Gielgud played the central role many times: his 1936 New York production ran for 136 performances, leading to the accolade that he was " the finest interpreter of the role since Barrymore ".

The performance was set on a bare stage, conceived to appear like a dress rehearsal, with Burton in a black v-neck sweater, and Gielgud himself tape-recorded the voice for the Ghost ( which appeared as a looming shadow ).

Eileen Herlie repeated her role from Olivier's film version as the Queen, and the voice of Gielgud was heard as the Ghost.

The Gielgud / Burton production was also recorded complete and released on LP by Columbia Records.

John Gielgud was possibly the most famous Jack Worthing of the twentieth century, and his 1939 production was seen as a turning point in modern stagings: it quickly served as a model for later performances.

The first time I heard it mentioned was in the 1980s and I immediately consulted Sir John Gielgud whose own performance of Jack Worthing in the same play was legendary and whose knowledge of theatrical lore was encyclopaedic.

A memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields, with a final tribute read by John Gielgud.

" Suddenly, Richard Burton had fulfilled his guardian's wildest hopes and was admitted to the post-War British acting circle which included Anthony Quayle, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Hugh Griffith and Paul Scofield.

Hamlet was a challenge that both terrified and attracted him, as it was a role many of his peers in the British theatre had undertaken, including John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier.

Since Burton disliked wearing period clothing, Gielgud conceived a production in a " rehearsal " setting with a half-finished set and actors wearing their street clothes ( carefully selected while the production really was in rehearsal ).

A critically panned film he made about the life of Richard Wagner ( noted for having the only onscreen teaming of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in the same scenes ) was shown as a television miniseries in 1983 after failing to achieve a theatrical release in most countries, but Burton enjoyed a personal triumph in the American television miniseries Ellis Island in 1984, receiving a posthumous Emmy Award nomination for his final television performance.

It was both commercially and critically successful ; Moore received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor whilst Gielgud won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as Arthur's stern but compassionate manservant.

In the 1964 film adaptation he was portrayed by John Gielgud, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

* He was portrayed by John Gielgud in Richard III ( 1955 film )

An audio version was produced by the BBC starring Ralph Richardson as Captain Bluntschli and John Gielgud as Major Sergius Saranoff.

The character of Lear in the nineteenth century was often that of a frail old man from the opening scene, but Lears of the twentieth century often began the play as strong men displaying regal authority, including John Gielgud, Donald Wolfit and Donald Sinden.

The production was considered one of the highlights of a remarkable Stratford season, and led to Gielgud ( who had done little film work to that time ) playing Cassius in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1953 film version.

Many years later, after he had gone to Hollywood and become a film star, Gielgud was to quip: " He was a great influence on me.

The play had limited popularity in the early twentieth century, but John Gielgud exploded onto the world's theatrical consciousness, through his performance as Richard at the Old Vic Theatre in 1929, returning to the character in 1937 and 1953 in what ultimately was considered as the definitive performance of the role.

And when it transferred to the Gielgud Theatre in London, Charles Spencer reviewing for the Daily Telegraph pronounced it the best Macbeth he had ever seen.

The miniseries was nominated for Emmy Awards for best actor ( John Gielgud ), actress ( Jane Seymour ) and supporting actress ( Polly Bergen ).

Olivier's performance won him an engagement as the leading man of the Old Vic Theatre the following season, starting his career as a classical actor, but he was said to have resented Gielgud's direction and developed a wary relationship with Gielgud which resulted in Olivier turning down Gielgud's request to play the Chorus in Olivier's film of Henry V and later doing his best to block Gielgud from appearing at the Royal National Theatre when Olivier was its director.

It has always been, however, for his Shakespearean work that Gielgud has been best known.

She is best known for her roles as Lorraine Prescott on the CBS soap opera Falcon Crest from ( 1984 – 1985 ), the stuck-up and popular Benny Hanson in the comedy film Pretty in Pink ( 1986 ), Mary-John Lovejoy in ' The Lost Colony ' episode of Lovejoy ( co-starring with John Gielgud and Ian McShane ), and Ellen Tigh on the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica.

Spacey is well known in Hollywood for his impressions as when he appeared on Inside the Actors Studio he imitated, at host James Lipton's request: James Stewart, Johnny Carson, Katharine Hepburn, Clint Eastwood, John Gielgud, Marlon Brando, Christopher Walken, Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon.

The organization is known for its aggressive media campaigns, combined with a solid base of celebrity support — Pamela Anderson, Drew Barrymore, Alec Baldwin, John Gielgud, Bill Maher, Stella McCartney, and Alicia Silverstone have all appeared in PETA ads.

In the National Theatre Willcox was known as " The Animal ", the nickname John Gielgud gave her after she with a girlfriend " discovered you could have a backwards wheelchair race " and she wheeled herself " into John's private parts ".

* Chez Nous ( Globe Theatre, now known as the Gielgud Theatre 1974 )

For BBC Radio 3 he wrote a series of monologues entitled Barnes's People, for which he attracted a large number of well known actors: Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness, Peggy Ashcroft, Judi Dench, and Ian McKellen.

* The Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, was known as the Globe from 1909 to 1995.

Gielgud also directed, produced and acted in the 1948 Broadway production whose cast won a special Tony Award for " Outstanding Foreign Company ".

In the years of his marriage to Sybil, Burton appeared in the West End in a highly successful production of The Lady's Not for Burning, alongside Sir John Gielgud and Claire Bloom, in both the London and NewYork productions.

She later co-starred in Arthur ( 1981 ), starring with Dudley Moore ( in the title role ) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.

Notable more recent productions of Measure for Measure are Charles Laughton as Angelo at the Old Vic Theatre in 1933, Peter Brook's 1950 staging at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with John Gielgud as Angelo, and a 1976 New York Shakespeare Festival production featuring Meryl Streep as Isabella and John Cazale as Angelo.

Richard of Bordeaux was particularly successful, running for fourteen months and making a household name of its young leading man and director, John Gielgud.

Other stage work at this time included The Night of the Ball ( New Theatre, 1955 ), the new Robert Bolt play Flowering Cherry ( Haymarket, 1958, Broadway, 1959 ), Toys in the Attic ( Piccadilly, 1960 ), The Wings of the Dove ( Lyric, 1963 ), A Measure of Cruelty ( Birmingham Repertory, 1965 ), A Present for the Past ( Edinburgh, 1966 ), The Sacred Flame ( Duke of York's Theatre, 1967 ) with Gladys Cooper, The Battle of Shrivings ( Lyric, 1970 ) with John Gielgud and Lies ( Albery, 1975 ).

After leaving the Rank Organisation in the early 1960s, Bogarde abandoned his heart-throb image for more challenging parts, such as barrister Melville Farr in Victim ( 1961 ), directed by Basil Dearden ; decadent valet Hugo Barrett in The Servant ( 1963 ), which garnered him a BAFTA Award, directed by Joseph Losey and written by Harold Pinter ; The Mind Benders ( 1963 ), a film ahead of its times in which Bogarde plays an Oxford professor conducting sensory deprivation experiments at Oxford University ( precursor to Altered States ( 1980 )); the anti-war film King & Country ( 1964 ), playing an army lawyer reluctantly defending deserter Tom Courtenay, directed by Joseph Losey ; a television broadcaster-writer Robert Gold in Darling ( 1965 ), for which Bogarde won a second BAFTA Award, directed by John Schlesinger ; Stephen, a bored Oxford University professor, in Losey's Accident, ( 1967 ) also written by Pinter ; Our Mother's House ( 1967 ), an off-beat film-noir directed by Jack Clayton in which Bogarde plays an n ' er do well father who descends upon " his " seven children on the death of their mother, British entry at the Venice Film Festival ; German industrialist Frederick Bruckmann in Luchino Visconti's La Caduta degli dei, The Damned ( 1969 ) co-starring Ingrid Thulin ; as ex-Nazi, Max Aldorfer, in the chilling and controversial Il Portiere di notte, The Night Porter ( 1974 ), co-starring Charlotte Rampling, directed by Liliana Cavani ; and most notably, as Gustav von Aschenbach in Morte a Venezia, Death in Venice ( 1971 ), also directed by Visconti ; as Claude, the lawyer son of a dying, drunken writer ( John Gielgud ) in the well-received, multi-dimensional French film Providence ( 1977 ), directed by Alain Resnais ; as industrialist Hermann Hermann who descends into madness in Despair ( 1978 ) directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder ; and as Daddy in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgie, ( aka These Foolish Things ) ( 1991 ), co-starring Jane Birkin as his daughter, Bogarde's final film role.

) ( 1962 ), playing sadistic Lieutenant Scott-Padget, co-starring Sir Alec Guinness ; I Could Go On Singing ( 1963 ), co-starring Judy Garland in her final screen role ; Hot Enough for June, ( aka " Agent 8¾ ") ( 1964 ), a James Bond-type spy spoof co-starring Robert Morley ; Modesty Blaise ( 1966 ), a campy spy send-up playing archvillain Gabriel opposite Monica Vitti and Terence Stamp and directed by Joseph Losey ; The Fixer ( 1968 ), based on Bernard Malamud's novel, co-starring Alan Bates ; Sebastian ( 1968 ), as Sebastian, a mathematician working on code decryption, who falls in love with Susannah York, a decrypter in the all-female decoding office he heads for British Intelligence, also co-starring Sir John Gielgud, and Lilli Palmer, co-produced by Michael Powell ; Oh!

In 1923 John Gielgud, who would later become President and first Honorary Fellow of RADA, studied at the Academy for a year.

In his later years he was celebrated for his theatre work with his old friend John Gielgud.

His Old Vic roles included Caliban to the Prospero of John Gielgud, and Prince Hal to Gielgud's Hotspur, beginning a professional association and friendship that lasted for five decades.