Does it seem that our generation—and I’m talking here about the skipped generation, the not-Boomers, not-Xers, the handful of us who dimly remember the Partridge Family, but got to watch Star Wars as kids, before there was anything like it—has very little to hug to our chests, to say to our kids “I remember...”? Yes, we did enjoy a Golden Age of baseball, and we’ll be able to say “I say Barry Bonds hit like a nightmare, I saw Roger Clemens strike out everybody in sight, I saw Greg Maddox, I saw Mike Schmidt at the end of his career when he wasn’t that great anymore and they booed him like anything, I saw Pedro at his peak when nobody could touch him—not Koufax, not Johnson, not Matty, I’m telling you, nobody!” But we missed two or three Golden Ages of popular music, and film, and theater, and fiction, and all that cal.
One thing, though, that just happened to happen for us as we were getting old enough to appreciate it, was the great generation of British Theyater actors who learned to be great television actors as old men (and occasionally women), doing breathtaking performances right in our living rooms. Lord Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson never quite got television (or film, for that matter), and we missed their greatness, and sucks to be us. But when we started watching television with our parent on Sunday nights, Alec Guinness was learning to master the medium. And it’s got so much better since then. Seriously. Better. Not the shows, I’m not granting that, but the acting, the slightly stylized, perfect-for-television performances of the best of British Theater. Some of it was watching them grow up in it. Michael Gambon and Nigel Hawthorne evidently got better on stage and never (yet, in Mr. Gambon’s case) really knocked us out on television later. Peter O’Toole was a film actor, through and through, as was Richard Harris. But Ian Holm and Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay and Judi Dench and Alun Armstrong and Denholm Elliott and Helen Mirren and Eileen Atkins and Freddie Jones and Maggie Smith and Trevor Peacock and Lynn Redgrave and Edward Petherbridge and even Christopher Lee and a gazillion others, all showing the craft of it, all breathtakingly wonderful (if not every time out). This was more than a recording for posterity of their abilities, too. This was something we could watch as it was happening (or a year or two later, anyway). The Xers, for the most part, will be watching the generation after them, who grew up playing for television, and although that generation is often wonderful—I would hesitate to say that Alec Guiness is superior as a television actor to Hugh Laurie—it’s a totally different thing, much more expected, and I imagine much less romantic.
Anyway, Ian Richardson has died.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.