[This is the tenth in an occasional series describing
British artistes who found fame on stage or in the movies]
The career of the artiste here described was long and
eminent. Although his films brought him to a wide global audience, it is
particularly as an actor on the theatrical stage that his consummate brilliance
lay.
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| Ralph Richardson |
Sir Ralph Richardson
(1902-1983) was one of the three theatrical knights – Olivier, Gielgud and
Richardson – who brought unforgettable lustre to the British and world stage in
the 20th century. Olivier became a film star and public figure:
Gielgud was a flamboyant theatrical character: Richardson was a much more
private person yet with his own brand of oddity.
Born in Cheltenham, his father was an art teacher at
Cheltenham Girls College. When his parents separated Richardson, aged 5, stayed
with his Catholic mother while his two siblings stayed with their Quaker
father. They lived in lodgings, initially in a converted railway carriage.
Richardson was a mediocre school pupil becoming an insurance office boy until
he received a grandmother’s legacy of £500, which he said “transformed my
life”. He first went to art school, but realising he had no drawing talent, he drifted
into acting with an actor-manager’s touring company. He learnt his craft,
moving on to the Birmingham Rep in 1925 before joining The Old Vic in 1930,
then headed by John Gielgud. After an initial coolness, Richardson and Gielgud
became firm friends and confidants
until Richardson died in 1983.
 |
| Friends Gielgud and Richardson in The School for Scandal |
Richardson quickly established himself as a leading
Shakespearean actor – as Prince Hal opposite Gielgud’s Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1, as Caliban opposite
Gielgud’s Prospero in The Tempest and
as a matchless Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth
Night. These kinds of role became his stock in trade: he never convinced as
a Shakespearean hero although he tried Othello, Henry V, Brutus and Macbeth –
he somehow did not shine in such parts. Richardson was often described as a
magician, creating a theatrical coup from very little with a sixth sense of the
dramatic.
He dabbled in films in the 1930s, appearing as Bulldog Drummond (!), but he signed a
contract with mogul Alexander Korda and had a memorable role as sun-blinded
Captain Durrance in the Technicolor epic The
Four Feathers (1939). One of the high-spots of his movie career came later
in 1949 in the role of the cold and emotionally abusive Dr Sloper, father of
Olivia de Havilland, in The Heiress,
based on Washington Square by Henry
James. He was excellent in this
movie, an artistic but not a box-office triumph.
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| Capt. Durrance in The Four Feathers |
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| Dr Sloper in The Heiress |
Later Richardson was to have movie success with the David
Lean-Terence Rattigan drama The Sound
Barrier, (1952), the admired if depressing O’Neill epic Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962) and he featured as George III in
Lady Caroline Lamb (1972). Richardson was however pre-eminently a man of
the theatre.
During WW2 both Richardson and Olivier served in the Fleet
Air Arm but were honourably discharged in 1944 at the request of the Old Vic
(“granted with an alacrity which was almost hurtful”, quipped Olivier) to mount 3
seasons of plays at the New Theatre in the West End from 1944-47. Shakespeare,
Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen and others featured with Olivier and Richardson having
roles in all the plays. Several critics reckoned these 3 seasons were the
apogee of the English theatre in the 20th century. Richardson’s
Falstaff, Peer Gynt and Cyrano de Bergerac were particularly treasured. He was
knighted in 1946 to the chagrin of
Olivier, although his own knighthood followed 6 months later.
Richardson kept working until his dying day. Later triumphs
included the 1970 Home by David
Storey, where he co-starred with Gielgud as inmates of a mental home, impressed
both British and US audiences. Pinter’s No
Man’s Land, again with Gielgud, ran well in London in 1975.
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| Richardson and Gielgud in Home |
Richardson had married in 1924 the actress Kit Hewitt; sadly
she contracted encephalitis lethargica (a
type of sleeping sickness) and was an invalid for some years before her death
in 1944. Two years later he married Meriel Forbes, a comedy actress from the
Forbes-Robertson theatrical family.
Richardson was famously absent-minded and
bumbling in private and professionally. He and Lady Richardson much upset the
British Council who sponsored a goodwill tour in the 1960s by arriving late to
functions, ignoring their hosts and behaving so badly they were branded “not
for export”.
Most of Richardson’s eccentricities were harmless. He
allowed his parrots to fly about his house uncaged and he attracted the
attention of the police by loitering on a London pavement – he was taking his
pet mouse for a walk! Well into his 70s, he roared around on a powerful motor-bike.
His final movie appearance was as Lord Greystoke in Greystoke; The Legend of Tarzan, released posthumously in 1984.
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| As Lord Greystoke |
Richardson was an enigmatic personality. Greatly admired by
his peers in the acting profession and by well-informed critics - clearly
seeing him in person on stage and feeling the histrionic electricity he
generated were the keys to understanding his greatness.
SMD
18.06.14
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014
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