[Sir Donald Wolfit] is a good book. It deserves to thrive. It is not a great book and considering that it describes the life of a great actor perhaps it ought to be. But great books about great actors are much rarer than great acting. Let us therefore be grateful that Mr. Harwood, who was himself once in Wolfit's company, has done such a good and sensitive job on an actor whose legendary egoism and megalomania obscured for many playgoers the true value of his art….

He was born, somewhat humbly in Nottinghamshire, after his time; and though the early part of Mr. Harwood's story is not any more engaging than the early parts of most biographies it illuminates occasionally the man to come, as in the account of Wolfit's schoolboy tendency to display exaggerated signs of exhaustion after sprinting 220 yards. (p. 73)

Wolfit's style and crusading spirit—the...