Radio, Television and Film
In 1954 and 1955 Richardson played Dr. Watson in an American/BBC radio co-production of Sherlock Holmes stories, with Gielgud as Holmes and Orson Welles as the villainous Professor Moriarty. In the 1960s Richardson played Lord Emsworth on BBC television in dramatisations of P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories, with his real-life wife Meriel Forbes playing his domineering sister Connie, and his friend Stanley Holloway as his butler Beach. In totally different vein, he appeared in the 1981 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, having been offered the part of Disraeli in a play what Ernie Wise had written.
Richardson's film appearances include Things to Come (1936), The Citadel (1938), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Heiress (1949; his first nomination for an Academy Award), Richard III (1955; playing Buckingham to Olivier's Richard), Our Man in Havana (1959; with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969). He portrayed Simeon in Jesus of Nazareth (1977). In 1981, he portrayed the Supreme Being in a cameo appearance near the end of the Terry Gilliam film Time Bandits. Also that same year, he appeared as Ulrich of Craggenmoor, the aging sorcerer who takes on an ancient dragon in the fantasy epic Dragonslayer. He played the barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the television adaptation of the Agatha Christie play, Witness for the Prosecution, starring alongside a young Bridges. Richardson played the sixth Earl of Greystoke in the 1984 film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award. His last film appearance was in Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984), starring Paul McCartney.
In 1939 British exhibitors voted him the 9th most popular local star at the box office.
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Famous quotes containing the words television and/or film:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“Is America a land of God where saints abide for ever? Where golden fields spread fair and broad, where flows the crystal river? Certainly not flush with saints, and a good thing, too, for the saints sent buzzing into man’s ken now are but poor- mouthed ecclesiastical film stars and cliché-shouting publicity agents.
Their little knowledge bringing them nearer to their ignorance,
Ignorance bringing them nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.”
—Sean O’Casey (1884–1964)