become the Head of BBC television drama. Although the BBC hoped he would have the same impact on shaping the genre in the new medium as he had done in radio, his time in charge was not regarded as a success, as many of the producers working under him felt he had no great liking for television or appreciation for what it could achieve that radio could not. In 1952, he left the television service, being replaced by the experienced producer Michael Barry. In the 1950s, Gielgud was involved in directing a run of Sherlock Holmes radio plays starring his brother John as the lead character, with Ralph Richardson as Dr Watson and Gielgud himself once appearing as Mycroft Holmes. These were broadcast on the BBC's Light Programme. By this time Gielgud was in conflict with junior colleagues in the drama department; unlike them he was unable to appreciate the work of playwrights such as Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. Beckett's Waiting for Godot would have made its English début in a radio production had Gielgud not rejected it. Private life Gielgud was married five times, the first in 1921 while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, where he married an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl who was a student at Cheltenham Ladies College. She was Nathalie Mamontov (1903–1969), daughter of musician Sergei Mamontov (1877—1938) and Nathalie Sheremetievskaya; her mother's third husband was Grand Duke Michael, brother of Tsar Nicholas II. This lasted for only two years, however, and they divorced in 1926. Gielgud in 1928 married Barbara Dillon, an actress, who was born Mabel Barbara Joan Druce and was the daughter of the actor Hubert Druce and actress Frances Dillon (real name Ethel Buckle). 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 published "One Year of Grace" – A Fragment of Autobiography (Longmans, Green) in 1950 and the also autobiographical My Cats and Myself (Michael Joseph) in 1972. Val Gielgud died in London in 1981 at the age of eighty-one. Selected filmography Death at Broadcasting House (1934) Men Are Not Gods (1936) Cafe Colette (1937) Selected plays Party Manners (1949) References Internet: Val Gielgud at the BBC