Radio, Television and Film
In 1954 and 1955 Richardson played Dr. Watson in an American/BBC radio co-production of Sherlock Holmes stories, with Gielgud as Holmes and Orson Welles as the villainous Professor Moriarty. In the 1960s Richardson played Lord Emsworth on BBC television in dramatisations of P. G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle stories, with his real-life wife Meriel Forbes playing his domineering sister Connie, and his friend Stanley Holloway as his butler Beach. In totally different vein, he appeared in the 1981 Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show, having been offered the part of Disraeli in a play what Ernie Wise had written.
Richardson's film appearances include Things to Come (1936), The Citadel (1938), The Fallen Idol (1948), The Heiress (1949; his first nomination for an Academy Award), Richard III (1955; playing Buckingham to Olivier's Richard), Our Man in Havana (1959; with Alec Guinness and Noël Coward), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969). He portrayed Simeon in Jesus of Nazareth (1977). In 1981, he portrayed the Supreme Being in a cameo appearance near the end of the Terry Gilliam film Time Bandits. Also that same year, he appeared as Ulrich of Craggenmoor, the aging sorcerer who takes on an ancient dragon in the fantasy epic Dragonslayer. He played the barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts in the television adaptation of the Agatha Christie play, Witness for the Prosecution, starring alongside a young Bridges. Richardson played the sixth Earl of Greystoke in the 1984 film Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, for which he was again nominated for an Academy Award. His last film appearance was in Give My Regards to Broad Street (1984), starring Paul McCartney.
In 1939 British exhibitors voted him the 9th most popular local star at the box office.
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Famous quotes containing the words television and/or film:
“It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
—Shirley Chisholm (b. 1924)
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—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)