Sir John Gielgud, who has died aged 96, was the peerless verse speaker of 450 years of British theatre and one of its two greatest Shakespearean performers. His end came "simply of old age" at his home near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, north of London on Sunday, 79 years after his first London stage appearance.
His last performance, filmed just weeks ago, was for Samuel Beckett's play Catastrophe, part of a marathon Channel Four and RTE-funded project to film all the playwright's works.
Yesterday's tributes to the actor were suffused with awe and regret at the passing of an unprecedently long-active genius, the last of a group of titanic actors who graced theatres for much of the 20th century.
The British National Theatre director, Trevor Nunn, and the actor Corin Redgrave (son of the actor Michael Redgrave and brother of Vanessa Redgrave) reached for epitaphs from Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to do him justice.
Nunn said: "There's a great spirit gone." Redgrave - whose father, Sir Michael, was deeply influenced by Gielgud - said: "The odds is gone/ And there is nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon."
Immediate reaction to the news was more profound than for his great contemporary and lifelong rival Lord [Lawrence] Olivier's death 11 years ago.
As recently as the 1990s, he played an outstanding radio Hamlet, a part he first played on stage in the 1920s in what a critic then called "the highwater mark of acting in our time".
His former agent Laurence Evans, who also represented Olivier and the fellow British acting great Sir Ralph Richardson, said: "I suppose that, of the three, Sir John was really the greatest actor."
The stage director Peter Brook said that comparisons "could not matter less. His one aim was to reach the highest level of quality. And the word went very deep. It was in his blood. This very endearing, lovable man touched everyone by this purity in him, which was reflected in his work."
The playwright Christopher Fry (92) said the magnificence of Gielgud's verse speaking as Richard II in 1929 "released something in me" which helped him write plays. "Olivier was the greater comedian but Gielgud was greater as a tragic actor."
Ms Cicely Berry, the Royal Shakespeare Company's voice director, said: "We live in an age when we talk minimally to each other. We have television on and the internet. Yet we still have these big feelings inside us. There is something in us which responds to cadence and makes us want to listen.
"He had the gift of entering into language and taking us into another world."
Michael Billington adds: Everyone acknowledges John Gielgud was a great actor. But his contribution to modern British theatre has been seriously underrated. As a producer, he was a radical visionary, who, long before the era of subsidy, saw the need for semipermanent classical companies.
Gielgud's greatest legacy was his now largely forgotten work as an actor-manager in the 1930s and 1940s. At a time when West End theatre was relentlessly frivolous and ephemeral, Gielgud had the vision and foresight to create classical companies. At the New Theatre in 1935, where he and Olivier famously alternated as Romeo and Mercutio, at the Queen's Theatre in 1937-8 and at the Haymarket in 1944, he laid the foundations for post-war British theatre.
Gielgud presented a classical repertory comprising Shakespeare, Congreve, Sheridan and Chekhov. He engaged the design team of Motley to give the productions visual coherence. And he surrounded himself with the rising generation of actors, including Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, George Devine, Anthony Quayle, and Glen Byam Shaw.
But it was Gielgud who erected a signpost to the future: one that led to the founding of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and the British National Theatre.
My abiding impression of Gielgud was of his irrepressible youthfulness. He would talk, if pressed, about the past. But his racing mind was more interested in the present and future.
Gielgud was often seen as the aristocratic figurehead of British acting embodying traditional values: in my view his greatness, as both actor and manager, lay in his radically restless temperament, his visionary belief in companies, and his astonishing ability to recreate himself from one generation to the next.