But it's a grand voice and we're glad to have it.

He's 93 now and will leave, when he leaves, a great memory of a rich life in the theatre, rivaled in our day, only by the achievement of Laurence Olivier.

For me, as a Jew, his greatest moment has been captured on film, videotape really, the part of a great (but assimilated) Jewish intellectual who winds up, at the end of telvision verion of Herman Wouk's work, The Winds of War, entering the gas chamber in a crowd of other Jews to be snuffed out. He looks at the moon, which is full, and utters a Hebrew prayer and accompanies his people.

Gielgud himself is not Jewish, is Polish-English but notes with humor that with his name and his nose he's often been mistaken for a Jew.

There are three biographical books about him. I have all three and none, at any point, use the other word: homosexual.

But always, through his career, there was the word "effeminacy" to describe his performance,that he was unconvincing as a lover.

And there was -- this is in none of the books, that moment in the 50's, in England when he'd been entrapped in a London public restroom, been fined -- and -- one of my friends, a student of theatre assures me, had to serve time.

What I remember is that in the United States, in the time of McCarthy, he'd been denied a visa to come here to act on grounds of moral degeneracy.

What I remember was the reaction of the British public. He was knighted.

That night he was playing the part of Jaffier in Venice Preserv'd and when he uttered his first line, "My Lord, I am not that abject wretch you think me." there was such laughter and applause Sir Gielgud had to pause for minutes before the play could go on.

The British public (and their Queen) had given their judgment on America's condemnation.

McCarthy is gone now, Gielgud still very much alive.

The visa had been restored by the 1960s and I, along with a grateful and appreciative America saw his one-man show "The Seven Ages of Man" as it toured the United States.

The night that I saw him, he alluded, very obliquely, to that incident. He was, in reading excerpts from Shakespeare, "doing" female parts, "But I will not, you will be grateful to know, do it in drag." he said.

We laughed -- and then -- remembering, applauded.

He has our hands and hearts.

Merry Christmas, Sir John!