THAT famously mellifluous, lilting, honeyed voice. The Prince of Players is undeniably old now - an extraordinary 92 and still counting - but his voice is the same, only quieter.
"I have nothing to do but work," whispers Sir John Gielgud, in the tones Sir Alec Guinness famously described as "a silver trumpet muffled in silk". "I have few friends left. That's the awful thing about being old."
Pity the ageing actor. To be famous - not just famous, indeed, but the greatest surviving actor of your generation - and still to yearn to act . . . that must be exquisite agony. Once, audiences thrilled to Sir John's Hamlet and Lear, his Romeo Oedipus and Raskolnikov. Now, he sits in the living room of his loftily exquisite 17th-century Buckinghamshire home, and ponders the actor's perennial obsession: work.
In the enormous room, sitting in an enormous Sofia, his slight figure folds up and almost disappears. He is playing the elder actor's end game - and he is also playing it out on film. Gielgud no longer treads the boards - he gave up theatre as late as 1988 - but he does accept short, tempting scenes in TV productions and feature films. The roles he plays "have to have something which appeals to me: either a couple of good lines or a good entrance or exit".
His latest dramatic whistle-stop is Shine, in which he plays a once great pianist who tutors David Helfgott's audacious talent. But "I get very tired," the actor Confesses. "I have to ration myself and work only Certain hours. They're always very good about that."
The "couple of lines" that attracted him to Shine are conceivably his character's reminiscences about performing Rachmaninov for Rachmaninov - "He said he could hear himself in my playing: he said it touched his soul." Gielgud is sprightly in the role, but the moment recalls Sir Andrew Agueeheek's "I was adored once, too". A sudden window opens on the character's soul.
So, what does he think of the label, Britain's Greatest Actor? His reaction is a sudden gesture of impatience: "Oh, that old . . ." He is terrified of becoming "too respected", he explains, because "they don't tell you when you are bad".
He genuinely seems to feel a faintly paranoid fear of being denied the truth about his performances. Status serves only to exacerbate that fear. His other fear, understandably, is of mortality. Gielgud hates to be seen to be old and he loathes birthday Celebrations. He names Paul Scofield and Guinness as his only surviving contemporaries. But he Can be wry about the inevitable. Some recent, unflattering photographs showed him being wheelchaired on to a film set, he recalls that they gave his agent "several anxious moments". As to his death: "Sometimes I think people see it as an indecent race between myself, the Pope and Boris Yeltsin."
Gielgud's refuge sits in precise, formal gardens. A fountain is Crammed with enormous koi carp. There are three loud, alert Tibetan terriers on the premises. For more than 20 years, he has shared this elegant retreat with his Companion, Martin Hensler, who refers in familiar-deferential style to "Gielgud".
Hensler prepares a simple but delicious lunch, pours the wine, and interjects now and again to illustrate Gielgud's remarks. In his unplaccably middle-European accent he gently ribs the actor about the time he turned down a lengthy shoot: "Six weeks? I cannot! I am half dead!"
Gielgud himself has never made any secret of being gay, though he mistrusts the militancy of someone like the late Derek Jarman. (Virtually the only unkind remark that passes his lips in two hours concerns "that awful garden" of Jarman's on Komney Marsh.)
BUT back to the beginning. The Grand Old Man first appeared on stage at the Old Vie, in 1921: "I was lucky, I got such a chance. Playing Shakespeare at the Vic, in a very superficial way, I learned to project. In films, I learned patience. Films are a terrible Chore. You spend half your life in a Caravan. They actually pay you for your time." It takes 15 years to make an actor, he claims, and the process involves learning to relax.
"I remember doing The Cherry orchard in rep at the Oxford Playhouse in 1933, and it suddenly felt as though I was in the story, not acting in a play at all. That's what it's all about: it's more important to belong to the world of the play than to play to the audience.
"I was very self-conscious as a young man; I realised always that the camera was very, very revealing of me. It can show whatever it wants to show, and it isn't always what you think you're doing as an actor. I had to get used to that."
He liked filming, he says, "mainly because I could see the back of my head, and how I walked, and things that otherwise I would only see at the tailor's. Which was a kind of help to one's mannerisms." He is prosaic in his judgment of the great triumvirate of theatrical knights - Gielgud, Olivier, Richardson - and of his place in it. "We each had our own success, and we worked together enough to cannon out each other. We three had quite different talents, and we capitalized on them."
In his case, he adds, "I always thought that I was rather good at playing appalling prigs. He played Clarence to Olivier's famous "crookback Dick". Yet, by dint of surviving longer, it is Gielgud who seems the more enduring on screen. "With Olivier I always had a curious love-hate relationship," he says. "He was very generous to me; I wasn't so generous in return. His physical authority I always envied. He took tremendous pains at everything. And, of course, he had great managerial ambition."
So why the friction? "He always said I was too self-consciously poetic, which was perfectly true. I think he saw through me very easily. He was very perceptive. We hardly ever worked together, but when we did were never happily in harness."
Richardson, though, was different. The time the two of them swapped Harold Pinter's bizarre banter in No Man's Land was the happiest of his life. Richardson was "a wonderful acting partner ... I miss him very much. He had a sort of level madness that was very endearing."
Nowadays, Gielgud is staggered by the way strangers become stars overnight. He cannot easily recall young actors to praise. He seldom goes to the theatre; there is very little he wants to see. "I've not directed a play for 15, 20 years, so I don't know what to expect. You sec. in my time I knew all the actors in the West End. I'd worked with most of them. Everything now is back to front, East to West. You don't know where anything's going."
Even when he did No Man's Lanai and, earlier, David Storey's Home - both with Richardson - he "wouldn't have known what to do" without the directors, Peter Hall and Lindsay Anderson. This diffidence is characteristic. Gielgud admits he was "a bit bewildered" by Alain Resnais's extraordinary 1977 film Providence, and during the filming of Prospero's Books, Peter Greenaway's 1991 version of The Tempest, which involved much naked wallowing in freezing water, "I never liked to interfere or ask questions, or even say "What do you mean by that?" because I thought it was so brave of him [Greenaway] to take on the project at all.
"I fed that as an actor, you should be at the mercy of the director. I've never worked with any of the shouting, screaming kind of directors. I've always been very lucky." Of his cameo in Scott Hicks's Shine he muses: "I wonder why they suddenly chose me?"
It is as though he was lucky to get it. He has a coveted role as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor coming up, but generally, "I don't much care whether I play leading parts or small parts now. As long as I work. I'm getting better at reading scripts. Even so, I've made mistakes."
Prospero with his books; the hard-drinking, sleeplessly self-absorbed author in Providence, the playfully cruel Ryder senior in the 1981 TV version of Brideshead Revisited - these are the three screen roles of which Gielgud is most proud. I point out that these characters are remote and manipulative. Do they reflect their creator?
"I suppose so," he concedes. "I try not to examine myself too much. I've just read Christopher Isherwood's diaries, and it's so boring reading about his inner self - Krishnamurti and dope. I thought actors were self-centred, but he's far worse, an absolute mania for examining."
Yet there must be a middle way?
"Well, certainty actors are nearly always self-centred. The greatest ones - Edith Evans, say - are some of the most self-centred people I ever met." There is something extraordinary about Gielgud, and something particularly extraordinary about the attraction he inspires. It is hard to believe he is in many ways not exactly as he seems on the surface: a hospitable, generous personality tempered by a slightly lofty, patrician quality.
There are worse ways to relate to your fellows. "Two wars have passed me by, and so many dramas and complications of every kind and I've been amazingly lucky. I've been amazingly varied in my chances. I think a lot of my mistakes have been, thankfully, forgotten. But I think you can brood on them all the time - worry about them too much. It's all over now."
He tried, he says, to forestall a lot of things that were said about him. "But you can't stop what people say about you." I put it to him, as honestly as I can, that he is not just admired, but loved. There is silence.
"It's not for you to say?" I suggest, gently.
That voice speaks the words more quietly than I can convey. "It's not for me to say."