Sir, - In the early 1960s, Sir John Gielgud directed Richard Burton's Broadway Hamlet. The organ-voiced Welsh actor later wrote that, during the readings of the play in rehearsal, he was rendered speechless by the vocal beauty, cadences and intuitive art with which Gielgud endowed Sheakespearean blank verse. So much so that, from self-doubt rather than pique, Churchill's favourite young actor finally declared: "Here, you do the bloody part!"
No wonder Gielgud was (irreverently) referred to as "the greatest actor in the world from the neck up!" - Yours, etc.,
Oliver McGrane, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.