A Great Talent; A Modest Man: He Was Counted Among the Finest of the Century's Actors

Thoughts on Shakespeare: Sir Alec Guinness
Obituary
The National Post

Earlier this year I wrote that the death of John Gielgud meant that, of the great generation of 20th-century British actors, only one now remained. That survivor was Sir Alec Guinness, who has died aged 86. Masters of timing, Gielgud and Guinness might have synchronized their final exits to coincide with the turn of the millennium.

Alec Guinness was known as the chameleon of the group, the character-man who never played anyone remotely resembling himself, and maybe never had a self to play. This is a myth. He had a very strong though quiet personality, and a spiritual dignity that, especially in his later years, imprinted itself on every performance he gave; the Star Wars people knew what they were doing when they cast him as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Sometimes, indeed, the personal quality was excessive. Peter Sellers once invented a distinguished English actor specializing in mystical roles whom he christened Sir Eric Goodness; and when Sir Alec assumed an Indian accent to play Professor Godbole in David Lean's film of A Passage to India (1984), he did seem to be stepping unwisely into Sellers's territory. (The compliment was often returned; Sellers, whose acting really did depend on impersonation, was the bizarro Alec Guinness.)

I once had to meet Sir Alec in the lobby of his London hotel (he lived in the country) and made some weak remark about how relieved I felt that I had actually recognized him. He smiled and said the legend of his anonymity had been much exaggerated. This was in the early 1980s when he was about to conquer a new medium, playing George Smiley in the television adaptation of John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Over a sumptuously good meal (he is the only actor I have ever interviewed who has taken me to lunch, and he was the most courteous of hosts), the subject of his supposed self-effacement came up again. I asked about the Fool that he played to Laurence Olivier's Old Vic King Lear in 1946, a performance widely regarded as definitive, and one of his passports to wider stardom. He attributed part of his success to the fact that Olivier, who also directed, had mercilessly cut the part and the play. But he also said, "I was very good in that -- even I had to admit it." He could be self-deprecating about being self-deprecating.

Alex Guinness has a special place in Canadian theatre history, as having led the company at the first ever Stratford Festival in 1953. Not just that: He was the first actor ever to appear or to speak on the Festival stage. He played the title role in Richard III, a marathon he balanced with the supporting part of the King of France in All's Well That Ends Well. By now he was not only a stage star but a movie star, perhaps the best-known in British cinema; not every actor in his position would have devoted a summer to leading largely untried actors, all unknown to him, in a tent, which is all the Festival theatre then was. He is remembered as having been an inspirational and remarkably untemperamental leading man; at the end he personally provided the money to have two promising young Canadian actors taken to London for further training. (One of them was Timothy Findley.)

Born in London on April 2, 1914, he was almost a classic example of the lonely child who becomes an actor. Officially unrelated to "the brewery Guinnesses," he was in fact illegitimate. The name on his birth certificate was Alec Guinness de Cuffe. His mother was entered as Miss Agnes Cuffe; his father's name, he said in his autobiography, was left "an intriguing, speculative blank."

His mother married when he was five, though the marriage only lasted three years. He didn't get good parts in school plays ("you're not the acting type," he was told) but still managed to stop the show as a messenger in Macbeth. Thus encouraged, he took acting lessons in 1933 from the distinguished actress Martita Hunt (who told him "you'll never make an actor") and then went to a real acting school run by the equally distinguished Fay Compton. He left there after a year, but he had been spotted in a school show by Gielgud, who gave him some much-needed money on which to stay alive, and then cast him in the eye-catching small role of Osric in Hamlet (1934).

The young Alec, like other future stars, spent much of the 1930s oscillating between the two great British theatrical leaders of the era: the intense Gielgud and the flamboyant Tyrone Guthrie, who was responsible years later for inviting him to Stratford. Guthrie ran the Old Vic, where he cast Guinness in the lead in a memorable and innovative production of Hamlet in modern dress.

Guinness, to judge from photographs, played the role frail and vulnerable, and was either promising or deeply impressive, depending on which historian you read. It didn't make him a star, though; he was still playing supporting roles (like the Fool, and the Dauphin in Saint Joan, whom Peter Ustinov described as "one of those walking pear-drops he does so well") when he rejoined the Vic after the war, though he did get a crack at Richard II. By now, there was no doubt that he was a major actor waiting to happen.

His movie career did not get started until 1946. He had played Herbert Pocket in his own stage adaptation of Dickens's Great Expectations, and this led to him getting the role -- and giving a delightfully wistful performance -- in David Lean's film of the novel. It was perhaps the best Dickens picture ever made, rivalled only by Lean's Oliver Twist the following year, with Guinness a superb Fagin. It was probably this performance, with its huge quantities of beard, that did most to create the legend of Guinness's facelessness. Guinness-in-disguise was also a selling point of the 1949 comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he played eight sequentially murdered members of the same aristocratic family. (One has heard of serial killers; he was a serial victim.) Such was the wit, teeming but never overflowing, that Guinness poured into each characterization, and so great the glee the audience derived from it, that even an oil painting that bore his likeness seemed hilarious. But in fact it was the recognizability of the actor, guaranteeing the family likeness, that was the joke. The film, a masterpiece of tongue-in-cheek, was the finest of the Ealing comedies of quirky English gentility with which Guinness now became inextricably identified. Its only possible rival is The Ladykillers (1955), in which the boot was on the other foot; Guinness now played the leader of a gang of crooks trying fruitlessly to rub out one harmless old lady. (Sellers was a junior member of the gang.)

Alec Guinness became a Catholic convert in 1956 and his faith seemed in large measure to underpin his work. He became both a friend and partisan of that great Anglo-Catholic, T. S. Eliot; he was one of the finest speakers of Eliot's poetry and created the role of the mysteriously omniscient psychiatrist in Eliot's 1949 play The Cocktail Party. (Some 20 years later, he reprised this role under his own direction; both performance and production were riveting.)

He could be a great stage comedian, as when he played the lead in the Feydeau farce Hotel Paradiso (1956), but he increasingly projected an aloof, untouchable authority, which served him well as Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and in Terence Rattigan's Ross (1960). He seemed after that to have turned into the most boring great actor in the world, and some of his other stage performances in the 1970s were excessively civilized.

He seemed to have largely given up on Shakespeare; his second Hamlet (1951) and his Macbeth (1967) were both severely criticized, though it's more than possible they were searching, unromantic performances ahead of their time.

But he came back in glory in 1984, playing a magnificently dignified Shylock, a walking casebook in the corroding effects of persecution: a performance that lit up an otherwise dim production of The Merchant of Venice.

His most acclaimed film performance was probably his Oscar- winning Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), another Lean picture, acclaimed at the time as a new pinnacle in British filmmaking, but much scorned since. His performance of a wartime British officer, fanatically devoted to his own interpretation of the military code, remains indelible, immaculately poised between tragedy and comedy.

Star Wars (1977) established him for a new generation (though his avowal that he would have been a forgotten man without it is typically overstated modesty), and having a percentage of the gross set him up for life. He refused, however, to appear in subsequent instalments (other than as a hologram). His George Smiley, seedily sensitive, similarly established him for TV viewers.

He was married, in 1938, to Merula Salaman, a former actress, whom he had met when they were animals together in Gielgud's production of Noah; their marriage lasted their lifetimes and they had a son, Matthew, who is also a talented actor. He was knighted in 1959.

Alec Guinness was not a figurehead to be mourned as Gielgud was but he will be equally missed and was, in a less spectacular fashion, equally loved. He seems to have been respected by everyone who worked with or encountered him.