‘He embodies another time, another world’

Twenty years after John Gielgud’s death, Julie Kavanagh recalls her friendship with one of the giants of British theatre

One afternoon in the summer of 1997, I found a note on my desk in the magazine office where I worked:

“John Gielgud would like you to ring, please.”

I knew exactly why: the 93-yearold Gielgud was going to invite me to lunch. Four months earlier I’d had a letter from Paul Anstee, the actor’s former partner, longstanding friend and executor. Gielgud had lent him my biography of Frederick Ashton and Anstee wanted me to make Sir John my next subject. “I have photographs galore,” Anstee told me. “Letters and diaries to help with dates if anything comes of it all.”

It was incredibly tempting. I’d already been approached by the Nureyev Foundation to write the dancer’s authorised life, but had not yet made up my mind. Tackling Nureyev made more sense: as a ballet student I’d seen him at his greatest, whereas I knew Gielgud only through his film and television appearances – the roguishly malevolent father in Brideshead Revisited, his Oscar-winning performance as a smutty-mouthed butler in Arthur, and the inspiring music professor in Shine.

On the other hand, since the deaths of Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, Gielgud’s mystique as the last survivor of the fabled trinity of classical actors had grown; to one young actor I knew he was “a monument”, to another, “the living embodiment of another time, another world”. Nureyev had died recently, but Gielgud, despite his age, was more alert than ever, Anstee said, and brimming over with mischievous reminiscences. I wrote back to Anstee, saying that

I’d love to accept his invitation to spend an afternoon at his house in Sussex.

In 1953, at the age of 25, Anstee, an aspiring actor turned stage designer with a scrubbed, sunny face, had been introduced to Gielgud at a dress rehearsal and they soon became lovers. “It was bad for John’s reputation to be seen with a pretty boy,” Anstee told me, so when they travelled they took along Gielgud’s sister, or else stayed with like-minded friends such as Noël Coward, Truman Capote or Somerset Maugham.

In the autumn of 1953 Gielgud was involved in a scandal that almost put an end to his career. His arrest for soliciting in a Chelsea “cottage” led to such a savage public backlash and witch-hunt that Anstee destroyed Gielgud’s letters out of fear. So scarring was the experience that Gielgud still refused to allow any mention of his “troubles” in print. This, Anstee said, would be a major obstacle in persuading him to co-operate on a

From Bosie to Brando, he knew them all, and told me ribald stories in his famous voix d’or