This wordless rendition of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene captures feted Shakespearean John Gielgud in both his West End debut and his first appearance on film. He made his first silent feature later this year: Walter Summers’s Who Is the Man? Gielgud was a recent graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art when his agent sent him to audition for the Regent Theatre, saying: “Here is an opportunity to become a London Star in a night.”
Stardom would have to wait, with critic Ivor Brown castigating the young lover as a “niminy-piminy” who was “scant of virility”, with “the most meaningless legs imaginable”. Gielgud himself complained that his Romeo costume transformed him into “a mixture of Rameses of Egypt and a tetchy Victorian matron”. Nevertheless, Gielgud’s more experienced and acclaimed Juliet, Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, a protegée of his great-aunt Ellen Terry, helped settle his nerves, especially in the love scenes. Afterwards, the two actors, both gay, formed a lifelong friendship.

Pamela Hutchinson