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Guinness played a vast variety of characters in a career that spanned more than a half-century.
©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times, published August 7, 2000
LONDON -- Actor Sir Alec Guinness, whose roles in a 66-year career ranged from Hamlet to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, has died, a hospital spokesman said today. He was 86.
Guinness became ill at his home near Petersfield, southern England and was taken by ambulance to the King Edward VII Hospital where he died Saturday, said hospital spokeswoman Jenny Masding.
Newspapers reported that Guinness died from liver cancer, but the hospital would not confirm the cause of death.
Guinness was one of the last surviving members of Britain's greatest generation of actors, which included Sir Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson.
From postwar 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 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 theater, 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, 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 recognizable in makeup 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 Lt. Col. Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory. He once described it as his favorite 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 in Great Expectations, through Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago and 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. He once described the dialogue as "frightful rubbish" and said he felt like a "caged animal" on the set.
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 theater 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 Merula Salaman, whom he married in 1938. They had a son and remained happily married.
Guinness was seldom recognized in public.
In one of the stories he told about himself, Guinness checks his hat and coat at a restaurant and asks for a claim ticket. "It will not be necessary," the attendant smiles.
Pleased at being recognized, Guinness later retrieves his garments, puts his hand in the coat pocket and finds a slip of paper that reads: "Bald with glasses."
Evensong (1934)
Great Expectations (1946)
Oliver Twist (1948)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
The Man in the White Suit (1951)
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
The Captain's Paradise (1953)
The Ladykillers (1955)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
All at Sea (1957)
Our Man in Havana (1960)
Tunes of Glory (1960)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Comedians (1967)
Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973)
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1973)
Murder by Death (1976)
Star Wars (1977)
The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raise the Titanic (1980)
Return of the Jedi (1983)
A Passage to India (1984)
A Handful of Dust (1988)
Associated Press