons. He does it by not pushing to hard. He combines an unspoiled intuition with a lifetime of learning. The feel of his rehearsal is most ingratiating... and persuasive.

it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness. The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.

MAURICE. And I wanted to join you. I got in the queue to buy a ticket. ROSALIND. All right, so what happened? MAURICE. It's not what happened ... It's what could happen. Now. ROSALIND. What are you talking about, Maurice? MAURICE. January, 1951. This time, I attend the play. And I see you across the theater. (He looks to her. She remains still unmoved) MAURICE. This time, we make eye contact. And afterwards, we meet in the back. By the bar. (She doesn't move.) This time I say, "Did you enjoy the performance?" (She stares at him. Says nothing.) «Gielgud is excellent, don't you think? (Beat.) ROSALIND. Yes, very lifelike. Very good. MAURICE. And the incredible thing is we're both there, watching him. Experiencing the very same thing. Together. ROSALIND. It is incredible. MAURICE. Boch watching. ROSALIND. And when Hermione died, even though it was Leontes' fault, I felt for him. I truly did. MAURICE. Come, poor babe: I have heard, but not believed - ROSALIND and MAURICE. The spirits o' the dead May walk again. MAURICE. And they do. I love that Hermione wasn't really dead. That she comes back. ROSALIND. (Sympathetically.) No, Maurice. She doesn't. Not really. MAURICE. Of course she does. ROSALIND. No. MAURICE. Then how do you explain the statue coming to life? ROSALIND. Hope. They all project it. Leontes projects life where there is none, so he can be forgiven. MAURICE. But don't you think he deserves to be forgiven? ROSALIND. Do I forgive myself? MAURICE. What? For what? (Beat.)

Shakespeare's intention: he so carefully devised the balcony scene as prelude, and the farewell scene as post-consummation, in order to avoid embarrassing both the boy actor who created his Juliet and the audience.

how important speed in scene-changes and economy of superfluous decoration was in mounting Shakespeare's plays to their best advantage,

lago to amuse the audience, especially since Othello (like Macbeth) has no sense of humour.

Richard II is something of a plaster saint and knows it only too well. But it is a rewarding part, with lovely things to say, and I thought it suited my personality.

Twice today I've got to play Hamlet, this great part that I shall never play again. And I can't do it today. I could do it tomorrow, or next week, but I can't do it now.

as there were no kind of sanitary facilities on the premises, the results were apt to be unsightly and demoralising, to say the least.

I pride myself, after long experience, that I can begin and stop weeping at the exact points demanded in the script.

I once tried to approach Akiro Kurosawa, but he never answered.

Caesar is not really very interesting: Cassius is the part. I

I never saw a production at Stratford Ontario, Guthrie's own theatre, which he designed and developed from a tent and which was said to work wonderfully.

John Gielgud thought ‘he was never the same after leaving England, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. I think that tax business, and the way people reacted to it, shocked him . . . He wasn’t much good as a tax exile. He didn’t do a lot with his money. His houses were commonplace, the food dreadful, the decoration pretty amateurish.

But it wasn’t just Twain and Whitman whispering heresies into my ear, a whole ink spill of geniuses had staked their reputations on the argument that “Will Shake-speare” was one of the hyphenated pen names popular among Elizabethan satirists who didn’t fancy being disemboweled in public. The list of gadflies who questioned the official narrative of Shakespeare included Chaplin, Coleridge, Emerson, Gielgud, Hardy, Holmes, Jacobi, James, Joyce, Welles, and of late even Mark Rylance, the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Collectively they believed the Stratford businessman to be a front and a fraud. Whatever the truth, it’s fair to say the authorship debate had long been divided into two camps, artists vs. academics.

About what you’d expect, was Gideon’s grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.