Val Gielgud

Val Henry Gielgud CBE (28 April 1900 – 30 November 1981) was an English actor, writer, director and broadcaster. He was a pioneer of radio drama for the BBC, and also directed the first ever drama to be produced in the newer medium of television.

Val Gielgud was born in London, into a theatrical family, being the brother of Sir John Gielgud (who acted in several of his productions) and a great-nephew of the Victorian actress Dame Ellen Terry.

BBC radio Following education at Oxford University, Gielgud began his career as a secretary to a member of parliament, before moving into writing when he took a job as the sub-editor of a comic book / magazine. It was this job that led him to work for the BBC's own listings magazine, the Radio Times, as the assistant to the editor Eric Maschwitz. This was Gielgud's first connection to the corporation, and although he was not yet involved in any radio production, he often used his position at the magazine to make his thoughts on radio dramas felt: in his autobiography, he later confessed to having written several of the letters appearing on the magazine's correspondence page, supposedly from listeners, criticising various aspects of the corporation's drama productions.

Maschwitz and Gielgud were close friends, and even wrote detective fiction together – Gielgud would later on go on to be responsible in whole or part for twenty-six detective / mystery novels, one short story collection, two historical novels, nineteen stage plays, four film screenplays, forty radio plays, seven non-fiction books and be the editor of a further two books.

In January 1929, Gielgud was appointed Head of Productions at the BBC (BBC Radio Drama), responsible for all radio drama, when he had never previously directed a single radio play. He succeeded R. E. Jeffrey, whose output he had been so regularly criticising in his abuse of the Radio Times letters page. He proved to be highly successful in this role, remaining in it for the next twenty years and overseeing all of the radio drama produced during the period, writing many plays himself and worked as an actor in small parts in six of them. She divorced him on the grounds of his desertion in 1943; he went on holiday alone in 1931 and they did not live together thereafter. The marriage produced a son, Adam, born in 1930 – father of the dancer and choreographer Piers Gielgud.

His following three marriages produced no further offspring.

He was awarded the CBE in 1958. He published "One Year of Grace" – A Fragment of Autobiography (Longmans, Green) in 1950 and also the autobiographical My Cats and Myself (Michael Joseph) in 1972. Val Gielgud died in London in 1981 at the age of eighty-one.

Portrayal in fiction Gielgud appears as a character in the 2023 BBC radio play, A Wireless War, which tells the story of the relocation of the Radio Drama Company to Evesham at the start of World War II. Gielgud is played by Carl Prekopp.

Selected filmography Death at Broadcasting House (1934) Men Are Not Gods (1936) Cafe Colette (1937)

Selected works

Imperial Treasure (1931) Death at Broadcasting House (1934) Under London (1934) Death in Budapest (1937) The First Television Murder (1940) Years of the Locust (1947) Gallows' Foot (1958) A Necessary End (1969)

Selected plays Party Manners (1949)