Gielgoodies

Timothy Bateson

Richard Burton was playing Hamlet at the Old Vic, but he was very nervous and not at his best. John came round to his dressing-room afterwards, to find him stark naked. ‘I’m so sorry, Richard,’ he said. ‘Shall I come back later when you’re better — I mean when you’re dressed?’

To Vivien Leigh, after she suggested playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet for a wartime concert party: ‘Oh no, Vivien! Only a great actress can do that sort of thing.’

To Alec Guinness, then a rising young star, on meeting him in Piccadilly: ‘I can’t think why you want to play big parts. Why don’t you stick to the little people you do so well?’

Robert Lang
Olivier once invited me to dinner with Gielgud. During the meal he asked Gielgud ‘Did you ever read Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, which I played at the Royal Court?’ Gielgud said: ‘Yes I did, it was offered to me first.’ I got the impression this was news to Olivier.

Pinkie Johnson
After the read-through of The School for Scandal, John said to me: ‘Pinkie, you’re meant to be like a little ping-pong ball dancing on top of a fountain, but you’re like a slow drip of cold water.

Michael Craig

Cedric Messina was casting Shaw’s In Good King Charles’s Golden Days for television. Gielgud said to him: ‘James is such a boring part. Why don’t you offer it to Michael Craig?’

To Terence Rattigan, discussing whether he should appear in a double bill of Rattigan’s new plays: ‘They’ve seen me in so much first-rate stuff;do you really think they will like me in anything second-rate?

John McCallum
When Richard Wordsworth asked John to explain the Duke of Clarence’s lines in Richard II: ‘As in a theatre, the eyes of men/After a well-graced actor leaves the stage/Are idly bent on him that enters next,’ he replied: ‘It’s very simple, dear boy.