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

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.

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.

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.

Encouraged by this success, Shaffer continued to write and established his reputation as a playwright in 1958, with the production of Five Finger Exercise, which opened in London under the direction of John Gielgud and won the Evening Standard Drama Award.

John Gielgud won Best Supporting Actor and the theme song won Best Original Song.

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

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.

But Gielgud was best known for directing productions in which he also starred, including his greatest commercial success Richard of Bordeaux ( 1933 ), his definitive production of The Importance of Being Earnest ( 1939, 1942, 1947 ), Medea with Judith Anderson's Tony Award-winning performance of the title role with Gielgud supporting her as Jason ( 1947 ), The Lady's Not for Burning ( 1949 ) that won Richard Burton his first notoriety as an actor, and Ivanov ( 1965 ).

It also won two BAFTA awards for Best British Actor ( John Gielgud ) and Best Foreign Actor

South Pavilion, the former home of actor John Gielgud, was bought by Tony and Cherie Blair for £ 4m, in 2008.

The same team of Pat Sandys, Tony Wharmby and Jack Williams worked on the production which again starred John Gielgud and James Warwick.

He was cast as Richard Nixon in Peter Morgan's Frost / Nixon, which received enthusiastic reviews during a run at the Donmar Warehouse and Gielgud Theatre in London before moving to New York's Bernard B. Jacobs Theater in April 2007, culminating in Langella's third Tony Award.

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.

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

He began his career at The Observer of London, where his interviews with numerous cultural figures ( including Graham Greene, Rudolf Nureyev, Henry Moore, Artur Rubinstein, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson ) received a British Press Award.

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.

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 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.

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 ).

) ( 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.

* 1950: John Gielgud played Cassius at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Michael Langham and Anthony Quayle.

After Hillside Preparatory School in Godalming, Surrey, and Westminster School, where he gained a King's Scholarship, Gielgud trained briefly at RADA and understudied Noël Coward in Coward's The Vortex at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead under the direction of Norman MacDermott ( 1890 – 1977 ).

* John Gielgud played Charles Surface in a legendary season at the Queens Theatre in 1937 and repeated the role under his own direction in a 1963 Broadway production.

With her debut in talkies only moderately successful, she acted on the stage for the most part in the 1930s and early 1940s, appearing in roles as varied as Ophelia in Guthrie McClintic's landmark 1936 production of Hamlet ( with John Gielgud and Judith Anderson ) and Marguerite in a limited run of La Dame aux Camélias.

It starred playwright and Beckett enthusiast Harold Pinter as the Director, and featured the last on-camera appearance of famed British actor, John Gielgud as the Protagonist ( he would die only a few weeks later ).

Gielgud was married five times, the first in 1921 while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, where he married an eighteen year-old schoolgirl, whose name is recorded only as ' Tata ', who was a student at Cheltenham Ladies College.

Even John Gielgud was heard, in his famous role of Hamlet, in an expanded 90-minute broadcast with Dorothy McGuire as Ophelia. Fredric March was also heard in his only performance as Cyrano de Bergerac, a role he played neither onstage or onscreen.

Despite the feuding, production continued with only minimal disruption, thanks to what Gielgud called, " Mankiewicz's consummate tact that kept us together as a working unit.

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.

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.

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

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.

* Sir John Gielgud narrated a second version in 1996, this time performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Andrea Licata ( Intersound Recordings ).

By this time Gielgud was in conflict with junior colleagues in the drama department ; unlike them he was unable to appreciate the work of playwrights such as Harold Pinter.

It was directed by the BBC's head of radio drama at the time, Val Gielgud, and produced by Lance Sieveking.

However, her time there was more noted for a succession of Shakespearian roles ( the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the Queen in Richard II, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia in Julius Caesar ), including some alongside John Gielgud ( Rosalind in As You Like It, Lady Macbeth in Macbeth, and Queen Gertrude in Hamlet ).

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.

In 2008 Stott starred in another West End production of a Reza play, this time God of Carnage, alongside Tamsin Greig, Janet McTeer and Ralph Fiennes at the Gielgud Theatre.