What do you think?
Rate this book
John G: The Authorized Biography of John Gielgud
John Gielgud has no place in the history of twentieth-century British theatre for the simple reason that he was that history. In a career spanning almost eighty years on stage and screen, radio and television, he effectively reinvented Shakespeare for the modern stage; he was the first great Hamlet of our time; with his brother Val he virtually created the BBC radio drama; decades before the founding of the National Theatre or the RSC, he pioneered the idea of a resident classical company in the West End. He made stars of Alec Guinness and Paul Scofield as well as hundreds of other actors, directors and designers; from Peter Brook to Peter Greenaway, he worked with all the revolutionary artists of his time.
The great-nephew of Ellen Terry, John was the bridge from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, and he was the founder and last survivor of a group of classical actors (Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans) such as the world had never seen and will never see again.
Twelve years before his death, John Gielgud invited Sheridan Morley to become his only authorised biographer, handing over to him letters and diaries and personal files. In addition to this huge archive, Morley has interviewed more than two hundred of John's colleagues, friends, rivals and critics to form a fully rounded and detailed portrait of the great man. Alongside hitherto unpublished views from contemporaries such as Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, Morley fully researches the events surrounding John's 1953 arrest for homosexual soliciting - an incident that helped eventually change the law in Britian.
The great-nephew of Ellen Terry, John was the bridge from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, and he was the founder and last survivor of a group of classical actors (Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Michael Redgrave, Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike and Edith Evans) such as the world had never seen and will never see again.
Twelve years before his death, John Gielgud invited Sheridan Morley to become his only authorised biographer, handing over to him letters and diaries and personal files. In addition to this huge archive, Morley has interviewed more than two hundred of John's colleagues, friends, rivals and critics to form a fully rounded and detailed portrait of the great man. Alongside hitherto unpublished views from contemporaries such as Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, Morley fully researches the events surrounding John's 1953 arrest for homosexual soliciting - an incident that helped eventually change the law in Britian.
510 pages, Hardcover
First published February 7, 2002
1 person is currently reading
44 people want to read
About the author
Sheridan Morley
84 books1 followerSheridan A. Morley (5 December 1941 − 16 February 2007) was an English author, biographer, critic and broadcaster. He was the official biographer of Sir John Gielgud and wrote biographies of many other theatrical figures he had known, including Noël Coward.
Morley was the eldest son of actor Robert Morley and grandson, via his mother Joan Buckmaster, of the actress Dame Gladys Cooper.
Morley was the eldest son of actor Robert Morley and grandson, via his mother Joan Buckmaster, of the actress Dame Gladys Cooper.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 24, 2025
A beautifully crafted biography of Gielgud that is rich in detail about his career and his personal life.
Kenneth Tynan, the greatest theatre critic of this mid-century period, and the one luck enough to be writing about this amazing generation in its prime, once suggested the following analogy: "you have to imagine the English stage as a vast chasm, with two great cliffs either side towering above a raging torrent. Olivier gets from one side to side in one great animal leap; Geilgud goes over on a tightrope, parasol elegantly held aloft, well down there in the rappers you can just discern Redgrave, swimming frantically against the tide.” 2
Gielgud spent his ninety sixth birthday in April 2000 working with Harold Pinter and David Mamet on a play by Samuel Beckett. He died peacefully on a Sunday afternoon, at home, barely a month later, and only then was the sound of what Alec Guinness once called ‘the silver trumpet muffled in silk’ silence for the first and last time, just three months before Alec himself died at 86….3
Arthur John Gielgud was born on 14 April 1904 at 7 Gledhow Gardens in South Kensington…5
1904 also saw the birth of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and it is tempting to see the real life Gielguds has counterparts to the Darling family-bohemian, eccentric, sometimes short of ready cash, but always individually and collectively fascinating, precisely because they were an extraordinary family in an apparently very ordinary London Street, with John has the perennially youthful, starry Peter and his father as the recalcitrant Mr.Darling. 7
Both Coward and John were also now taken up by the wealthy Lord Latham, a stage struck homosexual aristocrat who is to spend most of his inheritance putting money into cowards plays and giving country house parties of extraordinary extravagance, at which foot men would welcome the west end guess by pouring perfume into heated spoons to fill the hall with a thick scent. 46
At this time, far more evidently than later, there were essentially two British theatres: that of the commercial London and an all important touring circuit; and that of small club theatres and Sunday societies and university venues like Fagan’s, or summer festivals like Stratford’s where either classic Shakespeare or revolutionary check off and Epson could be experimentally staged on minimal budgets. 48-49
In Britain every year more than three hundred people were being convicted and often in prison for acts of “gross indecency”, even those taking place in the privacy of their own homes. 57
In a famous phrase of the period, you could around 1930 either join the Comintern or the Comintern and, like Guy Burgess, sometimes even both. 57
If there is a subliminal, homosexual reading of The Importance, with the idea that John Worthing's secret other life (what he calls Bunburying) maybe a metaphor for Oscars owned bisexuality, than John would have been the first to make this connection clear over the footlights. 74
…. But the picture [The Thirty Nine Steps] was swiftly hijacked from them both by Peter Lorrie, already internationally famous as the child murderer of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and now beginning to develop a line of neurotic villains which would see him safely through to the end of his Hollywood career thirty years later. 128
After a five week regional tour, they opened at the Phoenix to rave reviews, not least for the sets created by Rex Whistler, who was very soon to be killed on active service in France. 183
Gielgud wrote… Los Angeles is really too hot for comfort, and the town is a horror of ugliness, as flat as your hand and crawling with cars. Nobody dreams of walking anywhere, and all of the shops and houses are miles apart… the local houses and gardens are very artificial and over elegant, usually imitation tutor or American colonial, and everyone looks very healthy. There is an extraordinary abundance of everything-fruit and flowers and vegetables laid out under the sky in the open air markets, but in some curious way the whole of Los Angeles looks like an Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, which will all be taken down in a month or two and rebuild for next year…225-226
In this Summer of 1953 the most celebrated homosexual trials since of Oscar Wilde in 1895 had started with two accusations by Boy Scouts that they had been sexually assaulted over our bank holiday weekend by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and his friend, the assistant film director Kenneth Hume. 238
Before the war, Lady Astor's son was found guilty of gross indecency with another man and sentenced to prison in 1931, well four years later the louch Labour MP Tom Driberg was charged with homosexual offences; neither of these cases was whoever reported in the press, thanks to the power of the fleet Street censorship wielded by Lady Astor and Driberg’s Great protector, Lord Beaverbrook. 241
On the evening of 21 October 1953, with rehearsals for A Day by the Sea coming to an end, and an opening tour plan for the following week, John was arrested in a public laboratory in Chelsea for soliciting. 243
What Coward was to call “that deafening Kinsey Report” intersexuality had just been published in America, thereby giving an eager British press some legitimate excuse, however hazy, to put sex at the top of their headline agenda. 244
There was a certain irony in the fact that John played his first post trial performance at Liverpool, since it was there, just after the war, that Alec Guinness, while a member of the local rep, was himself picked up for homosexual soliciting. This never came out in Guinness's lifetime, because, unlike John, he did remain alert enough to give the police a totally false name…250
Peter Wildeblood, who had been charged with Lord Montagu, wrote a memoir called Against the Law soon after his release from jail, reminding readers that “in most other countries, the behaviour of consenting adults and private is now considered a matter for themselves alone. Britain and America are almost the only countries left in which such behaviour constitutes and offence…. Most people, if they were asked to define the crime of Oscar Wilde, would still imagine that he was in an effeminate poseur who lusted after small boys, whereas in fact he was a married man with two children who was found guilty of homosexual acts committed in private with male prostitute whom he certainly did not corrupt, and who lied on to clear themselves of other charges…. The prosecution never attempted to prove that he had done any harm by his actions. 256-257
The Sunday times of 28 March 1954, less than six months after Gielgud’s arrest, published an editorial which read, in part: “the case for the reform of the law as to act committed in private between adult adults is very strong. The case for an authoritative enquiry into it is overwhelming.” 259-260
Soon after the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution…260
As Richardson recalled: John is, quite simply, the nicest, most human after I've ever worked with. And together with Jack Nicholson, the most intelligent. John adores the theatre, theatre gossip, actors, actresses-he is steeped in them-but he equally adores books, poetry, Music, films and travel. 324
fifty-minute BBC television interview to Derek Hart for the Great Acting series. 333
country house at Wotton Underwood, just outside Aylesbury…340
play, Forty Years On….346
Kenneth Tynan, the greatest theatre critic of this mid-century period, and the one luck enough to be writing about this amazing generation in its prime, once suggested the following analogy: "you have to imagine the English stage as a vast chasm, with two great cliffs either side towering above a raging torrent. Olivier gets from one side to side in one great animal leap; Geilgud goes over on a tightrope, parasol elegantly held aloft, well down there in the rappers you can just discern Redgrave, swimming frantically against the tide.” 2
Gielgud spent his ninety sixth birthday in April 2000 working with Harold Pinter and David Mamet on a play by Samuel Beckett. He died peacefully on a Sunday afternoon, at home, barely a month later, and only then was the sound of what Alec Guinness once called ‘the silver trumpet muffled in silk’ silence for the first and last time, just three months before Alec himself died at 86….3
Arthur John Gielgud was born on 14 April 1904 at 7 Gledhow Gardens in South Kensington…5
1904 also saw the birth of J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and it is tempting to see the real life Gielguds has counterparts to the Darling family-bohemian, eccentric, sometimes short of ready cash, but always individually and collectively fascinating, precisely because they were an extraordinary family in an apparently very ordinary London Street, with John has the perennially youthful, starry Peter and his father as the recalcitrant Mr.Darling. 7
Both Coward and John were also now taken up by the wealthy Lord Latham, a stage struck homosexual aristocrat who is to spend most of his inheritance putting money into cowards plays and giving country house parties of extraordinary extravagance, at which foot men would welcome the west end guess by pouring perfume into heated spoons to fill the hall with a thick scent. 46
At this time, far more evidently than later, there were essentially two British theatres: that of the commercial London and an all important touring circuit; and that of small club theatres and Sunday societies and university venues like Fagan’s, or summer festivals like Stratford’s where either classic Shakespeare or revolutionary check off and Epson could be experimentally staged on minimal budgets. 48-49
In Britain every year more than three hundred people were being convicted and often in prison for acts of “gross indecency”, even those taking place in the privacy of their own homes. 57
In a famous phrase of the period, you could around 1930 either join the Comintern or the Comintern and, like Guy Burgess, sometimes even both. 57
If there is a subliminal, homosexual reading of The Importance, with the idea that John Worthing's secret other life (what he calls Bunburying) maybe a metaphor for Oscars owned bisexuality, than John would have been the first to make this connection clear over the footlights. 74
…. But the picture [The Thirty Nine Steps] was swiftly hijacked from them both by Peter Lorrie, already internationally famous as the child murderer of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), and now beginning to develop a line of neurotic villains which would see him safely through to the end of his Hollywood career thirty years later. 128
After a five week regional tour, they opened at the Phoenix to rave reviews, not least for the sets created by Rex Whistler, who was very soon to be killed on active service in France. 183
Gielgud wrote… Los Angeles is really too hot for comfort, and the town is a horror of ugliness, as flat as your hand and crawling with cars. Nobody dreams of walking anywhere, and all of the shops and houses are miles apart… the local houses and gardens are very artificial and over elegant, usually imitation tutor or American colonial, and everyone looks very healthy. There is an extraordinary abundance of everything-fruit and flowers and vegetables laid out under the sky in the open air markets, but in some curious way the whole of Los Angeles looks like an Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia, which will all be taken down in a month or two and rebuild for next year…225-226
In this Summer of 1953 the most celebrated homosexual trials since of Oscar Wilde in 1895 had started with two accusations by Boy Scouts that they had been sexually assaulted over our bank holiday weekend by Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and his friend, the assistant film director Kenneth Hume. 238
Before the war, Lady Astor's son was found guilty of gross indecency with another man and sentenced to prison in 1931, well four years later the louch Labour MP Tom Driberg was charged with homosexual offences; neither of these cases was whoever reported in the press, thanks to the power of the fleet Street censorship wielded by Lady Astor and Driberg’s Great protector, Lord Beaverbrook. 241
On the evening of 21 October 1953, with rehearsals for A Day by the Sea coming to an end, and an opening tour plan for the following week, John was arrested in a public laboratory in Chelsea for soliciting. 243
What Coward was to call “that deafening Kinsey Report” intersexuality had just been published in America, thereby giving an eager British press some legitimate excuse, however hazy, to put sex at the top of their headline agenda. 244
There was a certain irony in the fact that John played his first post trial performance at Liverpool, since it was there, just after the war, that Alec Guinness, while a member of the local rep, was himself picked up for homosexual soliciting. This never came out in Guinness's lifetime, because, unlike John, he did remain alert enough to give the police a totally false name…250
Peter Wildeblood, who had been charged with Lord Montagu, wrote a memoir called Against the Law soon after his release from jail, reminding readers that “in most other countries, the behaviour of consenting adults and private is now considered a matter for themselves alone. Britain and America are almost the only countries left in which such behaviour constitutes and offence…. Most people, if they were asked to define the crime of Oscar Wilde, would still imagine that he was in an effeminate poseur who lusted after small boys, whereas in fact he was a married man with two children who was found guilty of homosexual acts committed in private with male prostitute whom he certainly did not corrupt, and who lied on to clear themselves of other charges…. The prosecution never attempted to prove that he had done any harm by his actions. 256-257
The Sunday times of 28 March 1954, less than six months after Gielgud’s arrest, published an editorial which read, in part: “the case for the reform of the law as to act committed in private between adult adults is very strong. The case for an authoritative enquiry into it is overwhelming.” 259-260
Soon after the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution…260
As Richardson recalled: John is, quite simply, the nicest, most human after I've ever worked with. And together with Jack Nicholson, the most intelligent. John adores the theatre, theatre gossip, actors, actresses-he is steeped in them-but he equally adores books, poetry, Music, films and travel. 324
fifty-minute BBC television interview to Derek Hart for the Great Acting series. 333
country house at Wotton Underwood, just outside Aylesbury…340
play, Forty Years On….346
September 22, 2011
A fascinating account of an interesting life.
July 20, 2021
This is much more heavyweight than most theatrical biographies and in a few places it seemed to drag interminably. Gielgud was obviously a 'tricky' and complex man, but this book only seems to really catch him in a few places - you end up feeling that you really know little more about the MAN than you did before you read it.
Somehow I ended up with a copy of the US edition - I am not sure how far this differs from a UK edition other than in the inevitable spelling and vocabulary in a few places. The book itself is well presented, although perhaps a few more photographs might have been welcome. My copy looks as though the pages were originally uncut - whether that has any significance I don't know.
The book details Gielgud's career in great and careful detail. I was only lucky enough to see him on stage once - at Chichester Festival Theatre in [so the book reminds me] July 1971 [coincidentally the exact time I left school for good] as Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The book also reminds me that Cleopatra was played by Anna Calder-Marshall - I had always remembered this as Amanda Barrie, but I am sure that the book must be correct
I have huge respect for Sheridan Morley as a writer and chronicler of the theatre, but on this occasion feel that his subject somehow eluded him
Somehow I ended up with a copy of the US edition - I am not sure how far this differs from a UK edition other than in the inevitable spelling and vocabulary in a few places. The book itself is well presented, although perhaps a few more photographs might have been welcome. My copy looks as though the pages were originally uncut - whether that has any significance I don't know.
The book details Gielgud's career in great and careful detail. I was only lucky enough to see him on stage once - at Chichester Festival Theatre in [so the book reminds me] July 1971 [coincidentally the exact time I left school for good] as Caesar in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The book also reminds me that Cleopatra was played by Anna Calder-Marshall - I had always remembered this as Amanda Barrie, but I am sure that the book must be correct
I have huge respect for Sheridan Morley as a writer and chronicler of the theatre, but on this occasion feel that his subject somehow eluded him
September 18, 2023
Actually 4,5 stars. What an actor ! What a HUMAN BEING !
February 22, 2024
Very good, a trawl through the life of the Best (not greatest) though I think Sir John would prefer it that way. One tiny complaint, not enough focus on his Gaffes!!
October 1, 2016
This is an exhaustively thorough book! It has hidden in here a fascinating story of an actor brilliant at many genres (Shakespeare, Restoration, modern farce). However, Gielgud became famous playing fops. (He'd often compete with Noel Coward and Ivor Novello for the same roles.) Yet, he also had to navigate or hide his homosexuality for years and years on end. Scandal wrecked his career for years; he had to keep working to reinstate his deserved reputation.
Three stars? Yes. There probably is a better book by being more brief with Gielgud's exhaustively long resume and concentrating on the larger themes. In fact, many of his productions could've been gleaned from the chronology. Then, the author could just get to how Gielgud's life changed, how his acting changed, how he fought for roles, how his acting revolutionized others' approaches, his homosexuality, the scandals, the years of struggle, his family, his personal and working relations. We don't really need a couple pages every time Gielgud accepted a touring role out to West Swampy Shropshire-Heresford, unless he had to because of the other stuff. Get to the big stuff.
Three stars? Yes. There probably is a better book by being more brief with Gielgud's exhaustively long resume and concentrating on the larger themes. In fact, many of his productions could've been gleaned from the chronology. Then, the author could just get to how Gielgud's life changed, how his acting changed, how he fought for roles, how his acting revolutionized others' approaches, his homosexuality, the scandals, the years of struggle, his family, his personal and working relations. We don't really need a couple pages every time Gielgud accepted a touring role out to West Swampy Shropshire-Heresford, unless he had to because of the other stuff. Get to the big stuff.
October 20, 2016
Always loved Johns acting within the shakespeare boundaries, still a classical actor from the 50s onwards to modern era before his passing, a great read and revealing in parts into early his youth days and his aspiring acting path.
July 23, 2012
I found this hard going. It was merely a catalogue of the productions he had either appeared in or directed. Like so many books by or about famous actors this book was a trifle boring.
March 31, 2017
An enjoyable informative and intelligent read
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews