page_title: Ralph Richardson
section_title: 1960s
hierarchical_section_title: Ralph Richardson / Life and career / 1960s
caption_attribution_description: Promotional image for the 1963 Broadway production of The School for Scandal, featuring John Gielgud (left) and Ralph Richardson (right)
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: Richardson began the 1960s with a failure. Enid Bagnold's play The Last Joke was savaged by the critics ("a meaningless jumble of pretentious whimsy" was one description). His only reason for playing in the piece was the chance of acting with Gielgud, but both men quickly regretted their involvement. Richardson then went to the US to appear in Sidney Lumet's film adaptation of Long Day's Journey into Night, alongside Katharine Hepburn. Lumet later recalled how little guidance Richardson needed. Once, the director went into lengthy detail about the playing of a scene, and when he had finished, Richardson said, "Ah, I think I know what you want – a little more flute and a little less cello". After that, Lumet was sparing with suggestions. Richardson was jointly awarded the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor prize with his co-stars Jason Robards Jr and Dean Stockwell.
  Richardson's next stage role was in a starry revival of The School for Scandal, as Sir Peter Teazle, directed by Gielgud in 1962. The production was taken on a North American tour, in which Gielgud joined the cast as, he said, "the oldest Joseph Surface in the business". A revival of Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1963 was judged by the critic Sheridan Morley to have been a high-point of the actor's work in the 1960s. Richardson joined a British Council tour of South Africa and Europe the following year; he played Bottom again, and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
  For his next four stage productions, Richardson was at the Haymarket. Father Carving a Statue (1964) by Graham Greene was short-lived. He had a more reliable vehicle in Shaw's You Never Can Tell (1966) in which he played the philosopher-waiter William, and in the same year he had a great success as Sir Anthony Absolute in The Rivals. The critic David Benedictus wrote of Richardson's performance, "... he is choleric and gouty certainly, the script demands that he shall be, but his most engaging quality, his love for his son in spite of himself, shines through every line." In 1967 he again played Shylock; this was the last time he acted in a Shakespeare play on stage. His performance won critical praise, but the rest of the cast were less well received.
  Interspersed with his stage plays, Richardson made thirteen cinema films during the decade. On screen he played historical figures including Sir Edward Carson (Oscar Wilde, 1960), W E Gladstone (Khartoum, 1966) and Sir Edward Grey (Oh! What a Lovely War, 1969). He was scrupulous about historical accuracy in his portrayals, and researched eras and characters in great detail before filming. Occasionally his precision was greater than directors wished, as when, in Khartoum, he insisted on wearing a small black finger-stall because the real Gladstone had worn one following an injury. After a role playing a disabled tycoon and Sean Connery's uncle in Woman of Straw, in 1965 he played Alexander Gromeko in Lean's Doctor Zhivago, an exceptionally successful film at the box office, which, together with The Wrong Box and Khartoum, earned him a BAFTA nomination for best leading actor in 1966. Other film roles from this period included Lord Fortnum (The Bed Sitting Room, 1969) and Leclerc (The Looking Glass War, 1970). The casts of Oh! What a Lovely War and Khartoum included Olivier, but he and Richardson did not appear in the same scenes, and never met during the filming. Olivier was by now running the National Theatre, temporarily based at the Old Vic, but showed little desire to recruit his former colleague for any of the company's productions.
  In 1964 Richardson was the voice of General Haig in the twenty-six-part BBC documentary series The Great War. In 1967 he played Lord Emsworth on BBC television in dramatisations of P G Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories, with his wife playing Emsworth's bossy sister Constance, and Stanley Holloway as the butler, Beach. He was nervous about acting in a television series: "I'm sixty-four and that's a bit old to be taking on a new medium." The performances divided critical opinion. The Times thought the stars "a
caption: John Gielgud (left) as Joseph Surface, and Richardson as Sir Peter Teazle, The School for Scandal, 1962
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