In the second half of the 1950s Gielgud's career was in the doldrums as far as new plays were concerned. British theatre was moving away from the West End glamour of Beaumont's productions to more "" works. Olivier had a great success in John Osborne's "The Entertainer" in 1957, but Gielgud was not in tune with the new wave of writers. He remained in demand as a Shakespearean, but there were few new plays suitable for him. He directed and played the lead in Coward's "Nude with Violin" in 1956, which was dismissed by the critics as old-fashioned, though it ran for more than a year. He made two film appearances, playing a cameo comedy scene with Coward as a prospective manservant in Michael Anderson's "Around the World in 80 Days" (1956), and as the father of Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Sidney Franklin's 1957 remake of "The Barretts of Wimpole Street". He did not consider his performance as the tyrannical father convincing, and confessed that he undertook it only for the large fee ("it will set me up for a couple of years") and to keep him before the public in America, where he had not performed for over four years.