Sir John Gielgud

Sir John Gielgud0:00

On our desert island this week is one of the great actors of our time, Sir John Gielgud.

Sir John Gielgud0:05

So, John, I know that music means a lot to you because you produced opera and I've seen you in several plays in which you've played the piano excellently.

Sir John Gielgud0:14

Uh

Presenter0:14

Well, I don't play the piano at all, really. My father played very charmingly. He improvised on quite ambitious classical themes sometimes. And when I was a boy, he used to play all the big motifs from the ring and give me the Shaw book, The Perfect Wagner Right, to Read, and took me, when I was very young, to see, I think, Valkyrie and Rheingold under Beecham, I think, probably at Drodilane or somewhere. But anyhow, he sort of inculcated quite a taste for music, and I was able to copy his skill in improvising a little bit, though I never learnt to read music at all. And then I got a grammar firm when I was about 11 or 12 and began to buy records for myself. And the first record that I bought and fell in love with was this record of Chrysler and Zimbelist jogging into here.

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And I had seen Fritz Chrysler give a recital also with my father taking me at the Albert Hall, and he made an enormous impression upon me. He had such charm, and he took his call on the most wonderfully gracious

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dignified way. And uh the the tone of his violin as he put it to his shoulder was absolutely extraordinary, I thought. And I bought this record and played it continually and my mother, who was not very musical and was not at all ashamed of owning it, came into the nursery and said, Oh, I like that thing you're playing all the time, but I only do so wish they'd catch each other up.

Sir John Gielgud3:34

The opening of the Bach concerto for two violins in D minor, Fritz Chrysler and Ephraim Zimbalist, a recording I see made as long ago as nineteen fifteen.

Sir John Gielgud3:45

Now you have sung more than once in a production, haven't you?

Presenter3:48

Well, only once really. Uh Michael Redgrave, who was playing MacHeath in a revival of The Beggars Opera at the beginning of the war, which I had directed for Gleinbourn at the Haymarket Theatre in London, got ill.

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And the understudy was also ill, or couldn't go on, and I, having directed the play and known it terribly well from seeing it over and over again at the Lyric Hammersmith with Frederick Ranelow, volunteered to go on for a few nights, and I remember we rehearsed all the week end, and I knew the dialogue pretty well.

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And the tunes. And when I couldn't get a top note, I stamped my foot and clenched my fist in the air, which somebody assured me was what all singers did when they couldn't reach the top note. And I went up and apologised to the chorus because I had made a terrible mess of one of the ensemble numbers, and they were all so surprised that I had gone up to apologise. And it wasn't the custom at all, and made a great impression. And I also was paid, I remember in money, when I got back to my dressing room, there was money on the table for my salary, which was quite a lot. I think it was £100 or something for two nights. And I was terribly proud of that. I thought I'd never been paid like Sarah Bernhardt in coin before. But that was the only time I've ever attempted to sing. I believe there's theatre blood on both sides of your family. Yes, my father's family was Lithuanian, and his grandmother was quite famous actress. And of course, Ellen Terry was your great-aunted. My mother's family were all actors and actresses, and very wonderful ones, too. And it was a great responsibility, and it helped me very much to get jobs, I'm afraid, when I was young, when I was beginning. But it also was very difficult to live up to, because I think people expected a great deal of me. And I was rather conceited.

Sir John Gielgud5:06

I ain't got fly ma'am.

Presenter5:24

inefficient and it took me ten or fifteen years to find how difficult acting was and to calm myself down and not show off so much. Did you take it for granted that you were going into the theatre? No. My parents wanted me to be an architect and I was mad about drawing and I was mad on Gordon Craig because he was my cousin and because I was fascinated by his designs.

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And then I discovered I would have to learn blueprints and mathematics, at which I was very bad. And I was supposed to be going to Oxford when I left Westminster School. But I said to my parents, Well, let me try something on the stage if I can get a scholarship. And if I don't do well by the time I'm twenty-five, I'll go back to architecture and learn the mathematics. But I did well enough to encourage me to go on as an actor, though it wasn't my first thought. But Craig influenced me very, very much, and he designed with great success a production of Dido and Enius of Purcell.

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which he did at Hampstead Swiss Cottage or somewhere in the n before my time in 1903 or something like that. And it made a great success and I've seen a great many drawings of it and I always loved the opera very much. And I saw a very beautiful production at the Mermaid Theatre when it was in Acacia Road which Bernard Miles very daringly put on with Kirsten Flegstadt and Maggie Tate when he had a sort of garden theatre there. And I fell very much in love again with the opera which I'd never seen before. And it's the one opera that if anybody asked me ever to direct an opera again, I would like to have a shot at because I think it's such a lovely work. It's so extraordinary to think that it was written for a girls' school. But that's why I chose this record of Janet Baker singing the beautiful aria at the end of the opera.

Sir John Gielgud8:27

Janet Baker as Dido in Purcell's Dido in Aeneas. What was your very first appearance on the professional?

Presenter8:34

Uh well, I walked on as a st unpaid student at the Old Vic in a production of Henry the Fifth, about nineteen twenty-one.

Presenter8:44

A lot of us went and asked for jobs there, and they couldn't pay you, of course. And I carried a spear, and Henry V I came on and said, Here are the numbers of the slaughtered French, which was my only lie. You got it right. I don't know whether I did, but it was I was in four productions there as a student, and I saw Russell Thorndike play these great parts, King Lear and Pierre Gynt and Hamlet. In successive weeks, he always was bird perfect, and the company was a very shoddy, shabby one. Was that Robert Adkins?

Sir John Gielgud9:12

Was that in Robert Atkins' day?

Presenter9:13

Yes, it was. He was terrifying, I thought, and so were the old actors who worked in his company, were real old laddies from the provinces, you know. But it was an extraordinary atmosphere there, and old Lillian Bailey sort of flumping about as an old landlady.

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So when I went back there to play leading parts ten years later, it was rather thrilling really to remember that one had been there at one's very beginning. What was the first time you acted for money? For my cousin Phyllis Neilson Terry, I was assistant stage manager.

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For a tour she did of a play called The Wheel, which she had done in London.

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by JB Fagan, who afterwards was my boss at the Oxford Repertory Playhouse. And I had a tiny part and uh did assistant stage manager and general dog's body. We did a long twelve weeks' tour. She was a great star in those days, and she was very kind to me and she really started me off.

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The year you had at the Oxford Playhouse, the rapporteur must have been very useful. Well, that was wonderful because for the first time I played in The Cherry Orchard and Love for Love and Captain Brass Band and

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Mana Vana and um some Spanish plays. I was there about three terms, I think, and we did a play every week, so I did about fifteen or sixteen plays in that year. And from that I

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came to London and understanded Eurocard and the Vortex.

Sir John Gielgud10:25

That was one of your first Commercial successes, you had already played Romeo at at a very early age.

Presenter10:30

Yes, and nine team with Gwen Frank and Davis at the Regent Theatre, which is now pulled down near King's Cross. But I have played Romeo three times and never with any great satisfaction. I think it's the most difficult part, and Laurence Olivier beat me hollow in it when me alternated Romeo and Mercutio together in nineteen thirty five when he did the play.

Sir John Gielgud10:47

Oh, going back to your return to the Olvic when you played the Shakespeare leads for Lillian Bayless, how much were you paying?

Presenter10:53

£10 the first year and twenty the second, I think. I think so. I know she had a fit, but I knew I must be a success because she doubled the salary the second year and nobody had ever heard of anybody getting as much as that. She really was a terrible skin flint. And I think we had £15 to spend on each production. And they used to use the same pillars and benches and old curtains, and people used to give bits of scenery, Maths and Lang, or somebody who'd been on tour gave their props. Edith Evans gave the whole of a play called Delilah, which had been a failure. She gave all the scenery to the dick. So they used to make do. But it was a terrible business because the wardrobe also supplied the opera. And so great jealousies went on whether they'd give you the cloak that was needed by the leading soprano next week for some great operatic part or whether you could have it for a Shakespeare play instead or for as well. And you acted with Ray Richardson there? I met him there in the second year I was there and we became friends and have been ever since. And you played Lear at that time? Yes, I did when I was 25, 26. And it was a very exciting effort. I couldn't say more than that.

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Let's have your third record. What shall that be?

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Well, it's the um walk to Paradise Garden out of Delius's Village Romeo and Juliet. I once saw it, and I can't remember where.

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I became very fond of Delius because my father liked his music very much and was a great devotee of Beecham, who also of course was so enthusiastic, always about Mozart and Delius. And I remember also going to the great anniversary performance, I suppose it was his fiftieth year, some anniversary, which was the last time Delius himself appeared in London in the old Queen's Hall, must have been before the war of course. And I saw him sitting up there in the circle, and that was a very beautiful programme. And since then I've always been a great admirer of his music and I find it soothing and romantic.

Sir John Gielgud14:13

Walk to the Paradise Garden from the Delius Opera, a village Romeo and Juliet.

Sir John Gielgud14:18

Sir Thomas Beacham conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Sir John Gielgud14:22

Sir John, you went very successfully into management yourself at the Queen's Theatre.

Presenter14:26

Yes, I did it there and I did it in the hay market during the last year of the war and again at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1953. So three times I've been in management, but the first time was my own money.

Presenter14:38

And we made a little money, which was an extraordinary thing at that time, because we did four productions in a year. The other two were backed by tenants. and were pretty successful, both of them.

Sir John Gielgud14:48

You like the administrative side?

Presenter14:49

No, I was always grateful to have all the money side done for me by somebody else, and I have no idea of business and money at all.

Presenter14:56

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud14:56

One of your less successful roles was Shylock, and you said that's because you don't think you're good at unsympathetic roles.

Presenter15:04

That's right. Well, I don't think that's quite true. I'm rather good at prigs and bores and I'm rather proud of the fact that I can play rather dull men and make them seem rather more amusing perhaps. But um what I mean is that in personality one seems to have a rather fastidious, rather

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haughty manner, which was rather difficult to to fit. I could never play, I'm sure, successfully, low life parts. In fact, there's a record of me w with Ralph Richardson and Orson Welles doing a Sherlock Holmes thing, which we did once, in which I had to be cockney and say, Oh, bring up the coal matey or something, and it turned out to be Sherlock Holmes, which people used to play at parties as a joke against me because they said I was so bad. And I'm sure I could never be any good at dialect or convincing anybody that I was a navy or a farmer or even a pro I enjoy very much playing servants, playing you know, butlers and valets and clergymen and that kind of thing. But I can't get much l onto the manual worker because I've never been one and I don't think I ever

Sir John Gielgud16:08

Now for people of my generation, your your Hamlet was the definitive one, and rightly you were in a number of productions. I remember one was to mourn the demolition of Irving's Theatre, the Lyceum.

Presenter16:20

It was a strange production. We did it at Elsinor and it was right on the eve of the war and we had the feeling when we got to Denmark that there was a terrible trouble afoot and they seemed very nervous themselves there.

Presenter16:31

And although I didn't follow politics as I ought to have done, I did realize how bad things were. I'd had a year in Dear Octopus, which opened on the eve of Munich, and I remember Noel Card coming to the party afterwards and shaking his head and saying how dreadful everything was. And we were all rather rejoicing that Chamberlain had managed to put the war off for a year.

Speaker 416:50

Yeah.

Presenter16:51

It i it was a strange farewell it wasn't my farewell Hamlet, because I did it again at the end of the war in nineteen forty four. Yes, but I was beginning to feel that I was getting a bit old for it, and I think I was very tired by that time. And uh the Elsinore Castle is not, to my mind, at all ideal. Very disappointing when you get there. It's a great big stone courtyard, and we had bad weather.

Sir John Gielgud16:57

Cut the hedgehog.

Presenter17:10

And it was a funny feeling in the company that we were all being separated. I had a company of many of whom I had worked for on and off for about ten years. And we there was a feeling like the end of term. One somehow knew that we were all going to be separated. And people had mad practical jokes and threw each other into the sea and put booby traps over the door and somebody put a cannon in somebody's bed. I mean, most idiotic schoolboy things. But I think it was this feeling of danger and of suspense that we were all going through at that time.

Sir John Gielgud17:41

There was a little bit of trouble because somebody stole some Nazi flags to tell them to destroy them.

Presenter17:44

That's right.

Sir John Gielgud17:46

Yeah.

Presenter17:46

Yeah. Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud17:47

Let's have your fourth record.

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Yeah.

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The fourth record is a Mahla sung by the beautiful Kathleen Ferrier, who died so young. And not only is it wonderful music to me, I came to it very late, but I have such a touching recollection of seeing her performance of Orpheus at Covent Garden, the last one she gave before she was taken desperately ill and died.

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And shortly before that she had a slight respite from her illness and some people took a flat for her in Hamilton Terrace and took me round one afternoon to meet her. And she was sitting in bed in a pink dressing gown, so charming and so easy and like a lovely lancer lesse, something of Gracie Fields' charm. And we talked together and Ruth Draper was there. And it's an afternoon that I shall always remember with great affection and great nostalgia because you could see what a remarkable lady she was. And her voice, of course, was exquisite.

Sir John Gielgud21:03

Kathleen Ferrier singing the farewell from Marlowe's The Song of the Earth.

Sir John Gielgud21:08

We've been talking about your early days in the theatre. It's it's interesting to think how much the theatre has changed since those pre-war days.

Sir John Gielgud21:16

The arrival of the subsidized theatre. What's been your experience of working in those great organisations now with lots of people?

Presenter21:23

Well I must say I'm devoted to Peter Hall who I admire greatly and who was a very very kind and helpful uh director to me in two or three plays. But I did work for a year at the National Theatre, not in very satisfactory parts. Then I did a play called Half-Life by Julian Mitchell, a new writer, at the Cottislow, which was rather fun and which was successful enough to be moved to the Duke of Yorks where it ran for a year. So that was rather a nice change. And we also did No Man's Land, which was an enormous success. Before the National Theatre opened we did it at the Vic, and then later we did it again at the National. And that was a great experience and I loved working in the play. It was a magnificent part. I was working with Richardson who I love. So that was a great chance to play a different kind of work, just as at the Royal Court when I did Home and Bingo and Veterans. That was another sort of avant-garde adventure. But Richardson and I are both slightly heretical, I think, about very nouveau.

Presenter22:19

Very avant-garde writers. And when we did Home in No Man's Land, we both trembled like aspen leaves and had to kind of back each other up to persuade each other that we weren't going to make absolute fools of ourselves. But with the help of Lindsay Anderson and Peter Hall, who directed the two plays, they both came out very, very successfully. Let's have your first record.

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The Lieber's Lieder of Brahms, which I also came to very late. I heard it only a few years ago. I there was a performance of made into a ballet in New York.

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by Balanchin, of course, who is a genius, with two pianos on the stage, and these enchanting waltzes.

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And I fell very much in love with it. And when I bought the record, I found I played it a great deal. It's light and it's melodious and it takes you back to the kind of romance of youth when I used to dance a great deal in the twenties, you know, and go to nightclubs and and I think these waltzes have have a lot of style and a lot of charm and th they're prettily sung as well. So I thought they would be nice to have with me.

Speaker 423:19

Uh

Speaker 423:27

They shamed my home.

Speaker 423:32

Things are the favours.

Speaker 423:37

Would I in the world and to make an shame?

Speaker 423:44

I will take it like a tree.

Speaker 423:49

But you're

Speaker 424:01

I will take more than obey and shame for good deeds.

Speaker 424:12

In French room.

Speaker 424:16

She will

Sir John Gielgud24:29

One of the Brahms Neue Liebeslied Opus 65 and Jeda Hant sung by Jermgaard Sevried.

Sir John Gielgud24:36

One of your most successful endeavours was your one-man show, The Seven Ages of Man. You had great success with that all over the world. Yes, well, I did.

Presenter24:44

And it was a kind of experimental thing. George Rylands, who's at King's College, Cambridge, is a great Shakespearean, has always directed a great many plays and acted when he was a young man. And he directed in my season at the Haymarket at the end of the war, he directed Hamlet and the Duchess of Malfi for me. So when he produced an anthology called Ages of Man, and I looked through it, I suddenly thought it would be an interesting thing to try and put some of the speeches together that I liked particularly and thought seemed to be effective and to make a pattern of them and make a recital of it. And I did it for societies and I did someone performance with Julian Bream and with musicians helping me at various old Lady Astor's house in St. James's Square and at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. And then finally I decided I would try and really make it into a professional thing and I did a 13-week tour of America, beginning in Canada.

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With one night stands mostly, which was a tremendous bore really, but I learnt how to do it because I changed the items every night. So I did work on it very hard, and it was so successful by the end of the thirteen weeks that I took it to New York, where it succeeded beyond my expectations. And then I did it again in London. But I have done it in many places. The last time I ever did it was when we were doing the Charge of the Light Brigade in Turkey, and I did a performance for the English Library in Ankara before we went home, and it was very successful. But I haven't done it since, and I would dread doing it again, because I'd had about eight years out of it one way and another.

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Write record number six, please.

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Well, I wanted to have a an old friend's voice with me on the island, and so nobody could be better than Ralph Richardson.

Presenter26:22

And uh these poems of Blake have a great charm for me and he has such a beautiful voice and such warmth of personality that I felt he would be a great comfort to me if I was uh without anybody to talk to. Which ones do you choose? I chose the chimney sweeper.

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and the sick rose.

Speaker 126:41

When my mother died I was very young.

Speaker 126:44

And my father sold me, while yet my tongue could scarcely cry, Weep, weep, weep, weep.

Speaker 126:51

So your chimneys, I sweep.

Speaker 126:53

I didn't sort I sleep.

Speaker 126:56

There's little Tom Daikri.

Speaker 126:58

who cried when his head, uncurled like a lamb's back, was shaved.

Speaker 127:03

So I said,

Speaker 127:04

Hush, Tom, never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.

Speaker 127:12

And so he was quiet,

Speaker 127:14

And that very night

Speaker 127:16

As Tom was asleeping,

Speaker 427:18

Yeah.

Speaker 127:18

He had such a sight

Speaker 127:20

The thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack were all of them locked up in coffins of black, and by came an angel who had a bright key.

Speaker 127:32

And he opened the coffins and set them all free.

Speaker 127:36

Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run, And wash in the river, and shine in the sun Then, naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind.

Speaker 127:50

And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

Speaker 128:00

And so Tom awoke.

Speaker 128:02

And we rose in the dark and got with our bags and our brushes to work.

Speaker 128:07

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm, So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Speaker 128:17

O Rose, thou art sick

Speaker 128:22

The invisible worm that flies in the night

Speaker 128:26

In the howling storm.

Speaker 128:29

Hast found out thy bed of crimson joy

Speaker 128:34

And his dark secret love

Speaker 128:37

Does thy life destroy?

Sir John Gielgud28:42

Two Poems by William Blake, read by RAF Richardson, THE CHIMNY SWEEEPER.

Speaker 128:47

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud28:47

and The Sick Rose.

Sir John Gielgud28:50

So, John, we've been concentrating on your theatre work. Until fairly recently, films didn't mean much to you.

Presenter28:55

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud28:56

Now I made quite a n

Presenter28:56

I made even a couple of silent films. And then I made two other I made The Good Companions film and I did The Secret Agent with Hitchcock in 1935. How did you get on with Hitchcock? Very, very well. It was quite fun in a way, but it was awfully exhausting because I was playing at night. I was playing Romeo and Juliet at night, which I had directed and which I was alternating Romeo and McCutcheon with Olivier. So I don't know how I did the work really. I got up and you know, went to Lime Grove at about seven in the morning and then rushed off to the theatre about half past five and slept for half an hour and went on. It wasn't much fun. But when Tony Richardson asked me to be in The Loved One in California, And then the Charge of the Light Brigade. He found a sort of film personality for me, which was really something quite new for me. And I hadn't any theatre work to worry about at the same time. I'd always been torn between the two. And I turned down a lot of very interesting offers when I was working hard in the theatre. Corda offered to do Hamlet for me, which I turned down. And I was approached to do Caesar and Cleopatra with Vivian Lee, the shore play, which I also turned down. Because I was rather contemptuous of films and I didn't think I was any good in them when I saw the performance. I thought I was awfully bad.

Presenter30:03

affected and so on. So I didn't try. But when I started again with these films, The Light Brigade and and Loved One, I suddenly found much more ease with the camera and wasn't worried about being good looking any more.

Presenter30:15

And um so I I I settled down to it and now I enjoy it very much indeed. You had a great success in a rather strange film. Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud30:23

by Alain Reigné, uh Providence.

Presenter30:25

I did, and that was a wonderful experience, because he's a great director, although he doesn't speak much English. But it was a very fascinating script by David Mercer, who sadly died a few months ago. And um the moment I read it I was very thrilled that they'd asked me to do it because it was much more coarse and uh strong than anything I had usually played in the theatre. I had to play a lot of drunk scenes which I would never dream to do on the stage'cause I can't play drunk. But I had a lot of scenes in bed throwing bottles about and making obscene remarks, which I found with his help I managed to do without much self-consciousness. I could never have done them in the theatre, funnily enough. And you've been in Caligua, that's got some rather bad.

Sir John Gielgud30:58

Draw the

Presenter30:58

Next two. Well, I that was I wasn't very proud of that really, but it was a harmless little part in which I got bumped off very early on.

Sir John Gielgud30:58

Next to

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And it was rather amusing to be there with all the

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nude people who demand them.

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Bell went for lunch, rushed, clutching their hands in front of them, into the corridor to have pizza with their families.

Presenter31:19

Are you writing? You you've done several volumes of autobiography. Yes, I have done th I've done four books actually. And the one I wrote last year, which was done from some um radio interviews I did with John Miller.

Speaker 431:22

Yeah.

Presenter31:30

In fact, I did twelve of them and then I did four more last year.

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Four publishers offered to make a book of it and I

Presenter31:36

warned them they would not be easy because they were very colloquial and uh badly written. I mean they were they were meant to be spoken. But they were very patient and uh did a very good job on it I think. And it has been liked by people and I wanted to put uh all these stories and memories and things down before I forgot them because I have a frightfully good recall at the moment. One never knows how long one's memory will remain as good as that. And so it was fun to do going back on old times and mentioning a lot of people who I was very fond of and who I admired very much.

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And I did enjoy it on the whole.

Presenter32:07

We've got to record number seven.

Presenter32:10

We had to have something from Mozart, and there's so much to choose from. I fell in love with Mozart in the thirties when I went to Gleinborn and saw all the operas for the first time, I expect. And since then I've seen most of them many times.

Presenter32:22

and I do enjoy them enormously, and also his orchestral music. In fact, I play so much Mozart that I don't know which to choose. And I chose this movement from the Clarinet Concerto because it's one of my favorites. But there are dozens and dozens that I love equally well.

Sir John Gielgud34:04

The opening of the last movement of the Mozart Clarinet Concerto in A major.

Sir John Gielgud34:09

Jack Brimer, a soloist, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beacham.

Sir John Gielgud34:15

Now, a number of your friends and colleagues who have been on this program have recounted with glee and great affection their favourite story about you dropping bricks.

Sir John Gielgud34:26

Have you any favorite instance yourself which you'd care to?

Presenter34:29

Oh, they're a number. I can never think of them at the right moment. But, um uh it's it's perfectly true. I make the most terrible mistakes and gaffes sometimes. But um

Presenter34:40

I suppose the most famous one is there was an um a very nice man called Edward Knobloch who was very kind to me as a young man. He wrote a very successful play called Kismet.

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which was a huge success and worked with Arnold Bennett on milestones. And he was very charming, and I used to know him very well. And that towards the end of his life he was very unsuccessful, I think lost all his money.

Presenter35:01

And we were lunching at the Ivy one day and he said he had twenty-five unpublished plays in his top drawer or something, and he talked on and on. And I said about somebody else I said, he's almost as big a ball as it did in Not Block.

Presenter35:14

To his face.

Presenter35:16

And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know whether I'd said it or whether I hadn't said it. And I know I did say it. I can hear myself saying it.

Sir John Gielgud35:25

Uh

Presenter35:25

I do hope he wasn't too upset, because he was a very nice man.

Sir John Gielgud35:27

Oh dear. Yes, it's so easy to do.

Sir John Gielgud35:31

Now, you're on this island. How good would you be at looking after yourself? Are you a practical person?

Presenter35:36

I can't buy the kettle or an egg. I'm quite helpless. Always have been. You couldn't rig up.

Sir John Gielgud35:43

Well I suppose I would

Presenter35:43

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud35:44

After learn, would you try to get back again? Would you try to

Sir John Gielgud35:48

Make a raft or a message.

Presenter35:50

Uh

Presenter35:51

Probably rather happy though.

Sir John Gielgud35:52

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud35:53

Your last record, what's that?

Presenter35:55

Well it sounds rather solemn and religious, which it's a beautiful piece from the Fourier Requiem, which recently I had the pleasure of working on in Winchester Cathedral. I did the prayers in it and the innovation at the beginning. And I'd already got this record from King's College, Cambridge, which is a most beautiful record. And I thought it would make a fitting end to this programme.

Speaker 436:58

She loves to have

Sir John Gielgud38:00

Part of Imparadisum from the Fore Requiem, the choir of King's College, Cambridge, conducted by David Wilcox. If you could take only one disc out of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

Sir John Gielgud38:12

I think I would take the Bach, because I think it would be less likely to become monotonous. The Bach double violin concerto. And you are all allowed one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, to take with you.

Presenter38:23

passwords and a dictionary to go with them. I couldn't have both. But I'm torn between that and the works of Proust which I feel it's my duty to read. Well, you can certainly have a la recherche. I mean that's one book. Well I bought a whole lot. Yes. And now that they're so expensive to buy in the new version it would be nice to be given it.

Sir John Gielgud38:33

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud38:35

Yeah.

Presenter38:41

You want it in English? Oh, yeah.

Sir John Gielgud38:43

It's like

Presenter38:43

Could be in front of

Sir John Gielgud38:44

French. Right.

Sir John Gielgud38:45

Proust, and thank you, Sir John Gielgood, for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much for asking me. I've enjoyed it very much.

Presenter38:53

Yeah.

Sir John Gielgud38:53

Goodbye, everyone.