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Honours, character and reputation

Gielgud's state honours were Knight Bachelor (1953), Legion of Honour (France, 1960), Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (1977), and Member of the Order of Merit (UK, 1996). He was awarded honorary degrees by St Andrews, Oxford and Brandeis universities.

From 1977 to 1989 Gielgud was president of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art – a symbolic position – and was the academy's first honorary fellow (1989). In 1994 the Globe Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue was renamed the Gielgud Theatre. He had not acted on stage for six years, and felt out of touch with the West End: he commented on the renaming of the theatre, "At last there is a name in lights on the Avenue which I actually recognise, even if it is my own."

Gielgud was uninterested in religion or politics. As a boy he had been fascinated by the rituals at Westminster Abbey, but his brief attraction to religion quickly faded, and as an adult he was a non-believer. His indifference to politics was illustrated at a formal dinner not long after the Second World War when he asked a fellow guest, "Whereabouts are you living now?", unaware that, as he was talking to Clement Attlee, the answer was " 10 Downing Street ".

In his Who's Who entry Gielgud listed his hobbies as music and painting, but his concentration on his work, which Emlyn Williams called fanatical, left little scope for leisure activities. His dedication to his art was not solemn. The critic Nicholas de Jongh wrote that Gielgud's personality was "such infinite, mischievous fun", and Coward's biographer Cole Lesley recalled the pleasure of Gielgud's company, "the words tumbling out of his mouth in an avalanche, frequently having to wipe away his own tears of laughter at the funniness of the disasters he recounted, disasters always against himself".

Together with Richardson and Olivier, Gielgud was internationally recognised as one of the "great trinity of theatrical knights" who dominated the British stage for more than fifty years during the middle and later decades of the 20th century.

The critic Michael Coveney wrote, for Gielgud's ninety-fifth birthday:

I have seen Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Alec Guinness and Peggy Ashcroft but John Gielgud is something else. Gielgud is the lone survivor of those great actors whose careers laid the foundation stones of modern theatre. He is acclaimed as the greatest speaker of Shakespearean verse this century. People my age and younger can only take on trust the impact of the Hamlet whose influence lasted more than 30 years. Even the recordings do not quite convey the mellifluous magic of the voice once described by Guinness as a "silver trumpet muffled in silk".He is indelibly linked with the roles of Prospero and King Lear – regarded as pinnacles of theatrical achievement – yet he is also widely remembered for his wonderful comic touch as Jack Worthing in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. But his influence goes far beyond his performances. Without Gielgud there would be no National Theatre or Royal Shakespeare Company. He was a pioneer in establishing the first permanent companies in the West End.

In an obituary in The Independent Alan Strachan, having discussed Gielgud's work for cinema, radio and television, concluded that "any consideration of Gielgud's rich and often astonishing career must return to the stage; as he wrote at the close of An Actor and His Time (1979), he saw the theatre as 'more than an occupation or a profession; for me it has been a life'."