Ralph Richardson - Russell Harty TV Show (2)

(Part 2 of 6)

English actor Sir Ralph Richardson talks with host Russell Harty on the London Weekend Television show from September 26, 1975. Richardson tells an anecdote about his surprising recitation of lines from Macaulay's The Lays of Ancient Rome as a schoolboy. He also discusses Harold Pinter's play, No Man's Land, in which he was then appearing with Sir John Gielgud at the National Theatre. The two men also talk about acting, dreams, and nightmares.

Richardson, although primarily a stage actor, was known for lead roles in classic films, such as Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol and Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night, as well as important character parts in films such as Doctor Zhivago, The Four Feathers, Things to Come, Time Bandits, and Dragonslayer.

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His friend and fellow actor, Sir John Gielgud, once wrote about him (reprinted in John Miller's Ralph Richardson: The Authorized Biography):

"A consummate craftsman, endlessly painstaking in every detail where his work was concerned, he was something of a perfectionist in many fields outside the theatre...He loved to discuss his motor-bikes and cars, his clocks and pets, to argue about films and plays he had been to see...I think he was fundamentally a shy man, and in his later years he cultivated a certain delightfully eccentric vagueness, especially when he was cornered by strangers or failed to greet someone he had not noticed. Once, when an understudy whom he had never seen before went on for one of the two supporting parts in No Man's Land, Ralph absentmindedly congratulated the stagehand who happened to be standing near him after the curtain fell. But actually he was intensely observant and extremely farseeing...He could give delightfully comic advice...How sadly I miss his cheerful voice on the telephone..."

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  Entertainment

[rbbonotto]

Richardson seems to have gone out of his way to 'shield' himself from excessive prying in both his work and his wife, but in this segment he comes much closer than usual to defining what the art of acting is to him.

[Argentino246]

What a wonderful man!