Sir John Gielgud, who died on May 21st aged 96, was a master of acting in an age of great English actors.
He was the first classical actor of his generation to discard antique modes of Shakespearean interpretation and performance. His Hamlet, Richard II, Leontes, Angelo, Lear and Prospero were acclaimed as thrilling recoveries and discoveries of roles on which the dreariness of convention had long since settled.
After hesitations and doubts, he rode the surges of the new wave theatre, and revealed himself a remarkable character actor in the plays of Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett and Charles Wood.
He was not, however, just the starriest actor for high-strung, tragic heroes half in love with painful suffering, deploying that famous tenor voice which Alec Guinness once apostrophised as being "like a silver trumpet muffled in silk". He set new standards in the playing of the artificial high comedy of Congreve, Wilde and Sheridan, to which he brought the breath of naturalness.
As a source of inspiration and influence on his profession, he was unrivalled by any actor in his time except for Laurence Olivier. For, in youth and middle age alike, he was a modern pioneer seeking to fulfil the actor's dream of working in a permanent ensemble, performing classic plays of high quality, where profit was neither motive nor stimulus.
The other astonishing aspect of his career, which spanned more than 75 years, lay in his ability to recreate and extend himself as fashion and circumstance demanded. He was socially and politically conservative. As a raconteur and conversationalist, scattering his indiscretions and gossip with gay abandon, he may have been the acme of unconventionality. But, theatrically speaking, the shock of the new often shocked him. Since he was also a restless seeker, he learned to rise above the prejudice of his first impressions and to cast aside hidebound convictions.
In the 1950s, when the new wave of dramatists broke excitedly upon the London theatre, when Brecht and theatre of the absurd threatened the hold of the upper middle-class drawing-room comedy and the regimen of the well-made play, John Gielgud was, at first, left bothered and bewildered. By the early 1960s, he was beginning to look a thoroughly traditional figure.
This isolation from the new did not, however, last that long. John Gielgud adjusted, adapted and learned.
When his ability to memorise parts for the theatre began to falter in his mid-70s, he turned to the world of film. He adapted and fashioned a late career - notably as the conductor-hero of Alain Resnais's Providence (1977), and an ancient, naked Prospero in Peter Greenaway's astonishing version of The Tempest, Prospero's Books (1991).
He delighted in the suave malice of the narrator's father in the television version of Brideshead Revisited (1981). He won an Oscar for his performance as Dudley Moore's butler in the Hollywood comedy Arthur (1980).
The essential John Gielgud did not greatly change from first maturity to old age - he was all quick-silver and mercurial intelligence. He may have been born into the heart of the conventional upper middle classes of Edwardian England, but this third child of an Edwardian stockbroker had the theatre in his blood. Ellen Terry, Irving's leading lady, was a great aunt. His grandmother, Kate, played Cordelia at 14 and became an instant star.
Some have argued that his acting and looks bore no trace of his Terry ancestors. They suggest that his style bears the imprint of his father's Lithuanian forebears and of his thespian Polish great-grandparents, who were renowned for their Shakespearian acting. Even in his 30s - and remarkable for his great, domed forehead and aquiline nose - he did not look English. Educated at Westminster school, he was stage-struck in childhood, during which the adjectives "nervous, frail and sensitive" were attached to him. He played no school games and walked in stiff self-consciousness - "like a cat with rickets", said one of his first drama teachers. In a theatre which celebrated bluff maleness and matter-of-fact understatement in its leading actors, he seemed the man least likely to take the West End theatre at all, let alone by storm.
When he played his first leading role in London, as Romeo to Gwen Ffrancgon Davies's Juliet in 1924, the critics were loud in their scorn. It may have been his Slavic heritage that saved him from sinking after this. For it was in a then almost unknown Anton Chekhov play that he made his name. "Perfection itself", said James Agate, the most influential critic of the period, about his Trofimov, the young revolutionary in The Cherry Orchard.
So it was that the 25-year-old John Gielgud arrived at the Old Vic at the end of the 1920s as leading man - and walked almost straight into theatrical history.
The ability to ignore set-back and disappointment, to rise to new challenges, characterised the last 20 years of his life in the theatre. In 1985 he came to Ireland to act in a film adaptation of Molly Keane's novel, Time After Time, for the BBC. He played the role of Jasper, an eccentric Anglo-Irish anti-hero. Under the headline "Faded tweeds in Wicklow for Gielgud", The Irish Times revealed that the writer and actor were both aged 81 and had first met in Tipperary in 1930, when they survived the hunting season.
In an interview during filming in Co Wicklow, he admitted to having made the mistake in the 1950s of saying "no good would come of playing Beckett". Ironically, his final acting role was a silent part in Catastrophe, one of 19 film versions of Beckett's plays, last month. He kept working until the end.
John Gielgud served the stage unstintingly. No actor was more adored in his time. Indiscreet, self-deprecating, avid for gossip, he strode poker-packed, immaculately dressed, witty, generous and endearing, through thousands of private lives. To listen to him talk in uncensored private was to enjoy a one-man festival of sharp, quaint indiscretions. All his yesterdays seemed to have been such fun. He lived for 40 years with Martin Hensler, and when Martin died a little while ago, the life-force seemed to drain away from him.
Sir Arthur John Gielgud: born 1904; died, May 2000