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On Monday, April 28th,
at a benefit to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Folger
Shakespeare Library, The Shakespeare Guild paid tribute to SIR DEREK JACOBI with
a trophy that had been commissioned in 1994 to perpetuate a stellar artist’s
“Praise” and preserve his “Character with golden Quill” (Sonnet 85). Unveiled at a ceremony to
mark the 430th birthday of the world’s most influential playwright
and the 90th birthday of the man who had been described as our
century’s most enduring embodiment of the legacy we owe that playwright, The
Golden Quill is an elegant John Safer sculpture to be bestowed each spring on
the actor, director, producer, or scriptwriter an eminent selection panel has
designated as that year’s recipient of the Sir John Gielgud Award for
Excellence in the Dramatic Arts. As actor Tony Randall and
television journalist Robert MacNeil observed when the initiative was announced,
it is entirely fitting that there be London theatre prizes to commemorate the
legendary Laurence Olivier. It is
just as fitting that there be a laurel of “wide and universal” applicability
to immortalize the venerable contemporary who served in many respects as
Olivier’s mentor. “We cannot hear the
great voices of the past,” Mr. MacNeil reminded his listeners, “but it is
safe to say that in our time no actor has spoken Shakespeare with a finer ear
for the poetry, or a voice more perfectly turned to the music, than John Gielgud.
Shakespeare could not wish a more noble interpreter.”
Mr. MacNeil went on to proclaim that “The Shakespeare Guild does honor
to itself by devising this way of honoring Gielgud, now and long into the
future. And I am flattered to have a small part in bringing it
about.” Robert MacNeil was one of
five Guild jurors for the 1997 Gielgud Award.
He was joined by cultural leader Kitty Carlisle Hart, former chairman of
the New York State Council on the Arts, playwright Ken Ludwig, author of Crazy
for You and Moon Over Buffalo, British scholar Roger Pringle, director of the
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, and Radio Hall of Fame
inductee Susan Stamberg, cultural correspondent for All Things Considered and other NPR offerings. Like Sir Ian McKellen, who accepted the inaugural Gielgud trophy on May 20, 1996, Sir Derek Jacobi is an extraordinary performer whose admirers span the globe. In a message Sir John taped for the initial presentation of The Golden Quill, he mentioned Jacobi as one of the drama professionals he holds in highest esteem. A year later, in a letter he forbade Sir Derek to open until April 28th, Gielgud told him “I need hardly say how pleased I am to congratulate you” for this “recognition of your distinguished record of success both in the live theater and [in] films and television.” Sir John proceeded to enumerate his “vivid and enthusiastic memories” of particular achievements. He singled out Jacobi’s “remarkably effective Hitler in The Third Reich,” his Roman Claudius, his character of the same appellation “in Branagh’s great film,” and his “striking” portrayal of Alan Turing in Breaking the Code, “to say nothing of Richard the Second and many other triumphs.” Sir Derek Jacobi: All The World's
His Stage
Sir Derek is best known,
of course, for his 1977 incarnation as a stammering Roman emperor with the same
name as Hamlet’s adversary. In
December, when Jacobi was at the Smithsonian Institution for a panel on the
Branagh premier, someone reminded him of the limping figure he’d made so
appealing in I, Claudius.
Sir Derek quipped that, yes, he’s pretty much “cornered the market on
Claudii.” In February, viewers
who’d been tuning in for the 1997 season of Mobil Masterpiece Theatre had a
chance to relish another instance of Jacobi’s brilliance. In Breaking the Code,
a video treatment of the Hugh Whitemore drama about a genius who saved his
nation from Nazism only to be driven to suicide after his sexual orientation was
exposed in a scandal that threatened his livelihood, Jacobi enacts a
mathematician who has been hailed as the father of today’s computer.
In the words of New York Times critic John J. O’Connor, “A horrifying
inevitability engulfs the story, realized powerfully by the accomplished cast.
Mr. Jacobi, biting his nails and using a stutter similar to the one that
served him so well in I, Claudius, is incredibly moving, all the more so by
making Alan Turing so utterly unapologetic about any aspect of his life.” When Jacobi had created this role in a 1987-88 staging of Breaking
the Code, he’d won acclaim—and award citations—in the United States as
well as in his native England. Jacobi aficionados were
elated to learn a few months ago that PBS would be introducing a second series
of his winsome Cadfael episodes, to be
shown during its Thursday night MYSTERY! slot. They were equally gratified to hear that Dame Diana Rigg, who
hosts that program for WGBH Boston, would be on hand to emcee the proceedings at
which Sir Derek would be feted in the nation’s capital. Born in 1938, Derek Jacobi
grew up in what one biographer describes as “a wholly untheatrical family”
in Leyton, a borough of east London. He
studied history at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and while there he crossed
paths with such future luminaries as Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn. In
the meantime, prompted by the charisma of Richard Burton and other heirs to the
mantle of Gielgud, Olivier, and Richardson, he’d already played Hamlet at
school and attracted favorable notices with a Shakespearean role he’d taken to
the Edinburgh Festival in the mid-‘50s. Jacobi’s confirmation as
a dramatic artist occurred in 1960, when he affiliated with the Birmingham
Repertory Theatre. Three years
later, having impressed Sir Laurence Olivier with his title character during a
mounting of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII,
he received an invitation to act in the Chichester Festival Theatre, and shortly
thereafter in a newly formed National Theatre Company, based at that time in the
storied Old Vic. It was in this
hallowed shrine that Jacobi enjoyed his London debut, as Laertes in a Hamlet
that opened October 22, 1963, on the actor’s 25th birthday. After eight seasons with
Olivier’s troupe, Jacobi returned to the Birmingham Rep in 1971
The following year he commenced an association with the Prospect Theatre
Company that was to last until 1980, when he came to New York for his induction
to Broadway as Semyon in The Suicide. In what would be constructed as a sign that he was finally
attaining the international reputation he’d long merited, Jacobi collected a
nomination for the Tony Award. In 1982, having won the
hearts of viewers around the planet for his television parts in Man
of Straw, The Pallisers, and Philby,
Burgess and Maclean, and having appeared in such films as The
Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File,
Jacobi was asked to join the Royal Shakespeare Company.
It was there that he rose to the pinnacle of his profession in England.
His Prospero and Benedick earned him kudos in two of the roles that had
belonged, in the public mind, to Sir John Gielgud.
In the insight he brought to his rendering of the protagonists of Cyrano
de Bergerac and Peer Gynt, moreover, he made it clear that he could also bear up to
comparison with Sir Ralph Richardson. With
an alacrity that seemed altogether apt, he was rewarded with a trophy that is
now conferred in the name of Sir Laurence Olivier. A year after London’s
Society of West End Theatres declared Jacobi the finest actor of the 1984
season, Queen Elizabeth made him a Commander of the British Empire.
A decade thereafter, in 1994, Her Majesty dubbed Sir Derek a Knight of
the realm. In 1984-85 the Royal
Shakespeare Company exported Cyrano de
Bergerac and Much Ado About Nothing
to Washington, New York, and Los Angeles. Both of Jacobi’s roles were greeted
with Helen Hayes Awards, and his Benedick garnered a Tony.
Four years later, after another successful stint on television, he
acquired an Emmy for The Tenth Man, a feature of The Hallmark Hall of Fame. As his craft has matured,
Sir Derek has moved with increasing ease between the stage and the screen.
He’s also tried his hand at theatre management, and in recent years he
has shared with producer Duncan Weldon the artistic supervision of a rapidly
growing Chichester Festival operation. To
the honoree’s delight, Mr. Weldon and his lovely wife Janet were present at
the April 28th Gielgud ceremony. In pursuit of his first
love, a domain behind the footlights, Jacobi has enchanted playgoers in such
title roles as Richard III (in 1988 at
the Phoenix Theatre), Richard II (in
1989 at the Phoenix), Kean (in 1990 at
the Old Vic), Becket (in 1991 at the
Theatre Royal Haymarket), Macbeth (in
1993-94 at the RSC’s large Stratford and Barbican houses), Hadrian
VII (in 1995 at the Chichester Festival Theatre), and Uncle
Vanya (in 1996 at Chichester). During
the 1995 season at Chichester he also resurrected the spirit of dramatist August
Strindberg in a new work, Playing the
Wife. In the interim, Sir Derek
has continued to appear regularly on television and in the films of his protégé
Kenneth Branagh. It was Jacobi’s
role as the Prince of Denmark that persuaded Branagh to become an actor.
And when Branagh formed the Renaissance Theatre Company and importuned
Jacobi to direct for it, Sir Derek consented to a bold challenge only on the
condition that the troupe’s founder agree to have a go, for the first time, at
the melancholy Dane. Branagh’s maiden voyage as Hamlet was launched at the
Birmingham Rep in 1988, and in 1990 its rehearsal process was memorialized in a
PBS video documentary, Discovering Hamlet,
by Washington filmmaker Mark Olshaker. Shortly
after that Birmingham Hamlet, the
tables turned, and a much-pleased Jacobi found himself under the cinematic aegis
of his precocious colleague. He graced Henry V as Chorus, and that contribution paved the way to characters
in two of Branagh’s subsequent films, Dead Again (1991) and Hamlet
(1996). While Sir Derek was in
America for the 1997 Gielgud formalities, he spoke several times about his
reverence and affection for the great man in whose honor he was being saluted. He worked alongside Sir
John in 1967 during an Old Vic Tartuffe
that was overseen by the formidable Tyone Guthree. Twenty years later, when Jacobi donned the mask of Hitler in
1987 for HBO’ television movie Inside
the Third Reich, Gielgud supported him in the guise of Nazi leader Albert
Speer’s father. Jacobi is often
likened to Sir John, and in 1979, after Gielgud completed a vintage vignette as
John of Gaunt in the BBC Richard II,
he presented a signed copy of his script to the actor who was playing the lead.
Himself a “definitive” monarch during his heyday from the 1920s through the
‘50s, the 75-year-old patriarch wrote “To a worthy successor in a wonderful
part.” A few weeks ago, on February 28, 1997, Queen Elizabeth decorated Sir John, who would turn 93 on April 14th, with one of the highest accolades the Crown has at its disposal, an Order of Merit. After the Palace solemnities, in a postlude that linked him with Sir Henry Irving, the first English actor to be knighted, Sir John attended a Garrick Club luncheon as the special guest of his fellow thespians. |
