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John Gielgud, from the neck up
NOTHING is more legendary than the work of a legendary stage actor, since it is all but impossible to leave behind a permanent record of the live performances that made his reputation. And because theatrical acting usually looks and sounds overemphatic, at times grotesquely so, when filmed and viewed on a screen, many of the most storied stage actors have been reluctant to make movies or appear on TV. As a result, such once celebrated artists of the past as Katharine Cornell, Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, and Laurette Taylor are now known for the most part only as names in books.
To be sure, some of the great stage actors of the 20th century made sustained attempts to master the more naturalistic technique of screen acting and establish parallel careers in film. One of them, Laurence Olivier, took the medium seriously enough that he turned himself into a director in order to adapt such Shakespeare plays as Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948) for the screen, in the process documenting his own much admired performances. Olivier's contemporaries, however, typically settled for supporting roles, saving their best efforts for the stage. It is still uncommon for a major stage actor to appear in starring film roles that fully convey his power and range, the way Alec Guinness did in the 1940s and 50s.
Rarely, though, has there been so sharp a discontinuity between the stage and film careers of a classical actor as in the case of John Gielgud. Throughout his extraordinarily long career (he made his professional stage debut in 1921 and his last TV appearance a month before his death in 2000), Gielgud was generally regarded as the greatest of English-speaking classical actors. Best known for his Shakespeare roles, he also had success in such modern plays as Christopher Fry's The Lady's Not for Burning (1949) and Harold Pinter's No Man's Land (1975). He was, however, notoriously "camerashy" (his word) and so made only one movie of any importance, Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936), in the first half of his life. He filmed only one of his key classical roles, that of Cassius in Julius Caesar (1953, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz).'
It was not until the late...