98 Facts About Ralph Richardson

Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor who, with John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier, was one of the trinity of male actors who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century.

Ralph Richardson worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles.

From an artistic but not theatrical background, Ralph Richardson had no thought of a stage career until a production of Hamlet in Brighton inspired him to become an actor.

Ralph Richardson learned his craft in the 1920s with a touring company and later the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Ralph Richardson led the company the following season, succeeding Gielgud, who had taught him much about stage technique.

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Ralph Richardson continued on stage and in films until shortly before his sudden death at the age of eighty.

Ralph Richardson was celebrated in later years for his work with Peter Hall's National Theatre and his frequent stage partnership with Gielgud.

Ralph Richardson was not known for his portrayal of the great tragic roles in the classics, preferring character parts in old and new plays.

Ralph Richardson was cast in leading roles in British and American films including Things to Come, The Fallen Idol, Long Day's Journey into Night and Doctor Zhivago .

Ralph Richardson received nominations and awards in the UK, Europe and the US for his stage and screen work from 1948 until his death.

Ralph Richardson was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, first for The Heiress and again for his final film, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes .

Ralph Richardson was often seen as detached from conventional ways of looking at the world, and his acting was regularly described as poetic or magical.

Ralph Richardson was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, the third son and youngest child of Arthur Ralph Richardson and his wife Lydia .

Arthur Ralph Richardson had been senior art master at Cheltenham Ladies' College from 1893.

Ralph Richardson's Latin was poor, and during church services he would improvise parts of the Latin responses, developing a talent for invention when memory failed that proved useful in his later career.

In 1919, aged sixteen, Ralph Richardson took a post as office boy with the Brighton branch of the Liverpool Victoria insurance company.

Ralph Richardson resigned from the office post, just in time to avoid being dismissed, and enrolled at the Brighton School of Art.

Ralph Richardson left the art school in 1920, and considered how else he might make a career.

Ralph Richardson briefly thought of pharmacy and then of journalism, abandoning each when he learned how much study the former required and how difficult mastering shorthand for the latter would be.

Ralph Richardson was still unsure what to do, when he saw Sir Frank Benson as Hamlet in a touring production.

Ralph Richardson was thrilled, and felt at once that he must become an actor.

Ralph Richardson paid a local theatrical manager, Frank R Growcott, ten shillings a week to take him as a member of his company and to teach him the craft of an actor.

Ralph Richardson made his stage debut in December 1920 with Growcott's St Nicholas Players at the St Nicholas Hall, Brighton, a converted bacon factory.

Ralph Richardson played a gendarme in an adaptation of Les Miserables and was entrusted with larger parts, including Banquo in Macbeth and Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Ralph Richardson wrote to all four managers: the first two did not reply; Greet saw him but had no vacancy; Doran engaged him, at a wage of £3 a week.

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Ralph Richardson made his first appearance as a professional actor at the Marina Theatre, Lowestoft, in August 1921, as Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice.

Ralph Richardson remained with Doran's company for most of the next two years, gradually gaining more important roles, including Banquo in Macbeth and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar.

Ralph Richardson left Doran in 1923 and toured in a new play, Outward Bound by Sutton Vane.

Ralph Richardson returned to the classics in August 1924, in Nigel Playfair's touring production of The Way of the World, playing Fainall.

Ralph Richardson then toured for three months in Eden Phillpotts's comedy Devonshire Cream with Jackson's company led by Cedric Hardwicke.

Ralph Richardson left the run of Yellow Sands in March 1928 and rejoined Ayliff, playing Pygmalion in Back to Methuselah at the Royal Court Theatre; in the cast was a former colleague from the Birmingham Repertory, Laurence Olivier.

In May 1930 Ralph Richardson was given the role of Roderigo in Othello in what seemed likely to be a prestigious production, with Paul Robeson in the title role.

Ralph Richardson was the New Young Man of his time and I didn't like him.

Salaries at the Old Vic and the Festival were not large, and Ralph Richardson was glad of a job as an extra in the 1931 film Dreyfus.

Ralph Richardson was in four plays, the last of which, Bernard Shaw's Too True to Be Good, transferred to the New Theatre in London the following month.

Ralph Richardson filled it by accepting an invitation from Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic to play Mercutio in their production of Romeo and Juliet on a US tour and on Broadway.

Ralph Richardson's performance parodied the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini so effectively that the film was immediately banned in Italy.

Olivier was willing to co-operate, but Ralph Richardson was not; audiences and most critics failed to spot the supposed motivation of Olivier's Iago, and Ralph Richardson's Othello seemed underpowered.

O'Connor believes that Ralph Richardson did not succeed with Othello or Macbeth because of the characters' single-minded "blind driving passion – too extreme, too inhuman", which was incomprehensible and alien to him.

Ralph Richardson made his television debut in January 1939, reprising his 1936 stage role of the chief engineer in Bees on the Boatdeck.

At the outbreak of war Ralph Richardson joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a sub-lieutenant pilot.

Ralph Richardson had taken flying lessons during the 1930s and had logged 200 hours of flying time, but, though a notoriously reckless driver, he admitted to being a timid pilot.

Ralph Richardson counted himself lucky to have been accepted, but the Fleet Air Arm was short of pilots.

Ralph Richardson's work was mostly routine administration, probably because of "the large number of planes which seemed to fall to pieces under his control", through which he acquired the nickname "Pranger" Richardson.

Ralph Richardson served at several bases in the south of England, and in April 1941, at the Royal Naval Air Station, Lee-on-Solent, he was able to welcome Olivier, newly commissioned as a temporary sub-lieutenant.

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In 1942, on his way to visit his wife at the cottage where she was cared for by a devoted couple, Ralph Richardson crashed his motor-bike and was in hospital for several weeks.

Ralph Richardson was intensely lonely, though the comradeship of naval life was some comfort.

Ralph Richardson made two stipulations: first, as he was unwilling to seek his own release from the forces, the governing board of the Old Vic should explain to the authorities why it should be granted; secondly, that he should share the acting and management in a triumvirate.

Ralph Richardson's roles were Peer, Bluntschli, Richmond and Vanya; Olivier played the Button Moulder, Sergius, Richard and Astrov.

Ralph Richardson received good notices, but by general consent the production belonged to Richardson as Falstaff.

Ralph Richardson took the supporting role of Tiresias in the first, and the silent, cameo part of Lord Burleigh in the second.

Ralph Richardson had ambitions to be the first head of the National Theatre and had no intention of letting actors run it.

Ralph Richardson was encouraged by Guthrie, who, having instigated the appointment of Richardson and Olivier, had come to resent their knighthoods and international fame.

Ralph Richardson, parting company with the Old Vic brought the advantage of being free, for the first time, to earn substantial pay.

Ralph 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.

Ralph Richardson 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.

Ralph Richardson so liked his part that he decided to play it in the West End, with Ashcroft as Sloper's daughter Catherine.

Burrell, whom Ralph 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.

Ralph Richardson 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, Ralph 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.

Ralph Richardson headed a strong cast, with Renee 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.

Ralph Richardson did not attempt Chekhov again for more than a quarter of a century.

Ralph Richardson's playing of Macbeth suggests a fatal disparity between his temperament and the part.

In 1952 Ralph Richardson appeared at the Stratford-upon-Avon Festival at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre .

Ralph Richardson had poor reviews for his Prospero in The Tempest, judged too prosaic.

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Ralph Richardson was thought unconvincingly villainous; the influential young critic Kenneth Tynan professed himself "unmoved to the point of paralysis, " though blaming the director more than the star.

Back in the West End, Ralph Richardson was in another Sherriff play, The White Carnation, in 1953, and in November of the same year he and Gielgud starred together in NCHunter's A Day by the Sea, which ran at the Haymarket for 386 performances.

Ralph Richardson turned down the role of Estragon in Peter Hall's premiere of the English language version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in 1955, and later reproached himself for missing the chance to be in "the greatest play of my generation".

Ralph Richardson had consulted Gielgud, who dismissed the piece as rubbish, and even after discussing the play with the author, Richardson could not understand the play or the character.

Ralph Richardson concluded the 1950s with two contrasting West End successes, Robert Bolt's Flowering Cherry, and Graham Greene's The Complaisant Lover.

Ralph Richardson then went to the US to appear in Sidney Lumet's film adaptation of Long Day's Journey into Night, alongside Katharine Hepburn.

Once, the director went into lengthy detail about the playing of a scene, and when he had finished, Ralph Richardson said, "Ah, I think I know what you want – a little more flute and a little less cello".

Ralph Richardson was jointly awarded the Cannes Film Festival's Best Actor prize with his co-stars Jason Robards Jr and Dean Stockwell.

Ralph 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.

Ralph Richardson had a more reliable vehicle in Shaw's You Never Can Tell 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.

Ralph Richardson's performance won critical praise, but the rest of the cast were less well received.

Ralph Richardson was scrupulous about historical accuracy in his portrayals, and researched eras and characters in great detail before filming.

In 1964 Ralph Richardson was the voice of General Haig in the twenty-six-part BBC documentary series The Great War.

Ralph Richardson recorded some English Romantic poetry, including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and poems by Keats and Shelley for the label.

For Decca Records Ralph Richardson recorded the narration for Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and for RCA the superscriptions for Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia antartica – both with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Prokofiev conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent and the Vaughan Williams by Andre Previn.

In 1970 Ralph Richardson was with Gielgud at the Royal Court in David Storey's Home.

Back at the Royal Court in 1971 Ralph Richardson starred in John Osborne's West of Suez, after which, in July 1972, he surprised many by joining Peggy Ashcroft in a drawing-room comedy, Lloyd George Knew My Father by William Douglas-Home.

Some critics felt the play was too slight for its two stars, but Harold Hobson thought Ralph Richardson found unsuspected depths in the character of the ostensibly phlegmatic General Boothroyd.

Ralph Richardson afterwards toured the play in Australia and Canada with his wife as co-star.

Ralph Richardson continued his long stage association with Gielgud in Harold Pinter's No Man's Land directed by Hall at the National.

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Gielgud played Spooner, a down-at-heel sponger and opportunist, and Ralph Richardson was Hirst, a prosperous but isolated and vulnerable author.

Ralph Richardson returned to the National, and to Chekhov, in 1978 as the aged retainer Firs in The Cherry Orchard.

Ralph Richardson played Lord Touchwood in The Double Dealer, the Master in The Fruits of Enlightenment, Old Ekdal in The Wild Duck and Kitchen in Storey's Early Days, specially written for him.

Films in which Ralph Richardson appeared in the later 1970s and early 1980s include Rollerball, The Man in the Iron Mask, Dragonslayer in which he played a wizard and Time Bandits in which he played the Supreme Being.

For television, Ralph Richardson played Simeon in Jesus of Nazareth, made studio recordings of No Man's Land and Early Days, and was a guest in the 1981 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show.

Ralph Richardson played an old man who denounces the next-door family for murder and then realises he dreamt it but cannot persuade the police that he was wrong.

All the theatres in London dimmed their lights in tribute; the funeral Mass was at Ralph Richardson's favourite church, the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, in Soho; he was buried in Highgate Cemetery; and the following month there was a memorial service in Westminster Abbey.

Ralph Richardson reportedly voted for Winston Churchill's Conservative party in 1945, but there is little other mention of party politics in the biographies.

Ralph Richardson retained his early love of painting, and listed it and tennis in his Who's Who entry as his recreations.

Ralph Richardson thought himself temperamentally unsuited to the great tragic roles, and most reviewers agreed, but to critics of several generations he was peerless in classic comedies.

Ralph Richardson was foursquare, earthy on the stage, a little taller than average height, yeasty.

Miller, who interviewed many of Ralph Richardson's colleagues for his 1995 biography, notes that when talking about Ralph Richardson's acting, "magical" was a word many of them used.

Ralph Richardson himself touched on this dichotomy in his variously reported comments that acting was "merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing" or, alternatively, "dreaming to order".