page_title: Ralph Richardson
section_title: International fame
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Richardson / Life and career / International fame
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Actrice Peggy Ashcroft op Schiphol voor optreden in Stadsschouwburg
context_page_description: Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor who, along with his contemporaries Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, and Laurence Olivier, dominated the British stage of the mid-20th century. He worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles. From an artistic but not theatrical background, Richardson had no thought of a stage career until a production of Hamlet in Brighton inspired him to become an actor. He learned his craft in the 1920s with a touring company and later the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. In 1931 he joined the Old Vic, playing mostly Shakespearean roles. He led the company the following season, succeeding Gielgud, who had taught him much about stage technique. After he left the company, a series of leading roles took him to stardom in the West End and on Broadway.
  In the 1940s, together with Olivier and John Burrell, Richardson was the co-director of the Old Vic company. There, his most celebrated roles included Peer Gynt and Falstaff.
context_section_description: For Richardson, parting company with the Old Vic brought the advantage of being free, for the first time, to earn substantial pay. The company's highest salary had been £40 a week.  After his final Old Vic season he made two films in quick succession for Korda. The first, Anna Karenina, with Vivien Leigh, was an expensive failure, although Richardson's notices in the role of Karenin were excellent. The second, The Fallen Idol, had notable commercial and critical success, and won awards in Europe and America. It remained one of Richardson's favourites of his films. In Miller's words, "Carol Reed's sensitive direction drew faultless performances not just from Ralph as Baines (the butler and mistakenly suspected murderer), but also from Michèle Morgan as his mistress, Sonia Dresdel as his cold-hearted wife, and especially from Bobby Henrey as the distraught boy, Felipe."
  Richardson had gained a national reputation as a great actor while at the Old Vic; films gave him the opportunity to reach an international audience. Unlike some of his theatre colleagues, he was never condescending about film work. He admitted that film could be "a cage for an actor, but a cage in which they sometimes put a little gold", but he did not regard filming as merely a means of subsidising his much less profitable stage work. He said, "I've never been one of those chaps who scoff at films. I think they're a marvellous medium, and are to the stage what engravings are to painting. The theatre may give you big chances, but the cinema teaches you the details of craftsmanship." The Fallen Idol was followed by Richardson's first Hollywood part. He played Dr Sloper, the overprotective father of Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress,  based on Henry James's novel Washington Square. The film did not prosper at the box-office despite good reviews,  an Academy Award for Best Actress for Havilland, and nominations for the director (William Wyler) and Richardson.
  The Heiress had been a Broadway play before it was a film. Richardson so liked his part that he decided to play it in the West End, with Ashcroft as Sloper's daughter Catherine. The piece was to open in February 1949 at Richardson's favourite theatre, the Haymarket. Rehearsals were chaotic. Burrell, whom Richardson had asked to direct, was not up to the task – possibly, Miller speculates, because of nervous exhaustion from the recent traumas at the Old Vic. With only a week to go before the first performance, the producer, Binkie Beaumont, asked him to stand down, and Gielgud was recruited in his place. Matters improved astonishingly; the production was a complete success and ran in London for 644 performances.
  After one long run in The Heiress, Richardson appeared in another, R C Sherriff's Home at Seven, in 1950. He played an amnesiac bank clerk who fears he may have committed murder. He later recreated the part in a radio broadcast, and in a film version, which was his sole venture into direction for the screen. Once he had played himself into a role in a long run, Richardson felt able to work during the daytime in films, and made two others in the early 1950s beside the film of the Sherriff piece: Outcast of the Islands, directed by Carol Reed, and David Lean's The Sound Barrier, released in 1951 and 1952 respectively. For the latter he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor. With his characteristic liking for switching between modern roles and the classics, his next stage part was Colonel Vershinin in Three Sisters in 1951. He headed a strong cast, with Renée Asherson, Margaret Leighton and Celia Johnson as the sisters, but reviewers found the production weakly directed, and some felt that Richardson failed to disguise his positive personality when playing the ineffectual Vershinin. He did not attempt Chekhov again for more than a quarter of a century.
  In 1952 Richardson appeared at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (forerunner of the Royal Shakespeare Company). His return to Shakespeare for the first time since his Old Vic days was keenly anticipated, but turned out 
caption: Peggy Ashcroft, with whom Richardson frequently co-starred
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