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“... Lindsay Anderson lives in a flat in one of the redbrick turn-of-the-century blocks behind John Barnes in Swiss Cottage. With its solid turreted houses, backing on gardens, Can-field, Compayne, Aberdare, Broadhurst, it’s the haunt of refugees, and Jewish old ladies, and perhaps (Lindsay would strike out that ‘perhaps’) the most European bit of ...”

“... in order to please his father: Rachmaninov’s Third. When one-armed piano teacher Cecil Parkes (John Gielgud) tells Helfgott that no one’s ever been ‘mad enough’ to attempt it in the Royal College of Music’s annual competition, the student replies: ‘Am I mad enough, Professor? Am I?’ Apparently so, because he has a nervous breakdown as soon ...”

“... though I’d have thought the chances of him persuading his mamma to come are pretty slim. John Gielgud was once telling me about Mrs Simpson and how smart she was. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘she’d have made a disastrous queen. Didn’t go to the theatre at all.’ 19 January. Alan Bates opens tonight at the Barbican in the RSC production of ...”

“... Named Desire. Brando wasn’t an easy sell: the producer, Irene Selznick, favoured the movie star John Garfield. Marlon was a shade too young for Stanley, who is a war veteran. He was clearly hard to manage. But he had a mixture of brute and poet that Kazan urged on Selznick and Tennessee Williams.That was just the start, for in rehearsal Kazan built up ...”

“... friend of Patrick’s, he talked mostly to him, but Princess Margaret didn’t confine herself to John Gielgud and Paul Eddington but to her credit wanted to meet the boys in the play, which she did, though I suspect most of them had no idea who she was. In 1984 Snowdon took pictures of me for (I think) the Sunday Times after the shooting of A Private ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... to give the audience a new idea. It is easiest to make such changes when the playwright is dead. John Osborne and Peter Nichols did not want Miller to alter their plays, but he was more fortunate when he directed Robert Lowell’s version of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Since Miller did not want to set this play in the Caucasus, with an actor tied to a ...”

“... is the 16th book about Laurence Olivier, and his foreword tells of two more biographers, John Cottrell and Garry O’Connor, too intent on their own deadlines to discuss their common quarry with him. All this activity may puzzle the lay person. Holden’s final pages report Olivier alive, as well as can be expected at 81, residing tranquilly in the ...”

“... Shrew was about. My co-star in the Shakespeare and who played Beecham in The Chiltern Hundreds was John Scaife, a friend whom I lost sight of after university and only this last year discovered had become a distinguished molecular biologist at Edinburgh, but died young (in the 1990s) from Aids.17 January. Rupert returns from a walk with Owen, his brother, and ...”

“... understand the poems in the LRB, or new poems generally, and what catches my eye in the poem ‘John’s and Sam’s’ by Steve Ely is not the poem itself but its footnote, explaining that John and Samuel Smith’s breweries are located on the River Wharfe near Tadcaster, upstream from the former eel fishery of ...”

“... Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn’t time to tell them more but also because in those days actors were ...”

“... face lifted for the fourth time – the Doctors say no more), then Cecil [Beaton] and John Gielgud came to stay with us, and we went to Venice on Arturo Lopez’s yacht … Oh yes, I forgot Noel Coward – he fell in love with Jack. Jack hated it All. Later, in his thirties, he would tire also of the Greeks: ‘The children are so ...”

“... snaggle-toothed performances. In Jacob Slovak (1923), the one de Acosta play to have some success (John Gielgud appeared in a short-lived London production), Mercedes again depicted doomed heterosexual love. The heroine is a New England village girl who has a clandestine affair with her shopkeeper father’s Jewish assistant. (The drama was meant to be an ...”

“... of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the enclosure of Marske Moor in Swaledale to create a new farm, Cordilleras. The farm and most of the fields round about were named after places in South America, Valparaiso, Cotopaxi, Sierra Pedragosa and so ...”

“... male figure in these scenes is Autolycus. The best Leontes (probably) of the last century, John Gielgud, once wrote to Peter Brook that he would love the opportunity to double Leontes with Autolycus; and Autolycus, for all the obvious differences, can be seen as a surrogate Leontes. He alone, of the three seniors, has some spellbinding mastery not ...”