Sir Ralph was one of a series of great acting Knights from the middle of the 20th Century; his peers were Gielgud and Olivier. He was born Ralph David Richardson was born in Gloucestershire on December 19, 1902. His father taught art at Cheltenham Ladies' College. The son of a Quaker father and a Roman Catholic mother, Ralph Richardson lived with his mother after she left the family home in Gloucestershire, and was raised Catholic by her. When he was a teenager, Ralph enrolled at Brighton School to take up the easel and follow in his father's brushstrokes. However, after receiving an inheritance of 500 pounds, he abandoned art school to pursue his real love: creating verbal portraits as an actor.
Richardson began his acting career at age 18, performing in Shakespearean plays with a touring company. By 1926, he had graduated to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and, four years later, appeared on the stage of England's grandest of playhouses, London's Old Vic. He gained prominence in a series of West End productions of modern plays, including Somerset Maugham's Sheppey (1933) and J.B. Priestley's Cornelius (1935). His first film, The Ghoul (1933), was about a dead professor (Boris Karloff) who returns to life to find an Egyptian jewel stolen from his grave. Richardson, portraying cleric Nigel Hartley, is there on the night Karloff returns to unleash mayhem and mischief.
War descended and despite fairly busy work (about 10 films since the Ghoul and numerous plays) he joined up, like many of his fellow actors, to serve in the British forces. Richardson managed to successfully combine his acting work with holding down the rank of Lt Cmdr in the Fleet Air Arm. Here he both served and acted with Larry Olivier in the Old Vic throughout the war. He made a couple of films during this period, including ‘The day will dawn’ (1942) The Volunteer (1943) and The Silver Fleet (1943), as a self-sacrificing Dutch patriot.
In the 1950s he received further acclaim with the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company, appearing as Prospero and Volpone. He was knighted in 1947 for his work on stage and screen.
He made numerous quality films combining the skills of stage with the screen. Among them was Carol Reed's ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948) in which Richardson won the Best Actor Award from the U.S. National Board of Review for his portrayal of a butler suspected of murder. In 1949 he starred in ‘The Heiress’ – here he plays a cold and emotionally abusive father to Olivia De Havilland. De Havilland went on to win the American Academy award, Ralph was nominated but did not win best supporting actor.
Three years later, he won a British Academy Award for his role in David Lean's ‘Breaking the Sound Barrier’, about the early days of jet flight. In 1962, Richardson won Cannes Best Actor Award for his depiction of James Tyrone, the head of a dysfunctional family in playwright Eugene O'Neill's ‘Long Day's Journey Into Night’. Other notables were Richard III (1955), Our Man in Havana (1960), Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
I think he is also the only actor to be nominated for three British Academy Awards in the same same, in the same category ‘Best Actor’ and lose all three! These were for Doctor Zhivago (1965), for: Khartoum (1966) and The Wrong Box (1966). His final film appearance was as the sixth Earl of Greystoke in the 1983 movie Greystoke - The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award.
He was enigmatic to say the least and one of my favourite stories about this character was that one night he was found by police walking very slowly along the gutter of an Oxford street, he explained he was taking his pet mouse for a stroll. Richardson projected a personality unique in the British theatre, one that was charming and refined, but also mischievous and capable of hinting at sinister or tragic depths in the characters he played. To be fair he never made the screen breakthrough that Lord Olivier managed – although one wonders if he really cared. The stage was very much his arena and as such he will be remembered as one of the finest stage actors of the 20th century.
Well into his seventies, he continued to enthrall audiences with his extraordinary acting skills. He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Special Award in 1982 for his lifetime achievement in the theatre. Even then the very sick Sir Ralph remained the gentleman he had always been, even apologising to the nursing staff caring for him in case he was being a nuisance. He died of a stroke on the 10th October 1983.