Gielgud's Letters

The publication of the actor's letters reveals the actor's attempts to disguise his private life in a period when homosexuality was illegal and, because Gielgud lived to the age of 96, cover seven decades of theatre history.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

MARK LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, actors, it's rumoured, like getting fan letters, but what was he like at sending them?

TOM PAULIN:
Well, this is a love letter: "I am utterly devoted to you, admire you both for your personal sweetness, your pride, your cleverness and your physical beauty. I adore being with you". Is this a love letter? No, it's a fan letter! Of course, what I have always disliked about Guilgud, aside from the fact that he acted from the neck up, is that voice. I mean, that extraordinary bogus, decadent, heritage voice, which alibies nothing, Tennysonian voice, the absolute spiritual emptiness. He is sort of Ming dynasty heritage, Edwardian. Absolutely unspeakable emotional emptiness at the non-existent core of this. You know... monstrous figure!

LAWSON:
I think at this point, I had better ask, is there an actor in the house?! Kwame?

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
Yes! What I found lovely actually was hearing how articulate he was, or seeing - reading how articulate he was.

PAULIN:
You don't have to use words like 'charming' and 'awfully good' that he uses all the time.

KWEI-ARMAH:
I did think it was slightly long, too many letters for me, to be honest. But what I found myself interested in was not all of the kind of homosexuality stuff, but more hearing him recall the opening nights of historic and great plays and masterpieces, and speaking about Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson and hating Wolfit. Those are the things that really grabbed me.

LAWSON:
Although, you see I though because we are taken into these first nights, but he is not analytical, is he? He says, "I have been sent this fantastic play, or have seen this awful play", and he never tells you why he thinks they are good or bad!

KWEI-ARMAH:
Yes. He occasionally says, "The third act didn't work for me and we are going to restructure that." But no, he wasn't terribly analytical. But US terror/ disco please...

PAULIN:
Only once on the shortcomings of Olivier's acting and what was good about it, is there some kind of critical intelligence there.

WALTER:
There's one wonderful letter that he writes to an actor about how to play Romeo, which is absolutely fantastic, and that for me was the one letter in the book where you actually got an insight into what he felt about acting. He himself said in that, not obviously what you're saying, but something about how he knew how to play Romeo, but he could never play it because he didn't have the physicality for it, you know, the ability to convey it. And I thought that was really telling, it was full of self-knowledge. But it was one page in many hundreds.

KWEI-ARMAH:
He also spoke about feeling inferior to Olivier in terms of the way that he performs, and sings, and I liked hearing and reading things like that, those were nice insights.

PAULIN:
They were very few and far between

LAWSON:
But I expect we know why that is, because, I mean I am speculating here, but there are moments where you suspect you have seen where the lawyer's knife has gone in. There is a moment where he says, "I am off to make this Michael Winner film, and I hear he is a bit of a beast". And then there's no mention of the film actually at all ever again, and at one point he says "that retch Pinter", when they are in No Man's land, Pinter's play, and you never know exactly what's gone on, and I suspect there may have been rather a lot of deletions here.

WALTER:
There may have been more gossip, but it wouldn't necessarily have been in the end all that much better. For me what kind of brought the range of it alive, was I suppose, the darkness there at the heart of his life, in terms of his homosexuality. There is a lot of lightness around the homosexuality, a lot of play about it, especially in the later letters. But it's not so much the actual story of his arrest, but a few years later when he had been blackmailed in New York. You suddenly sense the weight that this intolerant society had on this kind of thing. I found this rather heart-breaking.

PAULIN:
It's got a good line there, it says: "I feel like Princess Margaret with a hangover ," that moment.

WALTER:
Yeah, wonderful. But he also says: "I feel I have only myself to blame". And then the next sentence: "what a hard, wicked world this is". And you get in that the whole sense of the way that generation of gay men felt.

PAULIN:
Yeah, but what about his own prejudices? The racial prejudice, many prejudices in many directions.

KWEI-ARMAH:
He was a man of his times. I mean in the opening section of the book, he never once called anyone who was African or black at all by their names. It was always "that nigger band" or "those wonderful coloured people", but, again, he was a man of his day.

LAWSON:
But also the mystery is to do with the sex. There is no sexuality at all in his acting, certainly the films that I saw, and yet he is getting quite an astonishing amount of sex! There is one where he is in his early 70s, and he goes to New York, and he says casually, "Oh, both of them rolled me on the floor and tried to have me" and then he says "My dear, at my age!". But it is odd because there is no connection between his sex life and his acting.

WALTER:
But if he had been able to openly express it, maybe then he would have been. If he hadn't felt that sort of weight of shame. The gossip is fun, but didn't you feel, the book is very claustrophobic in that way, he never gets out of the theatre.

LAWSON:
Oh yeah, he never refers to the outside world.

KWEI-ARMAH:
It's a companion book really. I kind of wanted to read his autobiography at the same time.