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JOHN GIELGUD
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Talking about playing the classics, including Hamlet
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JUDI DENCH
Actor
Reflects on childhood and deciding to be an actress |
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Siegfried Sassoon 1886 - 1967
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Siegfried Sassoon came from a wealthy background whose parents separated when he was 5, his father dying soon afterwards. Sassoon was educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire and Cambridge University, which he left without taking a degree. Before joining the army at the outbreak of World War I, he led a leisurely existence, writing poetry and fox hunting, but his secret awareness of his homosexuality in a homophobic age was a cause of alienation. In 1915, he was commissioned in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and sent to France, where his reckless courage earned him the nickname of "Mad Jack" and the Military Cross. But his uncritical acceptance of the war began to change as the carnage continued and people close to him were killed. Wounded in 1917, Sassoon was invalided back to England, where his anti-war views intensified, causing him to throw away his Military Cross and write a "declaration of wilful defiance" which might have had very serious consequences for him. However, his friend and fellow Welch Fusilier, the poet Robert Graves, persuaded the authorities to have Sassoon diagnosed as shell-shocked and he was sent to a sanatorium in Scotland where he met another great war poet, Wilfred Owen. Declared fit at the end of 1917, Sassoon returned to active service, but suffered another severe wound in 1918. The war over, Sassoon worked to get Owen's poetry published, the latter having been killed in the final days. Sassoon's own war poetry also began to appear, the earlier poems extolling its nobility and the later, far better ones attacking war and those who profited from it. Sassoon also began to write his fictionalised biographies, notably Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress. These were published together in 1937 as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Despite his sexual orientation, Sassoon married Hester Gatty, a much younger woman, in 1933 and a son was born in 1936. The marriage ended in 1945. In 1957, Sassoon was awarded the Queen's Medal for poetry. He died in 1967, aged 80.
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KEY WORKS INCLUDE:
The poems - The Old Huntsman (1917)
The poems - Counter-Attack (1918)
The fictionalised autobiography - The Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Sherston's Progress (3 volumes, 1928-36)
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