Actors etc.

Many actors turn to direction and production after some success in acting; they seem to get dissatisfied with being just actors and perhaps feel they have to be more involved in the creative process. Sometimes they desire to become writers!
Kirk Douglas after he retired from acting in old age started writing novels and said he had never felt happier or more satisfied in his life.
Even Bing Crosby, who had written a song or part of one, confessed that he'd have given up all the wealth he had gotten from singing if only he could have composed one good song.
I wonder if he was really serious or was he just spouting a wish he secretly had and wanted to make it seem greater than it was.
Now today I read that Harvey Granville Barker the great producer, director, actor and playwright in the early 1900's, said, just before he died, that "I feel my life is useless". Of course, by that time, married to a rich lady with nothing much to do but write his famous "Prefaces to Shakespeare", was not doing what he best did - involving himself in the craft of theatre production work.
So there's an excuse for Barker's pessimism: he'd done it all and now he was finished with it.
But there's no excuse for Sir John Gielgud for his thoughts towards the end of his life after having lived such an eventfull and successful acting life. He said: "O, I don't go to the theatre any more. I used to go twice a week but I stopped all that. I do think that over my long life - and I've lived through two world wars - that theatre has been completely unimportant. Yet I've been obsessed by it all my life, and I'm a bit ashamed that it interests me much more than politics, say. It's been en escape for me which I'm not particularly proud of. It seems a bit childlike."