Williams as Monroe.

In the weekly grind of seeing, suffering through, and writing about what passes for movies today, perfection is a word I rarely have the occasion to use. A warm, wonderful and enchanting work of artistry such as My Week With Marilyn is the exception to that problem. What an extraordinary thrill to leave a movie exhilarated instead of drained, sated instead of empty, rejuvenated instead of depressed. It’s a magical experience.

This is the moving, cinematically inspired true story of a young man named Colin Clark who, in 1956, went to London to apply for a job as a production assistant on the widely publicized, highly anticipated movie version of Terence Rattigan’s celebrated play The Sleeping Prince, to be called The Prince and the Showgirl, starring and directed by Laurence Olivier and co-starring the most famous and desirable woman in the world, the one and only Marilyn Monroe. Determined and persistent, Colin wouldn’t take no for an answer, and eventually graduated to an exalted go-for position as third assistant director, which included serving tea, soothing jangled nerves, acting as a bodyguard to the Hollywood goddess on her first visit to England, and generally playing the role of a peacekeeper that would tax the combined talents of the United Nations General Assembly. It was a dream come true for a confused, starry-eyed, 23-year-old underachiever, newly graduated from Oxford, whose wealthy, prominent parents considered his job on a soundstage at Pinewood nothing more than slumming. But he got a keyhole closeup of filmmaking at its most glamorous and stressful, and as the long and strenuous film dragged on, threatening to never end, he took copious notes and logged every detail in his diaries, which were finally published in the form of a 1995 memoir called The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me and expanded into a second book called My Week With Marilyn. Totally mesmerizing. This film might not appeal to anyone who has never heard of The Prince and the Showgirl or to those too young to understand the supercolossal charisma and appeal of the tragic Marilyn herself, but for legions of movie buffs like me who grew up on this stuff, My Week With Marilyn opens up a world of wide-eyed wonder while it sweeps away the glitter and the fairy dust to reveal the pain, frustration and sweat behind the scenes. By the time it ends, you feel like you were there, and thanks to the incandescent performance by Michelle Williams as Marilyn, I promise you’ll get to know the conflicted woman behind the diamonds and the sunglasses and the glossy 8x10 fan magazine photos a little bit better than you ever will from the continuing parade of biographies that keep writers fascinated by a legend imitated by many Hollywood wanna-bes through the years but equaled by none.

Eddie Redmayne, the versatile, charismatic and highly praised actor who won a Tony award for the excellent play Red, is a sweet and sexy combination of open-hearted youth and maturing hormones as a boy taking his first tenuous steps into manhood. Some members of the British press have done their best to contest the accuracy of Mr. Clark’s books, labeling him a parasite and a phony, accusing him of embellishing the facts, and claiming that as a third assistant to director-star Laurence Olivier on The Prince and the Showgirl he never got any closer to Marilyn than fetching coffee. Who cares? His memories, no matter how hyperbolic, make for first-rate filmmaking and the script by Adrian Hodges distills every poignant, startling, rapturous and heart-breaking highlight of importance from his two best-selling autobiographical memoirs. According to him, Marilyn took a fancy to a sympathetic boy with no agenda who adored her unconditionally, mainly because he was protective, unselfish and a reminder of her own lost innocence. Also, she was an outsider in a strange country who needed a friend. At first, it was difficult to gain her trust. One by one, her entourage arrives—including photographer and former lover Milton Greene (Dominic Cooper), third husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) and domineering Actors Studio coach Paula Strasberg (Zoë Wanamaker), a gargoyle who feeds on the star’s insurmountable insecurities and holds up the production on a daily basis, exerting control in all the wrong places, butting heads with everyone on the production while she gives Marilyn line readings. Kenneth Branagh is the distinguished Laurence Olivier, whose patience soon plummets into rage and near-madness (“Christ, what have I got myself into?”) as Marilyn keeps everyone waiting for hours on end, including one of England’s most revered character actresses, Dame Sybil Thorndike (Judi Dench in an imperial but luminous performance). Among the supporting players, Harry Potter’s Emma Watson is a wardrobe assistant with her own crush on Colin but no competition for Miss Monroe; Julia Ormond is a beautifully realized Vivien Leigh, who excelled in Marilyn’s role onstage but was too old for the screen; and Toby Jones (the one who should have won an Oscar for playing Truman Capote in Infamous, the second and better of the two films about the writing of In Cold Blood, instead of Philip Seymour Hoffman) is Marilyn’s press agent, Arthur Jacobs. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Williams.

My Week With Marilyn is pure perfection, all right, and even more. Simon Curtis, a seasoned London stage director making his feature-film debut, does a masterful job of handling the most minute moments with delicacy and candor. Like eyes growing accustomed to the dark, it takes a while to adjust to Ms. Williams. I’ve seen drag queens who look more like the real Marilyn. Her eyes are too big, the contours of her face lack the jaw line that stopped traffic, and where are the splendiferous curves when she shakes her booty singing “Heat Wave” and “That Old Black Magic” in film clips Colin watches hypnotized, in the darkness of a movie theater? Ms. Williams does her own singing and dancing and she’s letter perfect. Who knew? And then everything about the legendary sex goddess comes alive too—the breathless voice, the undulating poitrine, the tousled mop of bottle-blonde hair, the insecure body language that translated into control and power—as Ms. Williams grows into the role like new skin. The illusion grows on you, like a lichen. Scene by scene, she melts into the picture. By the end, she is no longer an imposter; she’s the real deal, inhabiting Marilyn’s body, mind, heart and soul.

As production on the ill-fated Prince and the Showgirl dragged on, the frightened American star grew more dependent on the English boy’s sweetness and sympathetic compassion (Mr. Redmayne’s charm and awkward sex appeal don’t hurt either). After she discovers Arthur Miller’s cruel notes on her neuroses and vulnerability that he later turned into The Misfits (a film she hated) and After the Fall (a play that would have killed her) and narrowly survives a suicide attempt, she needs a friend even more. Lonely and desperate to escape, to flee the hangers-on, the grinding pressures of the film, the press that followed her everywhere and the sycophants who falsely praised her even when she flubbed every line of dialogue, she threw caution to the wind and accepted his invitation to take a week off without tension and terror. “You should get out more—you should see the sights,” he says naïvely. “I am the sights,” she sighs wearily. Nevertheless, she disappears from the set without permission and tours the beauty of the English countryside. From Windsor Castle, where Colin’s godfather (Derek Jacobi) gave Marilyn a private tour, to skinny-dipping in a pastoral pond, a platonic relationship took roots. Discovering a freedom of self-expression she never knew, Marilyn’s self-confidence grew. Unfortunately, like countless others who fell under her spell, Colin mistook her childlike sincerity and sex appeal for genuine affection, and made the mistake of falling in love. She got some of her lost youth back, but like everything else in her tormented life, the euphoria was temporary. Miraculously, despite the angst, The Prince and the Showgirl finally wrapped, leaving the boy a sadder but wiser man. Her parting words to him were “Thanks for being on my side.”

I truly love this film, and Ms. Williams’s triumph in it. There was only one Marilyn Monroe and nobody will ever duplicate her unique gifts, but this brave, hard-working actress shows the many contrasting moods of a complex woman with inexhaustible craft. Sleeping with photos next to the bed of her mother, before she was taken away to an asylum, and Abraham Lincoln, whom she pretended was her father, she touches your heart until it cracks. “Everyone looks at me and they see Marilyn Monroe,” confides the woman who used to be a penniless sweater girl named Norma Jean Dougherty. “Then when they find out I’m not her, they run.” I was so focused that the film gave me neck pain, but that’s a good thing. I usually get a headache for all the wrong reasons and none of the right ones. Something moved me deeply watching Ms. Williams as the tragic Marilyn, illuminating the girlish joy, erotic glamour and self-destructive suffering of a public icon who was privately a bottomless pit of need. Whatever else you think of My Week With Marilyn, make no mistake about it—you know you have been to the movies.

rreed@observer.com

MY WEEK WITH MARILYN

Running Time 99 minutes

Written by Adrian Hodges

Directed by Simon Curtis

Starring Michelle Williams, Eddie Redmayne and Kenneth Branagh

4/4

Personally, I will always prefer the smashing and altogether enchanting MGM version in 1940, brilliantly written by Aldous Huxley, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, and who in his right mind would not? But if you long for the peace and grace of a bygone era, gloriously costumed and sumptuously designed, and the sweeping romance of lovers saved from the ruinous consequences of narrow-minded social pretensions, refurbished with the crisp satirical crackle of aged fireplace logs, this is the movie for you.

Pride and Prejudice is the one about the five eligible daughters of a struggling family named Bennet, and the desperate attempts made by their dithering, scheming mother to marry them off to five respectable suitors. The five sisters are all too aware that unless they find husbands to produce a male heir, their father’s ramshackle country estate will fall into the grubby hands of their closest male cousin. The burden of leading the way rests on the slender shoulders of sprightly Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), a heroine beloved for her lively wit, piercing sense of social justice and universal romantic plight.

Opportunity seems to knock when a rich, upstanding bachelor named Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) rents a nearby manor, but he’s more interested in Lizzy’s sister Jane. The story of Bingley’s timid courtship of Jane (Rosamund Pike), the eldest Bennet daughter, becomes the foil for the hate-at-first-sight relationship between Lizzy and Bingley’s snobbish friend, Mr. Darcy (tall, dark, handsome newcomer Matthew MacFadyen).

As “dear, beautiful Lizzy,” Keira Knightley is no Greer Garson. She doesn’t have the patrician poise, the beauty of a moss rose or the radiant intelligence. Nor is Mr. MacFadyen another Laurence Olivier. Sullen and physically imposing, as though his skin doesn’t quite fit his frame, he’s a brooding Gothic intruder, more akin to Heathcliff than Darcy. He’s no arrogant dandy like Olivier, and no 19th-century sex god like Colin Firth, whose career was born in the much-admired 1995 BBC television series. But he’s just different enough and sardonic enough to be interesting. And no matter who plays the leads, the ensuing plot twists and crossed wires in Pride and Prejudice are still the stuff of legend.

It’s the supporting cast that blithely lightens the load. As the flighty, flustered Mrs. Bennet, Brenda Blethyn offers a bit more than the usual dimwit portrayal. Dame Judi Dench is glorious as Darcy’s steely, patronizing and thoroughly obnoxious aunt, Lady Catherine, and Donald Sutherland is perfect as the august and long-suffering Mr. Bennet, who wouldn’t mind marrying off five daughters himself, but for a different reason—to get them out of the house and find some rest. Rosamund Pike is a lovely, astute Jane, and her scenes with Simon Woods’ nice but wooden Mr. Bingley bring some welcome humor and pathos to a potentially dull subplot.

Under the ambitious guidance of director Joe Wright, the story gets a barnyard face-lift that isn’t entirely in keeping with the novel. This time, the Bennet family lives in a house attached to a working farm with livestock roaming about with such fearless abandon that they all but take their meals at the dining-room table. But there is pleasure in this straightforward, youthful, no-frills approach. It seems less artificial that most costume epics, with a wholesome bubble that has led some wags to describe it as “a Jane Austen chick flick.” And the director has done a witty and masterful job of recreating a snooty little long-ago pocket of English country life that can today be seen only in embroidered heirloom wall hangings. It’s a world where young ladies thought about nothing more taxing than minuets and ribbons down their backs, and the words “old maid” gave their anxious mothers the vapors. The foibles of Jane Austen’s frivolous age are captured winningly, the absurdities of provincial middle-class society mirrored astutely right down to the last flounce and flutter of petticoats and eyelashes.

This may not be the definitive Pride and Prejudice, but it honors Jane Austen with reverence and spirit. At a time when we seem to be inundated by one gruesome, depressing movie after another, it’s reassuring to see an elegant man’s pride and a stubborn woman’s prejudice reach the lushly realized assertion that love conquers all.

Bad Buzz

Don’t let the title fool you: Bee Season is not about love in an apiary, or honey in a hive. It’s about the time of year when dictionary-toting adolescents sign up as contestants to compete for prizes, spelling words like “omniscient” and “diverticulitis.” Assaulted by Broadway musicals about spelling bees, and low-budget documentaries about spelling bees, I find myself, quite frankly, up to my unabridged Webster’s Collegiate with spelling bees. This predicament is neither eased nor eradicated by Bee Season. It is awful.

I looked forward to this. It comes from some fine people with impressive credentials: adapted from Myla Goldberg’s 2000 best-seller by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, the mother of Jake and Maggie, and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the talented partners responsible for one of my all-time favorite films, The Deep End. But despite the good intentions, something went pitifully wrong on the way from page to screen. Whatever people found intriguing about the novel is a mystery here, and however moving and unpredictable the story of a family of intellectuals going haywire in Oakland, Calif., might seem, the crisis fails to engage or convince in this tepid film.

Since most of it is weird, mystical and unplayable, the actors probably shouldn’t be blamed for the film’s failure, but for starters, I don’t think I would cast Richard Gere as a Jewish biblical scholar. He is Saul, an odd, anally retentive professor of religious studies at Berkeley whose only passions are the Kabbalah and the upcoming finals of the National Spelling Bee championships, in which his 11-year-old daughter Eliza (Flora Cross) is competing. Eliza is the family underachiever, but since her father has drilled into her head from infancy that the spelling of words contains certain secrets of the universe, her budding talent as a whiz-kid makes her the apple of Daddy’s eye, to the estranged detriment of his neglected teenage son, Aaron (Max Minghella), and his wife, Miriam (the equally miscast Juliette Binoche). Obsessed with Kabbalah, Saul spends all of his time as Eliza’s coach, convinced that his daughter’s special talent with letters will lead her to achieve shefa and communicate with God. The kid just wants to win a prize and please her doting, tyrannical father.

Meanwhile, Aaron turns his back on Judaism and joins a Hindu cult, and Miriam starts sneaking out at night, losing her grip on reality. When you find out what she’s up to, you may very well rub your eyes and go “Huh?” It is up to 11-year-old Eliza, an underachiever whose growing sense of alienation and terror makes her feel responsible for her family’s collapse, to change things. Obviously, the psychic vacuum her decision creates provokes a chain of events that shakes the family’s foundation, and the perfect house that Saul has constructed begins to crumble like pickup sticks.

Sadly, I’m afraid none of this makes a jigger of sense. The study of Jewish mysticism only adds to the confusion of lives undeveloped, dark secrets unexplored and motivations unexplained. The first hour is compelling, but the tension weakens as the complex plot unravels without telling us anything we want (or need) to know. In the end, the film has melted snow running through its veins. Seasoned veterans like Mr. Gere and Ms. Binoche fail to connect, leaving the two younger members of the quartet to steal most of the focus in dual acting debuts that are both grounded and memorable.

Unfortunately, for a movie about the power of words, Ms. Gyllenhall, the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of Running on Empty, fails to engage the viewer with the right words that might evoke magic, realism or understanding. Cold and elusive, Bee Season lacks the crucial emotional ingredients to make us care, and it remains too stubbornly esoteric and cerebral to appeal to anything more than a small and curious art-house crowd.

Personally, I will always prefer the smashing and altogether enchanting MGM version in 1940, brilliantly written by Aldous Huxley, with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, and who in his right mind would not? But if you long for the peace and grace of a bygone era, gloriously costumed and sumptuously designed, and the sweeping romance of lovers saved from the ruinous consequences of narrow-minded social pretensions, refurbished with the crisp satirical crackle of aged fireplace logs, this is the movie for you.

Pride and Prejudice is the one about the five eligible daughters of a struggling family named Bennet, and the desperate attempts made by their dithering, scheming mother to marry them off to five respectable suitors. The five sisters are all too aware that unless they find husbands to produce a male heir, their father’s ramshackle country estate will fall into the grubby hands of their closest male cousin. The burden of leading the way rests on the slender shoulders of sprightly Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley), a heroine beloved for her lively wit, piercing sense of social justice and universal romantic plight.

Opportunity seems to knock when a rich, upstanding bachelor named Mr. Bingley (Simon Woods) rents a nearby manor, but he’s more interested in Lizzy’s sister Jane. The story of Bingley’s timid courtship of Jane (Rosamund Pike), the eldest Bennet daughter, becomes the foil for the hate-at-first-sight relationship between Lizzy and Bingley’s snobbish friend, Mr. Darcy (tall, dark, handsome newcomer Matthew MacFadyen).

As “dear, beautiful Lizzy,” Keira Knightley is no Greer Garson. She doesn’t have the patrician poise, the beauty of a moss rose or the radiant intelligence. Nor is Mr. MacFadyen another Laurence Olivier. Sullen and physically imposing, as though his skin doesn’t quite fit his frame, he’s a brooding Gothic intruder, more akin to Heathcliff than Darcy. He’s no arrogant dandy like Olivier, and no 19th-century sex god like Colin Firth, whose career was born in the much-admired 1995 BBC television series. But he’s just different enough and sardonic enough to be interesting. And no matter who plays the leads, the ensuing plot twists and crossed wires in Pride and Prejudice are still the stuff of legend.

It’s the supporting cast that blithely lightens the load. As the flighty, flustered Mrs. Bennet, Brenda Blethyn offers a bit more than the usual dimwit portrayal. Dame Judi Dench is glorious as Darcy’s steely, patronizing and thoroughly obnoxious aunt, Lady Catherine, and Donald Sutherland is perfect as the august and long-suffering Mr. Bennet, who wouldn’t mind marrying off five daughters himself, but for a different reason—to get them out of the house and find some rest. Rosamund Pike is a lovely, astute Jane, and her scenes with Simon Woods’ nice but wooden Mr. Bingley bring some welcome humor and pathos to a potentially dull subplot.

Under the ambitious guidance of director Joe Wright, the story gets a barnyard face-lift that isn’t entirely in keeping with the novel. This time, the Bennet family lives in a house attached to a working farm with livestock roaming about with such fearless abandon that they all but take their meals at the dining-room table. But there is pleasure in this straightforward, youthful, no-frills approach. It seems less artificial that most costume epics, with a wholesome bubble that has led some wags to describe it as “a Jane Austen chick flick.” And the director has done a witty and masterful job of recreating a snooty little long-ago pocket of English country life that can today be seen only in embroidered heirloom wall hangings. It’s a world where young ladies thought about nothing more taxing than minuets and ribbons down their backs, and the words “old maid” gave their anxious mothers the vapors. The foibles of Jane Austen’s frivolous age are captured winningly, the absurdities of provincial middle-class society mirrored astutely right down to the last flounce and flutter of petticoats and eyelashes.

This may not be the definitive Pride and Prejudice, but it honors Jane Austen with reverence and spirit. At a time when we seem to be inundated by one gruesome, depressing movie after another, it’s reassuring to see an elegant man’s pride and a stubborn woman’s prejudice reach the lushly realized assertion that love conquers all.

Bad Buzz

Don’t let the title fool you: Bee Season is not about love in an apiary, or honey in a hive. It’s about the time of year when dictionary-toting adolescents sign up as contestants to compete for prizes, spelling words like “omniscient” and “diverticulitis.” Assaulted by Broadway musicals about spelling bees, and low-budget documentaries about spelling bees, I find myself, quite frankly, up to my unabridged Webster’s Collegiate with spelling bees. This predicament is neither eased nor eradicated by Bee Season. It is awful.

I looked forward to this. It comes from some fine people with impressive credentials: adapted from Myla Goldberg’s 2000 best-seller by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, the mother of Jake and Maggie, and directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the talented partners responsible for one of my all-time favorite films, The Deep End. But despite the good intentions, something went pitifully wrong on the way from page to screen. Whatever people found intriguing about the novel is a mystery here, and however moving and unpredictable the story of a family of intellectuals going haywire in Oakland, Calif., might seem, the crisis fails to engage or convince in this tepid film.

Since most of it is weird, mystical and unplayable, the actors probably shouldn’t be blamed for the film’s failure, but for starters, I don’t think I would cast Richard Gere as a Jewish biblical scholar. He is Saul, an odd, anally retentive professor of religious studies at Berkeley whose only passions are the Kabbalah and the upcoming finals of the National Spelling Bee championships, in which his 11-year-old daughter Eliza (Flora Cross) is competing. Eliza is the family underachiever, but since her father has drilled into her head from infancy that the spelling of words contains certain secrets of the universe, her budding talent as a whiz-kid makes her the apple of Daddy’s eye, to the estranged detriment of his neglected teenage son, Aaron (Max Minghella), and his wife, Miriam (the equally miscast Juliette Binoche). Obsessed with Kabbalah, Saul spends all of his time as Eliza’s coach, convinced that his daughter’s special talent with letters will lead her to achieve shefa and communicate with God. The kid just wants to win a prize and please her doting, tyrannical father.

Meanwhile, Aaron turns his back on Judaism and joins a Hindu cult, and Miriam starts sneaking out at night, losing her grip on reality. When you find out what she’s up to, you may very well rub your eyes and go “Huh?” It is up to 11-year-old Eliza, an underachiever whose growing sense of alienation and terror makes her feel responsible for her family’s collapse, to change things. Obviously, the psychic vacuum her decision creates provokes a chain of events that shakes the family’s foundation, and the perfect house that Saul has constructed begins to crumble like pickup sticks.

Sadly, I’m afraid none of this makes a jigger of sense. The study of Jewish mysticism only adds to the confusion of lives undeveloped, dark secrets unexplored and motivations unexplained. The first hour is compelling, but the tension weakens as the complex plot unravels without telling us anything we want (or need) to know. In the end, the film has melted snow running through its veins. Seasoned veterans like Mr. Gere and Ms. Binoche fail to connect, leaving the two younger members of the quartet to steal most of the focus in dual acting debuts that are both grounded and memorable.

Unfortunately, for a movie about the power of words, Ms. Gyllenhall, the Academy Award–nominated screenwriter of Running on Empty, fails to engage the viewer with the right words that might evoke magic, realism or understanding. Cold and elusive, Bee Season lacks the crucial emotional ingredients to make us care, and it remains too stubbornly esoteric and cerebral to appeal to anything more than a small and curious art-house crowd.

Olivier, greatest classical actor of the 20th century, is also to be seen at Barrow Street in the company of that neurotic porcelain beauty, his soon-to-be ex-wife, Vivien Leigh, as well as his young, somewhat dumpy future wife, Joan Plowright-not to mention that wrecked American genius, Orson Welles. Our host for the evening is Kenneth Tynan, finest drama critic since George Bernard Shaw.

This is the second time Tynan has been portrayed onstage recently-quite a compliment for a critic. They'll be building a statue to him next. The only thing missing in Orson's Shadow is the Lunts, I'm glad to say. There's something laborious about the Lunts. But Mr. Pendleton's royal flush of theater gods is in a heavenly league of its own (with the exception of Ms. Plowright, who is still alive). The playwright's clever and playful idea is to re-create the trauma behind the scenes of the 1960 London production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, which Welles directed, starring the middle-aged Olivier and his lover Plowright.

The manic Vivien Leigh, in trauma at the loss of Olivier, saunters grandly into the action in a brilliant performance from Lee Roy Rogers. The idea of mere mortal actors from Chicago's distinguished Steppenwolf impersonating the greats has obvious dangers. Who could possibly play Olivier except the man who performed him all his life-Olivier?

But the quartet uncannily captures the magical essence of things. John Judd has only to suggest Olivier in gesture and hooded glances, in his fussy stage fears and lordly, vulgar greenroom luviedom. His enslavement to Leigh's whims is one of the great love stories, and as with all good gossip, the gossip in Orson's Shadow is almost true. Mr. Pendleton, the dramatist, is a distinguished actor himself, and he understands and loves actors, being on intimate terms with their ways and fragile egos.

We couldn't be in the hands of a better backstage guide, nor a more splendid production (within a production) than David Cromer's. Orson's Shadow ultimately conveys a touching melancholy about the theatrical twilight of the gods and their gradual passing into dust from the ravages of age, illness and even insanity. But if Mr. Pendleton understands actors, he doesn't quite understand critics, if I may say so.

He cannot help himself. Mr. Pendleton lovingly embraces actors, but cannot bring himself to embrace a critic. His version of Tynan-played by Tracy Letts, the talented dramatist of the psycho-thriller Bug-is to make him craven. It's the one thing Tynan never was. Tynan's Achilles heel was that he adored star actors-particularly Olivier and Welles-whom he defined by their God-given "high definition performances."

For myself, the phrase "high definition performance" is more appropriate for the sale of Volkswagens. But Tynan's manner was never insecurely, loudly craven. I met him a few times, though I wouldn't pretend to have known him. At the height of his power-as opposed to the mystery of his emphysematic decline in Santa Monica, of all places-he possessed an effortless swagger of talent. He was like one of Whistler's suave, elegant, languorous aristocrats.

When Mr. Pendleton has Tynan announce about himself at the start that "no one really took seriously a word I wrote. You see, I am a critic," the laugh from the audience is automatic. But I'm obliged to respond on behalf of the Royal Society of the Prevention of Cruelty to Critics-a.k.a. the RSPCC-that everyone took seriously every word Tynan wrote. His column for the London Observer-my old newspaper-was the one we all read.

Tynan actually defined a drama critic as someone who knows the way, but can't drive the car. True, yes? But Mr. Pendleton's Orson's Shadow is a fanciful version of true events and therefore forgivable in two or three details. The following shouldn't affect your pleasure. They're just additional notes. But if you think they might spoil things, please resist reading on.

Still with me, eh? It isn't crucial, but Mr. Pendleton has deliberately conflated events. Tynan wasn't yet the dramaturge of the National Theatre in 1960 and Rhinoceros wasn't staged there. It was produced at the Royal Court, and Tynan was still the London Observer's critic. He was, in fact, silenced by the Machiavellian Olivier when he later hired him in 1963 to be his brains and the power behind the National's throne.

Mr. Pendleton has surprisingly missed one of the great lines in theater folklore. Tynan wrote to his hero Olivier suggesting he become his dramaturge. But he had all but killed Olivier's beloved Vivien Leigh in a murderous review of her sweet Cleopatra. ("She picks at the part with the daintiness of a debutante called upon to dismember a stag.") Olivier was married to Ms. Plowright by then. "How shall we slaughter the little bastard?" he asked her about Tynan. And thus it came to pass that he defanged the most powerful critic in England by hiring him.

Incidentally, Olivier first met Ms. Plowright when she took over the role as Archie Rice's daughter in John Osborne's The Entertainer. She was-sniffed Osborne, who was also mad for Vivien Leigh-"an unlikely Wallis Simpson to Olivier's Duke of Windsor." Archie was Olivier's first role out of tights in 20 years. But during the casting of the famous play, about a seedy third-rate comedian, Olivier-who was still obsessed with Vivien-actually wanted her to star in the play as Archie's working-class mother!

When the incredulous Osborne and the director Tony Richardson very politely inquired how the still-beautiful Vivien could possibly play his old mum, Olivier suggested in all mad sincerity that she could wear a rubber mask.

"Oh dearie, dearie me!" Richardson, convulsed with laughter, said afterward. "Rubber masks! Whatever next?"

So if you think the backstage lunacies of Olivier et al. in Orson's Shadow are exaggerated, take heart.

In July 2000, Alexandra Boyd, who originally played Joan Plowright, innocently wrote to her-"I felt compelled to drop you a line"-about Mr. Pendleton's version of Rhinoceros and the "exciting'' times that belonged to theater history. I shudder to think how the lady responded, for she's a stickler for facts. But then, if facts made a good play, good plays would be a cinch to write.

In her memoirs, And That's Not All, Ms. Plowright writes prissily that "'exciting' is not exactly the word to describe the catastrophic nature of events that surrounded that production." Mr. Pendleton's lovely, well-meant play is about the catastrophe. But in the end, was the Welles-Olivier-Plowright production such a disaster?

Tynan, though he worshipped Olivier and Welles, could be harsh about his favorites. He famously dismissed Welles' wayward Othello as "Citizen Coon." But he reviewed Rhinoceros quite favorably for the London Observer, although he never admired the absurdist Ionesco (and still didn't). In spite of the backstage idiocies we've learned about from Mr. Pendleton's reimagining, Tynan wrote admiringly of Welles' direction: "The overlapped dialogue, the whirligig moves, the boisterously assured utterance-these are Mr. Welles's trademarks, and the production as a whole is exactly what we have come to expect of him: a carefully orchestrated battle of egos, performed by actors who have learned from their director that being inhibited gets you nowhere in the theater."

The ingénue Joan Plowright didn't merit a mention from him. But he nailed what was surely the weakness in Olivier's performance. The greatest actor of his time couldn't play an ordinary, anonymous man.

"Laurence Olivier, as the last exemplar of individualism, is not so much miscast as undercast," Tynan wrote wittily. "Wearing an inexplicable Apache wig, and behaving with a determined kind of boyish, hangdog charm, Sir Laurence skitters gracefully around the stage, rolling his eyes and trying hard to seem humble and insignificant. The task is not an easy one; there is never any doubt that with one breath, one vocal blast, one surge of his enormous humanity, he could blow the part to smithereens, and with it the play."

A craven Tynan? Well, not really. But see Orson's Shadow just the same.

For an American icon, he was particularly unpretentious and human. A while ago, I was asked along to a dinner given by an old friend of his who lived in two chaotic rooms of the Chelsea Hotel. "Beautiful take-out," he said, teasing the host, who couldn't cook to save his life. The take-out wasn't so hot either. Miller was easy to talk to, like an elderly uncle. He looked pleased when I mentioned I'd just seen a fine revival of All My Sons.

"Yeah, I enjoyed it, too," he said unself-consciously.

Then I told him what happened during the intermission. A middle-aged man sitting next to me told me how much he liked the show and began to study his Playbill intently. At length, he looked up and said, "I didn't know Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman."

I thought Miller would bust a gut, he was laughing so much. At the same time, he was thrilled. Here was a man-an ordinary man-who was going to the theater to see a play, and he was just giving his honest response. The man was glad to be there, too.

There was nothing elitist about Arthur Miller or his plays. He was influenced by Ibsen and the Greeks, but he wrote from the gut, unafraid of the pull of honest emotion expressed by so-called ordinary folk. It's why we could connect with his great dramas, for all family wars and disappointments and yearnings are universal. Willy Loman is a "low man"-not a god or king, but Everyman.

Miller kept a carpentry shop at his home in Litchfield County where he made simple and workmanlike tables and chairs for the house, craftsmanlike and undecorative like his plays. He was a tall and famously handsome man, and his huge hands looked as if they could smash a typewriter in two. His modest writing studio was isolated in the surrounding grounds of the house. The room was virtually barren, with cheap linoleum on the floors, no pictures on the walls, no telephone. At the time, he worked at a desk he'd made and wrote on a 30-year-old typewriter.

His Roxbury, Conn., home, however, was more of an estate, with at least 350 acres: Miller was almost certainly the wealthiest playwright of our time (next to Neil Simon). Interviewing him a few years ago for a Vanity Fair piece, I assumed that the published play version of Death of a Salesman must have been his biggest seller, but he corrected me: It was The Crucible, his moral parable of the McCarthy witchhunts that became a universal tragedy of fanaticism and intolerance.

There had been different publishers of The Crucible since 1953, however, and he didn't know exactly how many copies of it had been sold. Would I try to find out for him? So the researchers at the magazine got to work on the play's tangled publishing history, and they came up with the staggering number of four and half million. "You live and learn," said Miller, impressed.

I couldn't resist adding that if he earned a dollar a copy, by my reckoning that made it well over two million dollars for just one published version of his plays.

"Well, someone's got to make it," he replied.

His plays remained popular in England, even though he long ago became unfashionable in America. He put it down to the commercial independence of nonprofit theaters in England like the National and bitterly regretted that there's no real equivalent system here. "But who gives a goddamn about fashion?" he protested when I mentioned the subject. "The only test of a play does not belong to fashion. The only test should be, 'Do I listen to this playwright or not? Does his play move me?'"

But he did give a goddamn, of course. In the punishing world of theater, great dramatists often have a cluster of early, successful work that isn't equaled in later years. Yet Miller never stopped writing! Theater was his public forum. Until the end, until well into his 80's, he still had things to say, and would not be silenced.

Laurence Olivier had a lot to thank him for. It was Miller who led the unlikely way to Olivier, the greatest classical actor of the 20th century, playing his most memorable modern stage role, the seedy, failed comedian Archie Rice in John Osborne's The Entertainer.

In July 1957, Miller accompanied his wife, Marilyn Monroe, to London, where she was filming the period comedy about a breathy innocent abroad, The Prince and the Showgir l, directed by her co-star, Olivier. Welcoming Miller-nicknamed "Mr. Monroe" and "Marilyn's Boy" by the British press-Olivier asked which plays he was interested in seeing. Miller named Osborne's Look Back in Anger, which had just opened at the Royal Court, because the title intrigued him.

To his surprise, however, Olivier advised him to pick something else-dismissing the breakthrough social drama he'd already seen with "It's just a travesty on England." It made Miller even keener to see it. Tickets were quickly arranged for the following night, and Olivier turned up unexpectedly to see the play a second time with him. He was stunned when Miller found Look Back in Anger a revelation-the first modern English play of the period, he said subsequently, to speak to him.

Anxious to grasp its significance, Olivier asked him twice-during the intermission, and again at the end-why he thought the play was so wonderful. Then they went backstage to meet the snarling 25-year-old Osborne. "Do you suppose you could write something for me?" a smiling Olivier asked him cravenly. According to Miller, Olivier was laying on the charm so much he could have convinced anyone to buy a car without wheels from him for $20,000.

Osborne's next play was The Entertainer, and the rest, thanks to Arthur Miller's role as the go-between, really is history.

Ten years ago, he was back at the Royal Court to see a new play with a friend of his, the London producer Robert Fox. (It's best, I guess, if we don't name the writer of the play.) Within a few minutes, however, Fox could hear Miller groaning to himself and shifting restlessly in his seat.

"Are you all right, Arthur?" he asked him as they were both taking a leak during intermission.

"No, I'm not," Miller replied feistily. "This is crap! Let's go."

Aware that members of the audience had recognized him, Fox suggested that perhaps he ought to stay for the second act

"It's crap and we're going!" Miller insisted, heading for the exit. "If we're not enjoying ourselves, why stay? Life's too short. I'm seventy-nine!"

For the disappointed theatergoer, life is always too short.

Lastly, this story Miller told me when I first met him that summer day in Connecticut all those years ago. There was a lake on his property, and as he took a gentle swim in it, he mentioned a TV soap opera that his sister, the actress Joan Copeland, had once starred in. Therein lies a tale and a Miller moral.

The character his sister played was killed off. Miller told me that his sister played the role of Ethel, who unexpectedly starts to die from an incurable disease. But when it dawned on the viewers what was happening, the TV station received thousands of letters in protest. Ethel must stay! But the die was cast, and they killed off Ethel just the same.

Then they thought up a bright idea. After a decent pause, Miller's sister returned to the soap opera as Ethel's long-lost twin from South Africa. But whereas Ethel had been a lovable character, her twin sister wasn't. So the protest letters poured in again. Ethel would never have a twin sister like this! The twin must go! So they killed her off.

"I hope this teaches us all a lesson," said Arthur Miller. "Never mess around with a good thing."

Then he swam off in the lake, at a determined, even pace.

That same year, almost half a century ago, American audiences were electrified by Laurence Olivier's emergence as the most stirring heroic actor of the 20th century in William Shakespeare's Henry V, which Olivier also directed. I mention Burton and Olivier here because they once played the kind of sexually uncomplicated and noble heroes to which we've become accustomed in the genre of epic historical spectacle. Of course, there's also Peter O'Toole in David Lean's 1962 Lawrence of Arabia, with the far-ahead-of-its-time sexual ambiguity of its hypnotically blue-eyed hero. But Mr. O'Toole's Lawrence was a very special case.

At a reported cost of $155 million, Alexander qualifies as a super-spectacle in every respect but one-namely in its neurotic, confused and sexually ambidextrous hero, played by Colin Farrell with a perpetual expression of apprehension because Mommy (Angelina Jolie's snake-caressing Olympias) and Daddy (Val Kilmer's one-eyed, tough-loving King Philip of Macedonia) wage an eternal war in Alexander's damaged and tortured soul.

Unfortunately, the presumed mass of moviegoers needed to recoup the costs of this super-spectacle-which includes thousands of extras and all the digital technology that money can buy-can't be expected tolerate a hero who needs to be told to either get a life or get a shrink. Don't get me wrong: As an inhabitant of a capitalist country, I have profound respect for the $155 million that Mr. Stone spent on his venture, what with all the employment it provided for hordes of technicians here and abroad. But it's foolhardy to challenge red-state prejudices with the blue states' brand of sexually venturesome entertainments, such as Bill Condon's Kinsey and Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education, targeted toward a narrow art-house audience.

Mr. Stone does his damnedest to bolster his spectacle with an art-gallery erudition that exhaustively documents the transitions from one civilization to the next in Alexander's relentless, hubris-driven march to the infinitudes of the East. Mr. Stone's crowning achievement is an extraordinary visual epiphany between a rearing horse and a rearing elephant confronting each other in an ancient Indian jungle (played in the film by modern-day Thailand.) In short, the tumultuous battle sequences spare neither the horses, the elephants nor the warriors.

The fact remains that Alexander would never have been green-lighted if its hero hadn't been touted in advance-in revisionist terms-as a bisexual man of action. Alexander's role model, Achilles, seemed to be similarly sexually ambivalent in Homer's Iliad, though not in Brad Pitt's "straight" muscular rendering of the character in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy. What of Patroclus? He was reduced in Troy to Achilles' cousin and hence a kinsman, not a lover, to be avenged.

Mr. Stone tries to minimize what many consider the great divide between gay and straight by tricking up the gay love scenes between Alexander and Hephaistion (Jared Leto) with coded eye contact and a preference for fraternal bear-hugs over man-on-man lip-and-tongue action. By contrast, the one out-and-out straight marital-sex scene is jazzed up by a violently jealous Roxane (played by the Puerto Rican-African-Cuban-Irish-American actress Rosario Dawson), who pulls a knife on Alexander after she catches him fondling another man; much of the scene is played with Roxane topless. Ho-hum-so what else is new? Ironically, what was once a puritanical prohibition in Hollywood's Production Code against the mixing of "races" has become merely a historical footnote to the current homosexual taboo.

The ultimate failing of Alexander, though, is its lack of urgency, tension and suspense-a failing reflected in the long interruptions in the narrative by authority figures like Christopher Plummer's Aristotle and Anthony Hopkins' Ptolemy, an aged former general in Alexander's Macedonian army, to provide some perspective on the events unfolding chaotically in the story. I didn't mind the History Channel lectures so much, because they at least liberated me, for a time, from the incessantly dismal whining and agonizing of Mr. Farrell's Alexander.

Still, as a film historian, I respect the length and breadth of Mr. Stone's serious-minded career sufficiently not to dismiss his current effort with undue haste and flippancy. Subtexts abound in Alexander, with or without its auteur's conscious intentions. Hence, it's impossible to contemplate Alexander's hubris (not simply in conquering foreign lands, but also in absorbing alien cultures into his own) without thinking of our equally hubristic President of the United States, who seeks to impose the "will" of his God on other peoples with other gods.

Curiously, however, Mr. Stone doesn't seem to avail himself of the alibi that all war movies are actually attacks on war itself, a barbaric activity reflecting the moral failures of supposedly civilized societies. Throughout his career, Mr. Stone has been no stranger to violence or even barbarism onscreen. He is, at least, free from the hypocrisy of pretending to deplore the very violence he's exploiting to entertain his audiences.

Well, then, is Alexander worth seeing? The best I can say is that though it is very far from the top of my list of end-of-the-year recommendations, it is equally far from the very bottom.

Office Politics, Japanese Style

Alain Corneau's Fear and Trembling, based on Amélie Northcomb's autobiographical novel of the same name, turns out to be virtually a one-set movie involving a bizarre conflict of two cultures in the skyscraping offices of a giant, Tokyo-based Japanese corporation. The interplay of cultures here is far from Sofia Coppola's comic romp Lost in Translation. Instead, Mr. Corneau's film, like Ms. Northcomb's novel, evokes the absurdist office routines of Herman Melville's Bartleby the scrivener. However, Ms. Northcomb takes great pains to explain her strange obsession to become completely Japanese, even to the point of the most humiliating submission to one's superiors-unlike poor Bartleby, who remains something of a mystery in his bizarre defiance of authority and routine.

Sylvie Testud plays Amélie, a Belgian woman who was born in Kobe, Japan, and never recovered from her childhood infatuation with Japanese civilization. When she signs a contract to work for the Yumimoto Corporation in Tokyo, she resolves to immerse herself in the Japanese way of doing things. Eager to please her bosses and co-workers, Amélie performs the humblest tasks with diligence and enthusiasm. Her immediate supervisor is Fubuki (Kaori Tsuji), a classically sculpted Japanese beauty whom Amélie deeply admires. But in a series of office missteps, Amélie finds herself relegated to servicing the company bathrooms. Despite this and many other humiliations, she stoically refuses to resign-in Japan, one is seldom fired from a company, and so there are many occasions when employees lose face repeatedly, weeping instead in private.

The movie would be depressingly masochistic if we didn't know that Amélie would eventually write a best-selling book about her experiences in Japan. But her tale is not simply a revenge story, either. What elevates Amélie's voluntary self-abasement from an almost incomprehensible pathology is the voluptuous complicity with which she embraces her ordeal. Often, when she looks out the office window at the Tokyo cityscape, she can imagine herself flying high above the city, absorbing its very essence. Her devotion to all things Japanese thus becomes quasi-religious in its spiritual intensity. In what is essentially a two-actress vehicle, Ms. Testud and Ms. Tsuji are letter-perfect in capturing all the shadings of their characters' passionately perverse relationship. The two also provide a film-ending punch line that perfectly sums up the paradox of their shared office adventure. Fear and Trembling is a must-see for any moviegoer looking for something really different.

Forgotten Lives

Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman's Born into Brothels has deservedly made the Oscar nominations' short list in the category of feature-length documentaries. The film is concerned with several stunningly charismatic children born to prostitutes in the red-light district of Calcutta, and the efforts of Ms. Briski, a New York–based photographer, to teach them to take photographs, which inspires them to look at their world with new eyes. Ms. Briski and Mr. Kauffman don't sentimentalize their subjects, nor discount the long odds they face in finding new lives without an education. The uneducated girls, when they are older, will almost inevitably join their mothers on the streets, and the uneducated boys will face lives of poverty or crime.

Still, in the years that Ms. Briski spent with her subjects, she became a part of their lives. The photos they took of each other introduced an element of artistic permanence into existences that would otherwise have been heartbreakingly transient. The resilience that shines in the faces of these children, both in the photos and in the movie itself, makes one angry once more about the incredible waste of human potential caused by social and economic injustice. For these haunting faces alone, Born into Brothels is on my own short list for best documentary-or, preferably, nonfiction film-of the year.

In the Mood for Wong

Wong Kar-Wai's Days of Being Wild (1991), his second feature, has come and just about gone from its one-week run at Film Forum, but you still can and should catch this stylistic gem on DVD. "Dreamlike" is a word that comes easily to mind in describing such Wong masterpieces as Ashes of Time and In the Mood for Love. In many ways, Days of Being Wild anticipated the overall pattern of its writer-director-auteur's haunting career, with this genuinely wild story of casual sexual encounters and obsessions across East Asian locales traversed by rootless characters crammed up in Hong Kong's dream factories.

Classic Noir

"Essential Noir" is the title of a film series at Film Forum (209 West Houston Street, 212-727-8110) consisting of 34 classics of American film noir being shown as 17 double features-remember them?-from Nov. 26 through Dec. 23. This truly essential slice of film-genre history opens with Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944). Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson head the sterling cast of this cat-and-mouse game of crime and detection, with Robinson the cat and Stanwyck and MacMurray the greedy, murderous mice. The cast of Mildred Pierce (1945) is headed by Mildred Pierce herself, Joan Crawford as the long-suffering mother of the bratty Veda (Ann Blyth), who finally draws the line at taking the blame for a murder committed by her terminally spoiled daughter.

Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), with Tom Neal and Ann Savage, and Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross, with Burt Lancaster, Yvonne de Carlo and Dan Duryea, are more cult items than noir classics, but both have an impressively fatalistic spirit (shown on Monday, Nov. 29).

Abraham Polonksy's Force of Evil (1948) has John Garfield making and losing a fortune in the numbers racket and an Old Testament brother (played by Thomas Gomez) sacrificed to the mob; Beatrice Pearson is the nice girl who sticks around to pick up the pieces (shown on Tuesday, Nov. 30).

Jules Dassin's Naked City (1948) is the one dud in the series, but don't miss Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1949), with Peggy Cumming and John Dall, and Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night (1949), with Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. These are two extraordinarily moving love stories in the dark shadows of a gun culture (shown on Wednesday, Dec. 1).

"How shall we slaughter the little bastard?" Olivier asked his wife, Joan Plowright, as he considered the unexpected offer. Olivier had recently been mauled by Tynan–who otherwise hero-worshipped him–for his season of plays at the Chichester Festival and was still fuming. In a brilliant, neutralizing, neo-Shakespearean maneuver, Olivier therefore hired him at the National–acquiring Tynan's youth and brains to build the new repertory of plays while stopping him writing. "God," Olivier wrote to him. "Anything to get you off that Observer ."

That Observer in London, it so happens, became my first home in journalism, and one day when I was a novice reporter in the mid-60's, I saw Tynan sweep rakishly into the building as if he owned the place, which he did in a way. Always dandyish, he was wearing a white suit on a rainy day, and to my young, wide eyes it was like glimpsing royalty. I remember–I'm slightly embarrassed to admit–that I immediately called home to tell my parents excitedly: "I just saw Ken Tynan, and he's wearing a white suit !"

Nobody wore them in those days, not even Tom Wolfe. But Tynan was the man we all read at school and at college, devouring everything he wrote. He's the man we still read. As John Lahr writes in his elegant introduction to The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan (published by Bloomsbury and edited by Mr. Lahr), he possessed a fizzing, unequaled "power both to spread the word and make it memorable." Intoxicated by theater, Tynan couldn't wait to tell us the news, good, bad or disastrous. He believed–my goodness!–that theater matters, that it counts for something big and important and unholy.

"I certainly miss our duelling days," he wrote nostalgically to Harold Hobson, drama critic of the Sunday Times ( The Observer 's opposition). Memorable duels need memorable opponents, and the Christian moralist Hobson could be a good match for the atheist champagne-socialist Tynan. He was writing to Hobson before his death, at the age of 53, from emphysema in godforsaken Santa Monica, Calif. "The trouble with our successors," he added, "is that nothing seems at stake for them."

But, alas–and damn it!–the Tynan diaries leave us with the overwhelming sense of a life helplessly adrift and all purpose spent in a no-man's land where absolutely nothing is at stake. This forlorn, furiously name-dropping, occasionally sadomasochistic record of the years 1971 to 1980–held back from publication by his widow, Kathleen, and now released by his eldest daughter, Tracy–shock and sadden us in the miserable picture he presents of himself "snarling, retching and wanking" into the abyss.

His well-known Victorian-schoolboy taste for spanking and caning–the disapproving headmaster's cane! Nanny's reprisal!–proves about as interesting as naughty middle-aged fantasies of a peculiarly English kind invariably do. Besides, he gleefully wrote about his soft-porn sex life before these diaries. (And he writes about it badly.) No, the shock of these rambling, doodling diaries comes with the horrible realization that, overwhelmed by melancholy and self-loathing, this most golden of talents has been reduced to "Diary of a Nobody."

By the time Tynan was 40, his dazzling self-confidence was on the wane. "Such is servility," he writes bitterly of his decade-long relationship to Olivier at the National. Wanting to create and direct, he devised the first trendy nude revue, Oh! Calcutta! But his book about William Reich was never finished; movie projects came to nothing; his will to write at all deserted him. "The sensation of vanishing. Nothing registers on me: I register nothing," he wrote. By 1974, he was recording: "I have no active professional identity at all–a sepulchral prospect on which to wake up every morning. Were I to commit suicide, I would be merely killing someone who had already ceased to exist. These grim reflections have had a markedly depressing effect on my libido. Sex in such a context seems as trivial as reading comics in a cancer ward."

Yet what purpose and wit he once possessed. It's hard to believe, as David Hare said, that this century's most celebrated theater critic worked his craft for a mere 13 years, from 1950 to 1963. "I counsel aggression," Tynan wrote of the deadly postwar British theater. "Because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist." Passionately embracing the modern, he rallied the New Wave with his famous endorsement of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger in 1956: "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger ."

Who can forget his critique of Orson Welles' grandiloquent, eye-rolling Othello as "Citizen Coon"? Or his brilliant note about Sir Michael Redgrave: "The difficulty with judging this actor is that I have to abandon all my standards of great acting (which include relaxation and effortless command) and start all over again. There is, you see, a gulf between good and great performances; but a bridge spans it, over which you may stroll if your visa is in order. Mr. Redgrave, ignoring this, always chooses the hard way. He dives into the torrent and tries to swim across, usually sinking within sight of the shore. Olivier pole-vaults over in a single animal leap; Gielgud, seizing a parasol, crosses by tight-rope; Redgrave alone must battle it out with the current …. "

Tynan was "part of the luck we had," as Tom Stoppard told the young Tynan children at his memorial service in London. And for an astonishing, brief time, he himself was lucky. His was the age of the convulsive new dramas at the Royal Court, the first plays of Beckett and the French Absurdists, the revolutionary new work of Brecht. The greatest actors of the century–Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson and so on–were still onstage. It was all there for him to report, which he did masterfully.

To be sure, there are flashes of the old lightning in the diaries of the irresistible, superior Tynan that used to be. On Fred Astaire: "The poet of late capitalism … he is the froth thrown up by the maelstrom of a condemned era, and miraculously, he has outlived it." Or this breezy diversion: "To ensure immediate arrival of breakfast in hotels, lock the door, remove all your clothes and go to the lavatory." A dour evening meal with several leading British journalists "in their blue suits with their defensive, hedging, qualifying manner" kicks him back to whiplash life. "God, the lack of selfhood and certainty! I can talk about not writing with more passion than they talk about writing. They look about as vivacious as a group portrait of the Bulgarian chess team."

The last years in Los Angeles, where he'd gone for his health as he was dying of emphysema in the late 70's, were salvaged by the kindly William Shawn of The New Yorker , who financed him. In return, Tynan produced two or three of the finest profiles ever written. The performer in him found an audience again, but too late.

"Still a non-smoker, but, alas, a non-worker," he wrote cryptically to Louise Brooks, with whom he had a memorable, platonic love affair. But there's the broken marriage to Kathleen. In a peach of a Freudian spoonerism, he asks her: "Did you remember to close the deadroom bore?" There was his S&M affair with the obliging Nicole, a young actress: "Then Nicole and I played the roles of count and countess whipping a new housemaid for theft and drunkenness …. " And there was the joyless round of Hollywood parties with the usual suspects, including the well-traveled Princess Margaret.

When it came to name-dropping, Tynan was in a super-league of his own. The most priceless example in the book is an account of a London party to celebrate the wedding anniversary of "Princess Margaret and Tony" in the early 70's. "The Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mum were also there," he notes en passant .

Tynan's fatal flaw–his inner insecurity–was his love of names, from royals to showbiz royalty. His need to hero-worship performers went hand-in-hand with his celebration of theater. In a sense, the stars he knew and worshipped legitimized him. Tynan himself was the illegitimate son of a successful self-made businessman and a former laundress who ended her life in a mental institution. The rest I leave to the psychologists. What I know–and am glad to know–is the enduring value of his work. Judging by these diaries, so full of despair and self-loathing, Kenneth Tynan couldn't have imagined that it would be remembered 40 years on.

I wish John Gielgud had gone on longer. One of the speakers reported that he died, at 96, while he was still in the middle of working, filming some David Mamet–Harold Pinter dramatic collaboration. While he's most known as a man of the theater, Gielgud came late in life-despite the jealous warnings of his great rival, Laurence Olivier-to love film work. Well into his 90's, he kept popping up for memorable moments on screen. He played the Pope in Elizabeth a couple of years ago. He did a silent cameo as a beleaguered Priam in the Player King's "dream of passion" in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet. Better still, he played the ghost in Mr. Branagh's earlier, better radio version of Hamlet a few years before that.

The ghost, of course, was the role Shakespeare himself is said by tradition to have played, and it's hard to imagine any ghost since Shakespeare as chilling and plaintive as Gielgud. None so haunting as when the ghost of the murdered king cries out, "O Hamlet, what a falling off was there.…" And none so bitter and vengeful when he spits out: "Lust, though to a radiant angel linked, / Will sate itself in a celestial bed / And prey on garbage."

I'd been getting deeper into Gielgud's work for several years now-I guess ever since I bought my own tape of Chimes at Midnight, which I re-run obsessively, awed by every quavering utterance of his Henry IV. And then I'd come upon the amazing 1994 BBC radio recording of Gielgud's Lear, made when he was 90-his last take on the great role, the culmination of a lifetime's learning about Shakespeare's language and the ages of man.

And then there was Gielgud as director. Now that I've got his staging of Richard Burton's 1964 Hamlet on tape at home (albeit in the primitive "Electronovision" version, Electronovision being a supposedly revolutionary development in recording theatrical performances for movie-theater release). In my limited but not negligible experience, it's the best Hamlet I've seen. I can play it over and over again; it transcends Electronovision and, I'll bet, any Hamlet you've seen. (Hume Cronyn, who played Polonius beautifully in this version, made a memorable appearance at the Shakespeare Society's Gielgud tribute.)

Still, one thing you generally lose when Gielgud directs is his voice. Someone once called it the most beautiful voice in the 20th century. (The only rival to my mind might be Rickie Lee Jones on Flying Cowboys-but that could be love talking.)

There's nothing like that voice, which perhaps can best be heard on that magnificent final Lear. So it was interesting that, in all the encomiums and anecdotes at the Gielgud tribute-and there were some great ones2-few, if any, spoke specifically about that voice (maybe because among an audience of Shakespeareans, it was taken for granted). The emphasis was on how transformative Gielgud had been in theater-how there would be no Royal Shakespeare Company, no National Theatre, had he not pioneered the modern repertory company. And of course, there were reminiscences of his famous and hilarious "inadvertent" insults, which, after hearing a whole evening's worth, sounded brilliantly advertent, if that's a word (it should be). I think he only feigned the fogginess that masked the malice. But there were also tributes to his generosity from actors and playwrights who'd worked

with him.

But what is it about that voice? It's many things, but one thing is that thrilling rhythmic quaver, a quaver that turns each extended phoneme into dark music. That quaver, in fact, can be seen as the intersection, the transition point between two styles of Shakespearean acting.

Recently I listened to a fascinating recording that reproduced-albeit in a sonic cloud of scratch and static-extremely early recordings of late Victorian Shakespeareans, actors such as Henry Irving, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Ellen Terry, even Edwin Booth. All except Booth were emoting in what had become an operatic (at best) and stilted and encrusted (at worst) oratorical style. But they all carried the power to infuse their voices with that rhythmical ululation, a primal pattern of sound that carried the sound. Listening to it at the Lincoln Center Performing Arts annex, it occurred to me that this pulsing wave form that bore along the particles of speech in a way replicated the rhythms of the iambic pentameter verse. It was the pentameter beneath the pentameter, and the best of the old Shakespearean actors played with it, played with synchronic and diachronic ways of manipulation to serve the emotion expressed.

That quaver is a genetic legacy as well. Gielgud was the great nephew of Ellen Terry and the inheritor, in a way, of the cumulative artistry of three centuries of Shakespearean actors.

There's a scholarly article I came across recently that argues there is "an unbroken chain of Hamlets" from Richard Burbage, who played it under Shakespeare's eyes, to the generations of succeeding Hamlets, each of which saw the previous generation's Hamlet. So that when Olivier played Hamlet, his take on it represented an incorporation-even if by selective rejection-of all the Hamlets that preceded him. Thus, Gielgud's Hamlet was the link between the Ellen Terry generation of Shakespeareans and Olivier and his modern successors.

Gielgud was an avatar of all that history, but he was also, crucially, a transition to the best of contemporary acting. A number of speakers at the tribute mentioned the powerful influence of his performance as Angelo in Measure for Measure back in 1950 as a breakthrough, a turning point in Shakespearean acting, bringing a Brando-like tormented psychological realism to the role of the sexually repressed (and sexually obsessed) Viennese deputy. But he never left that classical quaver behind; he disciplined it to bring the pulse of poetry to the prose of naturalism.

And we might not have had much of a record of that at all if Gielgud had listened to his insanely jealous rival, Laurence Olivier. That was one of the revelations in my conversation, a couple of days after the Gielgud tribute, with one of the featured speakers, Keith Baxter.

Mr. Baxter played a unique and pivotal role in the history of Shakespearean performance, the role of Prince Hal in Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight-not only the heir torn between the throne and the tavern, between the powerful personalities of Bolingbroke and Falstaff, but also the performer torn between Gielgud and Welles, two of the most powerful actors of the age.

One could do worse things in life than to spend it watching Chimes at Midnight over and over again. I've done that a lot lately. Each time one sees it the film grows, the performances deepen; it becomes more sophisticated and more primal, one of the great intersections of film and theater, perhaps the greatest Shakespearean film of all.

And then there's that scene in the very middle of Chimes at Midnight after the horrific battle of Shrewsbury, that amazing scene when the three of them-Gielgud, Welles and Baxter-face each other over the body of the slain Hotspur.

There's no indication in the text (which Welles rejiggered) that the three of them exchange glances, but it's one of those moments in which Welles' genius as Shakespearean and his genius as filmmaker came together to capture and express the implicit emotional dynamic between the three in a way I've never seen on stage.

"Orson gave me almost no direction," Mr. Baxter told me when we met the morning of his flight back to London, at the townhouse where he was staying.

"But the one thing he did tell me was that this is essentially a love story, a love triangle-a boy torn between two fathers, two father figures."

And in fact, in life Gielgud and Welles were in some ways father figures to Mr. Baxter; they'd both crucially fostered his career as a Shakespearean actor.

Mr. Baxter was a Welsh lad who had come to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, but felt no special calling to do Shakespeare until he saw Gielgud play Leontes in The Winter's Tale. Mr. Baxter found himself stunned by Gielgud's ability to take some of the knottiest, some of the most twisted and involuted language in all Shakespeare and deliver it with a casual, offhand eloquence.

Getting cast by Welles as Hal was another turning point in Mr. Baxter's life. He's gone on to play many of the major Shakespearean roles, including Hamlet and Mark Antony (his favorite-he played Antony four times, once opposite Judi Dench's Cleopatra).

He feels he owes it all to playing Hal between Welles and Gielgud. And, by the way, he's a terrific Hal; you can see the future Antony he loves in his Hal. Like Antony, Hal is torn between two worlds, between the realm of the sensual and the realm of the sensible. Mr. Baxter's Hal was also torn between two actors, two titans who represented different realms as well: Gielgud a man of the theater, Welles who'd gone from theater to film. And each, says Mr. Baxter, in awe of the other.

"When I would be driving to the set with Orson, he'd tell me, 'I'm sure John sees me as a terrible fraud and mountebank.' And then when I was driving with John, he'd say, 'I'm sure Orson considers me a terrible old ham.'" For his part, Mr. Baxter says, he was in awe of them both, an awe that fed into his role as Hal, the prince caught between two powerful charismatic figures, two conflicting father figures. It was an awe, he says, that made the rejection scene at the close of Chimes at Midnight so deeply moving.

You know the rejection scene at the close of the Second Part of Henry IV, right? Falstaff has roused himself from the fleecing of Justice Shallow (an amazing version of the greedy, credulous and yet somehow charming old geezer, played by Alan Webb) in order to race off to the court when he hears that King Henry IV has died and that his old partner in crime and carousing, Prince Hal, is about to be crowned king. Dragging the credulous Shallow with him, drunk with the foretaste of the spoils of the realm he thinks he'll share, Falstaff barges into the solemn, chanting coronation procession and cries out to the new king, "God save thee, my sweet boy!"

Hal, now King Henry V, soon to be conqueror of France at Agincourt, stops his fat friend dead in his tracks with "I know thee not old man.…"

And then delivers a stunning, stinging, bitter and sweeping condemnation of his onetime misleader:

I know thee not old man: fall to thy prayers;

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so

profane,

But being awake I do despise my dream....

It goes on, and it gets worse-cruel, cold, cutting. It's a stunning moment, and as played by Mr. Baxter and Welles in Chimes, it becomes not just one of the great moments in the history of Shakespearean performance, but one of the great moments in the history of cinema as well. (There are those who argue that, as Wellesian cinema, Chimes at Midnight is superior to Citizen Kane.)

Mr. Baxter told me a fascinating story about the way that scene was shot, how it typified the on-the-run, on-the-lam, catch-as-catch-can way Chimes at Midnight was filmed. The way the 1965 production had to be shut down repeatedly, as Welles ran out of money and had to con new sets of producers to finance him. How one of the cons involved Welles convincing a set of money men that he'd be shooting a (more commercially viable) remake of Treasure Island simultaneously with Chimes at Midnight. With Falstaff's tavern doubling as the Admiral Benbow Inn. How Welles raced across Spain to do a camera setup for Treasure Island to keep the con going. And then there was the time Welles had to skip town to escape a couple of Americans he thought were pursuers from the I.R.S.-but who, it later turned out, were just American journalists in trench coats.

The rejection scene itself was filmed on the run in three parts. Hal on horseback was filmed in Andorra, the coronation procession in Alcazar. "Then," Mr. Baxter said, "the money ran out, but Orson forbade me to go back to England. He let me go to Morocco, but I had to go every day to the American Express and see if we were starting up, and word finally came that Orson had found a church somewhere in the Pyrénées to shoot the rejection speech."

Despite the haphazard desperation-or because of it-it's an utterly, profoundly heartbreaking scene. An almost cosmically heartbreaking sight, to see Falstaff's stricken countenance as the reality of Hal's rejection sinks in and Falstaff sinks to his knees. Welles was the first to bring the power of the full-screen close-up to Shakespearean acting; some, like Peter Brook, have argued that the film close-up frees Shakespearean actors from the need to rant to reach the rafters of a theater, allows them to register rather than over-project emotion. And nowhere is the power of the full-screen close-up more evident than in the rejection scene. It invites us to look into Falstaff's-and Welles'-soul.

But what is really going on in Falstaff's face? As Hal's denunciation comes to a close, surprise and hurt are succeeded by an enigmatic expression that looks suspiciously like a smile.

What's the story of that surreptitious smile? "I found that expression, personally, almost unbearably moving," Mr. Baxter told me. "The look on his face becomes almost a fierce pride, as if to say, 'That's my boy. He's come out right.'"

Fascinating. Whatever you think about Welles' choice of expression, and Mr. Baxter's interpretation, it's a challenging notion. This moment of utter rejection is, after all, the final close-up of a character who is one of the great creations in all literature, rendered by one of the greatest Shakespearean actors and directors. And he chooses a smile! It's just a token of the way Welles' performance as Falstaff is one of those treasures that deepen, become ever more layered and complex. One almost wants to say it grows and matures like a fine wine, except that would inevitably, unfortunately summon up memories of Welles in his tragic lost, last years. The Welles who supported himself in his futile, frustrating attempts to make films by doing wine commercials-like the one for Paul Mason in which he uttered, with mock Shakespearean gravitas: "We will serve no wine before its time."

Mr. Baxter tells an extremely sad story from this period, an encounter with Welles that is almost an eerie recapitulation of that rejection scene they played together. It was 20 years later, sometime in the mid-80's, not long before a "surfeit-swell'd" Welles died. Mr. Baxter was making a stopover in L.A. and thought to surprise him by showing up at Ma Maison, the Beverly Hills hot spot where Welles took long, Falstaffian lunches.

"You know," Mr. Baxter told me, "there's something to the idea that actors become the roles they play in Shakespeare. I mean, Olivier's Richard III was so like Larry. Larry destroyed everything that got in his way- and like Richard, he was feminine and serpentine." (One of the most serpentine things Olivier did, Mr. Baxter says, was to tell his lifelong rival, John Gielgud, that he had no talent for making films, that Gielgud should stick to the stage. "It was Orson who told John he should do more film, that he could do anything in film.") If Olivier became Richard, Mr. Baxter says, Welles became Falstaff.

Mr. Baxter had arrived late that day at Ma Maison. "I'm almost never late," he recalls, but that day he was, and "as my car pulled up, there was Orson making his way out. Looking just ... huge. It was terrible. He had to be helped down the stairs by two waiters and then helped into the cab they called.…"

Mr. Baxter didn't know what to do. In the end, he stayed out of sight until Welles was gone.

He didn't intend it as a rejection. Not the kind of harsh blow Hal had dealt to Falstaff. It was more a kind of loving forbearance, I think; a sense that he might not be able to conceal his dismay at the surfeit-swell'd figure Welles had become. He was reluctant to serve as a reminder, as a mirror to Welles of the way everything had gone wrong since they'd played the rejection scene together in Chimes. And so he waited, unseen, while Welles was hoisted into his cab and spirited away.

It's a sad story, but the deepening beauty and power of Chimes at Midnight gives the dignity of tragedy rather than pathos to Welles' end.

"Orson said only one thing to me before we started shooting," Mr. Baxter recalled. "He said, 'We want to call down the corridors of time with this film.'"

And they did. John Gielgud and Orson Welles-and Keith Baxter between them-still call down those corridors; you can hear the echoes ring out in Chimes at Midnight.

When was Hamlet born? The premiere of The Three Sisters ? The date that Tony Kushner's Angels in America , the epic drama of our time, opened? No, only John Osborne's Look Back in Anger , the watershed drama of its time, actually has a birthday. It stands unusually alone, less an accident of history, more a time bomb. It premiered at the then newly founded Royal Court Theater, London, on May 8, 1956-dynamiting the tasteful, reticent course of English drama and ushering in the new.

Alas, you would get no sense of the importance of Look Back in Anger -or even of its living, vital quality as drama-from the careless, deadly revival by the Classic Stage Company. I regret to say that it is as if the director Jo Bonney and her histrionic leading man, Reg Rogers, as Jimmy Porter, haven't a clue what they're doing, or why. It's more than unfortunate that of all the gin joints in all the world, they happened to bump into me, who's currently struggling along with the official biography of John Osborne.

The wayward production is a lost opportunity to interest New Yorkers in a seminal English drama rarely seen here. It leaves me looking back with the thought that if this had been the premiere of Look Back , we almost certainly would never have heard of the play, or its author, again.

Yet this ferocious drama of class war and marital battlegrounds that's so identified with England couldn't be more un-English in its blistering rhetoric and passion. Osborne wrote from the gut-reacting against the refined middle-class drawing room dramas of Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan. He admired them both, but he was speaking as the rebellious spokesman of the restless new generation.

His articulate rage on behalf of the dispossessed lower class of England left Rattigan out of fashion and fleeing to Hollywood. The bewildered Rattigan spent hours explaining to George Devine, the founding artistic director of the Royal Court, why Look Back couldn't be a success. "Well, it is," Devine kept answering. "And it's going to make the Royal Court possible." "Then I know nothing about plays," said Rattigan. "You know everything about plays," Devine told him. "But you don't know a fucking thing about Look Back in Anger ."

In fact, the form of Look Back was nothing new. (Beckett's 1955 Waiting for Godot broke the form.) Osborne described his own play as "a formal, rather old-fashioned play." Its conventional three-act structure was no different to the Rattigan and Coward dramas he'd appeared in when he was a small-time repertory actor. The self-educated Osborne actually learned about theater-and how to write, or how not to write-from acting in good plays and bad.

What was stunningly new about Look Back was the heat and vitality of its language. It still stirs the blood. "It's no good trying to fool yourself about love," goes one of Jimmy Porter's famous speeches. "You can't fall into it like a soft job, without dirtying your hands. It takes muscle and guts. And if you can't bear the thought of messing up your nice, clean soul, you'd better give up the whole idea of life and become a saint because you'll never make it as a human being. It's either this world or the next."

The sheer immensity of feeling amid the torpor of class-ridden 1950's England was literally a shock to the system-to the privileged ruling elites, the conformist chinless wonders, the measured English way. "Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm," Jimmy Porter cries. "Just enthusiasm-that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!"

The American sociologist, George Goetschius, was an unofficial adviser to the Royal Court and a friend of Tony Richardson's, the original director of Look Back . Seven hundred fifty new plays were submitted to the Court in 1955; only Look Back was produced. But when Mr. Goetschius was shown the script, he said admiringly: "I tell you this. No Englishman wrote this dialogue. The guy's an American."

Arthur Miller was another admirer of Look Back , finding it in 1950's London "the only modern English play that I have seen." He meant its atmosphere of social realism as much as its burning rhetoric. English theater, and Osborne in particular, have a lot to thank Mr. Miller for. He introduced Laurence Olivier to the play, and Olivier's support was like being kissed by God. It happened in this near-farcical way:

Mr. Miller-nicknamed "Mr. Monroe" by the English press-was in London in 1956 when Marilyn, his then-wife, was making a terrible film co-starring and directed by Olivier, The Prince and the Showgirl . Olivier asked Mr. Miller what play he'd like to see, and was told that he'd heard Look Back was interesting. Olivier took him to see it-hiding the fact that he'd already seen it and hated every minute of it. When Mr. Miller gave Look Back his enthusiastic endorsement, however, Olivier saw the light and jumped on the Royal Court bandwagon.

He immediately contacted his friend, George Devine, to ask if this young man Osborne would write something for him. Osborne was then in the midst of writing The Entertainer , his drama about a failed music hall comic, Archie Rice, as postcolonial metaphor for crumbling old England. ("Don't clap too hard, it's a very old building!") The first two acts were sent to Olivier, who responded that he'd be delighted to play the role of Billy. He'd got it wrong! (Wrong again!) He'd chosen the part of the sympathetic Edwardian father. Gently advised that the lead role was Archie, Olivier, the greatest classical actor of the century, went on to play him, of course, and make the play a legend.

It was also a bold move for Olivier to take, in effect blessing the scourge of the establishment. Osborne, a nonconformist all his life, was mistaken for a social revolutionary, just as Look Back was wrongly seen as left-wing political propaganda. He wanted theater to change; in fact, he romanticized England's mythic past. Somerset Maugham had already called Osborne's generation "scum." The literary critic Harold Nicholson snootily prophesied, "The dandies of the new generation will have dirty fingernails." Osborne went on to dress like a dandy, too, and Kenneth Tynan, the leading drama critic of his day, in the London Observer called Osborne "the dandy with a machine gun."

It was Tynan who famously wrote about Look Back : "I doubt I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger ." Even so, Osborne distrusted the brilliant Tynan's faddish cleverness (and the champagne socialist's love of Bertolt Brecht). "Come and help us make history," Tynan grandly said to him as literary manager of the newly founded National Theater. "I've already made it," Osborne replied, which was the start of a beautiful feud.

But few would disagree-except for nutty revisionists-that Osborne did make history. For one undeniable thing, Look Back saved the Royal Court Theater in its first, shaky season. For another, it linked a public view of England to private wounds-a specialty of Osborne's, and the mantle inherited by many English dramatists, including David Hare.

To be sure, the play has its flaws. It always had. It has been critiqued as a bullying misogynist tirade by feminists and as a closet homosexual drama by gay activists. Yet every new generation has always responded to it, in spite of the silent sixth character in the play waging another war of attrition-the ironing board, said to be as obsolete nowadays as a horse and buggy.

It's disappointing, then, about the Classic Stage Company's production. But you aren't taking much care if you dress 1950's England in American clothes. You aren't conveying the open wounds of class warfare if your Jimmy Porter is played with a weird upper-class accent out of-of all things-Noël Coward. You can't hate in Look Back in Anger without the right kind of love.

Knights in tights have been giving me pleasure over the holidays. The concurrent publication by Applause Books of the lives of England's three greatest knights of the theater-Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Sir Ralph Richardson-makes one almost proud to be English. If I restrain myself just a little, it is only because the former Oxford don, Roger Lewis, has written an astonishingly silly biography of Olivier in which he favorably compares him to Peter Sellers.

It's like comparing the Parthenon to Graceland. Mr. Lewis' previous biography, however, was of Peter Sellers. Obviously he has him on the brain. There have been at least 15 other biographies of Olivier, but Mr. Lewis' takes the strudel. He writes like an unhinged Susan Sontag. He muses about Olivier's film of Hamlet : "Am I alone in thinking the curtains of Gertrude's bed are spread like the lips of a giant vagina?"

Let me assure him about that. He is alone. And so I took another spoonful of Christmas pudding, and left him alone.

The pleasures of John Gielgud's reissued An Actor and His Time and Garry O'Connor's delightful Ralph Richardson: An Actor's Life more than redress the balance. Sir Ralph-the English eccentric who could be seen roaring precariously round London on his motorbike, pipe jammed into his mouth, Spanish parrot, Jose, perched on his shoulder-died in 1983. Sir John-patrician, gossipy, sly, unique-is still happily with us, aged 94. The English love their actors, and Gielgud and Richardson, linked together, as Mr. Gielgud wittily put it, "like the brokers men in Cinderella, " were loved more than Olivier, who was merely revered.

The glittering triumvirate define the modern history of English theater. Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson-note their habitual billing-could only be English. Sir John's family tree of actors reaches back to the 19th century, to his great-aunt Ellen Terry and her illegitimate son, the theater visionary and designer, Gordon Craig. It's an extraordinary theater tradition, the pride of England. For instance, a fourth unbilled member of the Olivier-Gielgud-Richardson ruling elite was Dame Peggy Ashcroft. Among the junior members and satellites were Sir Alec Guinness (Mr. Gielgud's protégé) and Sir Michael Redgrave (Vanessa Redgrave's father). That generation led to such other riches as Maggie Smith (Olivier's Desdemona), Sir Ian McKellen, Albert Finney (who began as Olivier's understudy) and Michael Gambon, who is said to be the successor to Olivier's crown, like every great English actor before him.

Today, the irreverent new wave actors tend to dismiss the holy trinity. (But they have never seen Olivier, Mr. Gielgud or Richardson act on stage.) Olivier is viewed more as the dated peak of the 19th-century romantic tradition; Mr. Gielgud as a fossil of airy English lyricism; and Richardson as, well, Richardson-nutty, disembodied, as if appearing in a half-baked dream of his own making.

I wouldn't dismiss them so easily, if I were you. Olivier will never be surpassed, but I believe that Mr. Gielgud's contribution has been underestimated, though he remains the greatest verse-speaker of our time. He is an actor of unstoppable curiosity (which makes him too scatterbrained to be a great director). But his love of theater made him an early experimentalist who added an unexpected dimension to the parochial London theater. Mr. Gielgud was the champion of the Russian director and designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, as well as of the French innovator, Michel St-Denis. He was devoted to the new work of Peter Brook, jumping through ridiculous hoops for him in Oedipus at the National Theater.

"Frighten me," the director, Mr. Brook, said to the Oedipus cast during an improvisation. Each took his turn, but only Mr. Gielgud succeeded. He announced: "We open next Tuesday."

And Richardson's legacy? The English adored him because he succeeded in seeming both ordinary and eccentric. (Neither is threatening.) But he was extraordinary , and no one really knew him-including his enigmatic, secretive self.

When he was in his 70's, I interviewed him and still count my blessings. "I'm a very … square chap," he confided, squeezing out the words for extra emphasis, as was his way. He certainly looked the part-square and tweedy, camouflaging himself in his pipe smoke. He had his picture taken by the distinguished photographer Jane Bown whom he called, most politely, "Miss Boon."

"My problem with being photographed is that I never know who I am," he confessed, and he looked genuinely baffled, as if speaking about someone else. "Who am I? I never know. I haven't a clue . Who do you think I am, Miss Boon?"

He was fun, that's for sure! A fireworks enthusiast, he was a proto-George Plimpton. He famously set Olivier's Chelsea home ablaze. Hoping to impress Olivier's then-wife, Vivien Leigh, Richardson had organized a fireworks display in their garden. Unfortunately, to everyone's consternation, the rockets somehow doubled back on themselves, demolishing the Olivier's drawing room like missiles. The furious, and house-proud, Vivien Leigh banned him from visiting ever again-until, many years later, he was allowed to visit the Oliviers' stately home, Notley Abbey. Exactly how he managed to fall through the ceiling into the Oliviers' bedroom below must rank as one of the wonders of the world. He was in the attic respectfully admiring the frescoes created by monks in the Middle Ages when, stepping off a beam for a better view, he stumbled and fell through the floor.

You have the glorious impression that he may have done such things accidentally on purpose. He could have dark moods, too. He once decked Alec Guinness with a blow to the jaw, having mistaken him momentarily for Graham Greene. Greene had called him a lousy actor; Alec Guinness was his friend, even after the knockout punch.

He was knighted before Olivier and Mr. Gielgud, and had the deepest admiration for them both. "I haven't got his splendid fury," he said of Olivier. It was true. But nobody has ever acted quite like Ralph Richardson, or dared to, before or since. No actor, for one thing, has spoken like him. (Olivier and Mr. Gielgud are often impersonated on stage, never Richardson.) Stillness was one of his greatest virtues, a hypnotic understatement and compassion. He conveyed compassion better than anyone, and Falstaff was his finest hour. The apparently ordinary Richardson possessed the soul of a poet, and so he was entranced by the mystery of life.

"He wants to hoard all of himself for himself, for that is the power of his acting," writes Mr. O'Connor in his fine biography. "It is like Philoctetes and his bow. He mustn't give away the source of his power, for if he does one of the arrows will leap out and wound his own foot, his own flesh."

Sir Ralph's biographer comes dangerously close to plucking out the heart of his mystery. Certain magic is best left unexplained. But Mr. O'Connor has succeeded against many odds in writing a sensitive and definitive biography of the great actor. He has brought the unearthly Ralph Richardson back to life, and all will be glad.