LONDON -- Sir John Gielgud, the silken-voiced patrician actor whose Hamlet was regarded as the finest of the 20th century, has died. He was 96.
Gielgud died peacefully at home Sunday near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire west of London, his former agent, Laurence Evans, said Monday.The last of a trio of actor-knights who dominated the British stage, Gielgud held his place alongside Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson.
"Everybody currently working in the theater will agree that his death is the end of an era," said Trevor Nunn, director of the Royal National Theatre. "As Shakespeare said, 'There's a great spirit gone.' "
"He was the greatest actor, and his life was exactly the history of British theater in the last century," said Sheridan Morley, Gielgud's official biographer.
Gielgud's matchless range of Shakespearean roles stretched from the octogenarian Lear, performed at the age of 27, to playing Prospero in his own old age.
Late in life, he took up screen comedy as Hobson the butler in "Arthur," and won an Academy Award for it. He touched audiences with his tender patience toward his drunken playboy employer -- and with the impishness for which he also was known off screen.
"I have been extraordinarily lucky," Gielgud told The Associated Press in a 1991 interview. "I've had sort of three goes, which is rare, very fortunate for an actor, and in every kind of work."
Gielgud's stage career embraced the classics and provocative new works, and his films ranged from Alain Resnais' intellectual "Providence" (1977) to Bob Guccione's trashy, soft-porn "Caligula" (1979).
On television, he shone in "Brideshead Revisited" (1981), playing Jeremy Irons' eccentric father, and in "Summer's Lease" (1990), as the columnist, Haverford Downs.