Ralph Richardson

CHILDHOOD

Ralph David Richardson was born on December 19, 1902 in Cheltenham, at 11 Tivoli Road, where now is a plaque which he unveiled himself when he visited Cheltenham in 1982, shortly before he died. When he was a baby his mother, Lydia Russell, left his father, an art teacher at Cheltenham College, and took Ralph with her to Gloucester, where she raised him a Roman Catholic (his father and brothers were Quakers). When he was a teenager, Ralph enrolled at Brighton School to take up the easel and follow in his father's brushstrokes. However, after receiving an inheritance of £500, he abandoned art school to pursue his real love - theatre.

STAGE

Richardson made his professional stage debut in 1921 at the Little Theatre, Brighton. In 1926 he joined the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. He commenced his association with the Old Vic in 1930, and gained prominence in a series of West End productions of modern plays, including Somerset Maugham's Sheppey (1933) and J.B. Priestley's Cornelius (1935). He was prominent in the West End throughout the remainder of the decade, touring the United States in 1935, and in 1938.

During World War II, Richardson served in the Fleet Air Arm. When demobbed in 1944, he was asked to lead the Old Vic’s post-war revival after it had been bombed out of its old premises. Richardson joined Laurence Olivier and the director John Burrell as co-director of the Old Vic, where his notable roles included Falstaff (to Olivier's Hal), Bluntschli in Arms and the Man (Olivier as Sergius), and Peer Gynt in which Olivier took the cameo role of the Button Moulder. Richardson also appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon. In 1946, he went with the Old Vic on a tour of the United States. He was knighted in 1947.

FILM CAREER

In Things To Come

His film career is at once prolific and random, doing what came along for the financial rewards and perhaps "a bit of fame". Never handsome, he was always going to be a limited leading man in films and his 1930s films tend to the eccentric or the character lead, like "Boss" in Things to Come (d. William Cameron Menzies, 1936) and the barber in deep financial trouble in On the Night of the Fire (d. Brian Desmond Hurst, 1939).

After the second world war, he made a great impact in his award-winning performance as the suspected butler in Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol (1948), perhaps his finest screen work, full of subtle, suppressed longing and pain. Next was the role of the father of The Heiress (US, d. William Wyler, 1949), gifted with a merciless irony (and Oscar nominated); the humane Captain Lingard in Outcast of the Islands (d. Carol Reed, 1951) and the unconsciously selfish vicar in The Holly and the Ivy (d. George More O'Ferrall, 1952). In 1952, he won a British Academy Award for his role of the more consciously demanding father in David Lean's ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier’, about the early days of jet flight. In 1962, Richardson won Cannes Best Actor Award for his depiction of James Tyrone, the head of a dysfunctional family in playwright Eugene O'Neill's ‘Long Day's Journey Into Night’. Other notables were Richard III (1955), Our Man in Havana (1960), Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

One of his final film appearances was as the sixth Earl of Greystoke in the 1983 movie Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award. Sir Ralph Richardson died on 10 October 1983 in Marylebone, London, and is buried in the Highgate Cemetery.