Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. He worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles. Richardson was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, first for The Heiress and again for his final film, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes.
About Ralph Richardson in brief
Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor who dominated the British stage for much of the 20th century. He worked in films throughout most of his career, and played more than sixty cinema roles. Richardson was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, first for The Heiress and again for his final film, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. He was celebrated in later years for his work with Peter Hall’s National Theatre and his frequent stage partnership with John Gielgud. Richardson’s film career began as an extra in 1931 and he was soon cast in leading roles in British and American films including Things to Come, The Fallen Idol, Long Day’s Journey into Night and Doctor Zhivago. He continued on stage and in films until shortly before his sudden death at the age of eighty. His acting was regularly described as poetic or magical, and his eccentric behaviour on and off stage was often seen as detached from conventional ways of looking at the world. He had no thought of a stage career until a production of Hamlet in Brighton inspired him to become an actor. He learned his craft in the 1920s with a touring company and later the Birmingham Repertory Theatre. In 1931 he joined the Old Vic, playing mostly Shakespearean roles. After he left the company, a series of leading roles took him to stardom in the West End and on Broadway. In the 1940s, together with Olivier and John Burrell, Richardson was the co-director of the Old Victoria company.
He and Olivier led the company to Europe and Broadway in 1945 and 1946, before their success provoked resentment among the governing board of the company in 1947. His final film role was in Greystokes: The Legend Of Tarzan,. Lord Of The Apes, which he starred in with Laurence Olivier. He died aged 80 in London, and is survived by his wife, two children and a step-son. He is buried in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where he lived with his wife Lydia and their two sons. He also leaves behind a wife and two step-children, Christopher and Ambrose, who he met in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s. Richardson had no interest in becoming a priest, and was an indifferent scholar in most of the most poor parts of his life. His Latin was and during church services he would improvise responses that proved useful in his later career on histime. His grandmother died in 1919, aged 16, and left him £500, which later transformed his life, but he later resigned from his post as office boy with the Liverpool branch of the Victoria Victoria Victoria insurance company, ten shillings a week, ten pay, ten days a week. He never married. He did not have any children and was never married or had any children of his own. His wife Lydia was a devout convert to Roman Catholicism, in which she raised Ralph. The couple had met while both were in Paris, studying with the painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
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