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.

In his autobiography, Gielgud states repeatedly and clearly that his father was Polish Catholic, and mentions Gelgaudiškis as being his ancestral home whence his family and their surname originated.

As he aged, Gielgud sought out distinctive new voices in the theatre, appearing in plays by Edward Albee ( Tiny Alice ), Alan Bennett ( Forty Years On ), Charles Wood ( Veterans ), Edward Bond ( Bingo, in which Gielgud played William Shakespeare ), David Storey ( Home ), and Harold Pinter ( No Man's Land ), the latter two in partnership with his old friend Ralph Richardson, but he drew the line at being offered the role of Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, saying that the play offered " nothing but loneliness and despair ".

Val Gielgud was born in London, into a theatrical family, being the brother of Sir John Gielgud ( who appeared in several of his productions ) and a great-nephew of the Victorian actress Ellen Terry.

In the 1930s, Saint-Denis had moved to London, England, where he became one of the most highly regarded stage directors of the decade, being responsible for a series of landmark productions featuring such stars of the British stage as John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Alec Guinness.

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.

Gielgud is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.

His niece Maina Gielgud is a dancer and one time artistic director of the Australian Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet.

Gielgud's brother, Val Gielgud, appeared in one of the episodes, perhaps inevitably, as the great detective's brother Mycroft.

Gielgud gave one of his final radio performances in the title role of an All Star production of King Lear in 1994 that was mounted to celebrate his 90th birthday.

He also edited the Radio Times, and even turned his hand to the detective novel: Death at Broadcasting House, co-written with Val Gielgud and published in 1931, revolves around a radio play disrupted by the murder of one of the cast.

Gielgud followed up this triumph with a legendary production of Hamlet in which he both played the title role and directed a company that included Jessica Tandy, Jack Hawkins and a young Alec Guinness in one of his first professional roles as Osric.

Maschwitz and Gielgud were close friends, and even wrote detective fiction together – Gielgud would later on go on to be responsible in whole or part for twenty-six detective / mystery novels, one short story collection, two historical novels, nineteen stage plays, four film screenplays, forty radio plays, seven non-fiction books and be the editor of a further two books.

Andrews was cast as Skinner, one of twenty schoolboys ; the role gave him the opportunity at an early age of working with Gielgud.

Under Quayle and Byam Shaw Stratford became one of the principal centres of British theatre, attracting the leading directors such as Gielgud, Peter Hall and Peter Brook.

At the time of his death, Toone was one of the last survivors of the Old Vic theatre company of the 1930s, having appeared alongside the likes of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in productions of Shakespeare.

Of his Shakespearean roles on Broadway, Cromwell played Paris, kinsman to the prince, in Romeo and Juliet ( 1935 ) starring Katharine Cornell, who also produced the play, and Maurice Evans, in the title roles ; Rosencrantz in Hamlet ( 1936 ), which was staged and produced by Guthrie McClintic ( Cornell's husband, who had been married to Estelle Winwood ), starring John Gielgud in the title role, Judith Anderson as Gertrude, and Lillian Gish as Ophelia ; and Lennox in the revival of Macbeth ( 1948 ) starring Michael Redgrave in the title role and Flora Robson as Lady Macbeth, with Julie Harris as a witch, Martin Balsam as one of the three murderers, and Beatrice Straight as Lady MacDuff.

John Gielgud, when asked who inspired him as a young actor, named Alan Aynesworth as one of his inspirations.

Many of Britain's top actors, including John Gielgud, Robert Morley and Joyce Grenfell, paid tribute at a memorial service, where 90-year-old Sybil Thorndike praised her friend's enormous talent and recalled that Rutherford had " never said anything horrid about anyone ".

The UK has had a large impact on modern cinema, producing some of the greatest actors, directors and motion pictures of all time including, Sir Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, David Lean, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn, John Gielgud, Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Vanessa Redgrave, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins and Daniel Day-Lewis.

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 ).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

* TCM Remembers 2000: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Nancy Coleman, Rose Hobart, Muriel Evans, Steve Reeves, Gwen Verdon, Francis Lederer, Nan Leslie, director Don Weis, director Roger Vadim, Joan Marsh, Billy Barty, costume designer Bill Thomas, Max Showalter, Vittorio Gassman, Marie Windsor, Craig Stevens, David Tomlinson, Richard Farnsworth, director Claude Autant-Lara, film preserver James Card, Beah Richards, Julie London, Marceline Day, Nancy Marchand, Harold Nicholas, Nils Poppe, director Joseph H. Lewis, composer George Duning, director Lewis Allen, Ann Doran, Jean Peters, editor David Bretherlen, writer Curt Siodmak, screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., Alec Guinness, Loretta Young, Jason Robards, John Gielgud, Hedy Lamarr, Claire Trevor and Walter Matthau.

" Other actors famed for their performance of Malvolio include Sir Alec Guinness, Henry Irving, E. H. Sothern, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Henry Ainley, John Gielgud, Simon Russell Beale, Maurice Evans, Ken Dodd, Richard Briers, Sir Nigel Hawthorne and Sir Derek Jacobi.