|
Sir Alec Guinness :
An actor who never
played himself
Sir
Alec Guinness, whose roles in a 66-year-career ranged
from Hamlet to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, died on
August 5, at the age of 86. According to reports, the
veteran actor was suffering from from liver cancer,
but the the cause of his death could not be confirmed.
Sir Alec was one of the last surviving members of Britain’s
greatest generation of actors, which included Sir Laurence
Olivier and Ralph Richardson. From post-war comedies
through epics like The Bridge On The River Kwai, and
crowd-pleasers like Star Wars, Guinness played a vast
variety of characters with subtlety and intelligence.
Guinness was a tall man, with large, expressive blue
eyes and otherwise unremarkable features — “a
player’s countenance, designed for whatever might
turn up,” critic J.C. Trewin once said. His precise,
modulated baritone voice was distinctive, but if ever
there was an actor who never played himself, it was
Alec Guinness. “I had countless first impressions
of him,” playwright Ronald Harwood wrote, “Each
time I saw him, in films, later in the theatre, I had
the uncanny feeling I had never before watched him act.”
Guinness first made his mark in films in the Ealing
Studio comedies of the late 1940s and the 1950s ——
The Man In The White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, The
Lady Killers, and most remarkably in Kind Hearts And
Coronets. In that classic black comedy he played the
entire d’Ascoyne family —— in his own
words, “eight speaking parts, one non-speaking
cameo and a portrait in oils.” In parts such as
Fagin in Oliver Twist, Guinness was barely recognisable
behind his make-up and costume. But with The Bridge
On The River Kwai in 1957, he established that his versatility
had nothing to do with disguise. He won an Oscar for
his performance as the disciplined, inflexible Col.
Nicholson in a World War II Japanese prison camp. Three
years later, he played Nicholson’s opposite —
the boorish, hard-drinking Scottish Lieut. - Col. Jock
Sinclair in Tunes Of Glory. He once described it as
his favourite film role — “perhaps the best
thing I’ve done.”
Guinness, who was knighted in 1959, had a long film
partnership with director David Lean, beginning in 1946
as Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, through Oliver
Twist, The Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence Of Arabia,
Dr. Zhivago, and finally A Passage To India in 1984.
His 1977 role as Obi-Wan Kenobi introduced him to a
new generation of filmgoers and made him financially
secure. “I might never have been heard of again
if it hadn’t been for Star Wars,” he said.
But he detested the Star Wars phenomenon, and the fans
that went along with it. He once described the dialogue
as “frightful rubbish” and said he felt like
a “caged animal” on the set.
Guinness did little television, but became John Le Carre’s
quiet spy George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,
and Smiley’s People in 1979 and 1981. Some of his
best-known stage performances were in T.S. Eliot’s
Cocktail Party; in Ross as T.E. Lawrence; Dylan Thomas
in Dylan; and as a blind lawyer in John Mortimer’s
Voyage Round My Father.
His
considerable fame left Guinness unmoved. “You can
only be your own personality,” he once said, “And
I’m just happy to be an actor. If I tried to swan
around, I wouldn’t know how to behave. If I tried
to be a superstar, I’d be a laughing stock!”
Born
April 2, 1914, Guinness was an illegitimate child who
did not know the name on his birth certificate was Guinness
until he was 14. “I have to admit that my search
for a father has been my constant speculation for 50
years,” he said. The mysterious father, whose identity
he never learned, provided money for private schools,
but not university.
Guinness worked briefly as an advertising copywriter,
spending his pound-a-week salary on theatre tickets,
and survived on sandwiches and apples given him by friends
at work. After scraping together the funds for some
elementary lessons, he won a place at the Fay Compton
School of Acting. There, John Gielgud judged the end-of-term
performance and chose him as the prize winner.
It was Gielgud who later gave Guinness his big break,
casting him as Osric in his production of Hamlet in
1934. Guinness then went on to take some of his first
stage roles in Gielgud’s plays. In one of them,
Guinness met actress Merula Salaman, whom he married
in 1938. They had a son Matthew and remained happily
married, living in a country house in Petersfield, 50
miles southwest of London.
Guinness’s entertaining memoir, Blessings In Disguise,
published in 1985, told more about the talented and
eccentric people he knew than about himself. He was
seldom recognised in public. In 1985 he told the Guardian
newspaper that he hoped by the end of his life to have
put everything in order —— “a kind of
little bow, tied on life. And I can see myself drifting
off into eternity, or nothing, or whatever it may be,
with all sorts of bits of loose string hanging out of
my pocket. Why didn’t I say this or do that, or
why didn’t I reconcile myself with someone? Or
make sure that someone whom I like was all right in
every way, either financially or, I don’t know.”
Guinness is survived by his wife Merula and son Matthew.
More
Stories...
Mind-blowing
Special effects to make man
Film
piracy rampant on internet - experts
Foreign
Affairs: Drawing board to big screen...
|
