An Unassuming Talent of Immense Depth

With the death of Sir Alec Guinness over the weekend at age 86, the last of the towering quartet of actors who dominated the English stage and film through the middle half of the 20th century is gone.

Sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson, Lord Olivier of Brighton as he became, and Sir Alec were each superbly distinct from the others, but collectively they gave English theater and films a matchless excitement.

Beyond his acting, and the fact that he had the richest, subtlest comedic vein of the four, Guinness was a most felicitous writer. His first volume of autobiography, “Blessings in Disguise,” captured with shy and beguiling charm the personality of the true actor who found privacy and satisfaction in pretending to be others.

He was the most unassuming of the great English actors, the most chameleon-like in his choice of parts. His range was endless. He could be fierce or silly, calm or frantic, an upper-class twit or a lower-class bloke without missing a beat. Many of his greatest roles had an underlying humor or at least irony, but he always stayed strictly in character; it was the actor you watched, not the man.

It would undoubtedly have been a matter of chagrin to him that the news bulletin on his death should have identified him as Obi-Wan, the wise philosopher and light-swordsman of “Star Wars.” As he said in a later memoir, he had come to regret not so much doing the role as all the clamoring and adulation of fans that that seemed to grow, not fade, with the passing years. He cherished his real-life privacy and the inconspicuousness he sought, and Obi-Wan had made a mess of that.

There had been so many other roles, of course, including unforgettably his driven British officer supervising the construction of “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” for which he won a best actor Oscar in David Lean’s epic drama, and the egocentric starving artist Gulley Jimson in “The Horse’s Mouth” (he adapted the screenplay from a Joyce Cary novel and received an Oscar nomination for it). Yet just as memorable for filmgoers were his comic turns as a possessed experimenter in “The Man in the White Suit,” all eight members of a royal family in “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” the bumbling thief in the “The Lavender Hill Mob” and the wild-eyed gang leader known as the Professor in “The Ladykillers.”

Guinness once told me that, as he read the script of “The Ladykillers,”’ he had no idea how or if he could play the Professor. Then, one day at home, he was toying with one of the heavy celluloid placards with “Occupied” on one side, “Occupado” on the other; they were once used to identify your seat during intermediate airplane stops. He took out scissors and from the placard carved out a grotesque set of false uppers, which gave him a ghastly and leering overbite. “Aha,” Guinness said, and the characterization of the Professor was suddenly clear to him.

That was, in its way, the English approach to finding a character, from the outside in, as opposed to the American approach of working from the inside out. From the wrenching drama of “Kwai” to the outrageous comedies--which Guinness always made seem like only slight extensions of the truth--never was an actor so able to ground characters in observable reality.

The British tradition of fine actors and actresses seems to roll on forever, and already there are later figures of great talent and range--Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Courtenay, Richard Burton in his brief and shining hours, and younger actors such as Ralph Fiennes and Daniel Day-Lewis. But Sir Alec, in his multitude of disguises, was a unique blessing for us all.

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The Career of Alec Guinness

A list of Sir Alec Guinness’ film and television work:

* “Evensong” (1934)

* “Great Expectations” (1946)

* “Oliver Twist” (1948)

* “A Run for Your Money” (1949)

* “Kind Hearts and Coronets” (1949)

* “The Mudlark” (1950)

* “Last Holiday” (1950)

* “The Man in the White Suit” (1951)

* “The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951)

* “The Card” (1952)

* “The Captain’s Paradise” (1953)

* “The Malta Story” (1953)

* “Father Brown” (1953)

* “The Stratford Adventure” (1954)

* “To Paris With Love” (1955)

* “The Prisoner” (1955)

* “The Ladykillers” (1955)

* “The Swan” (1956)

* “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957)

* “Barnacle Bill” (1957)

* “The Horse’s Mouth” (1958)

* “The Scapegoat” (1959)

* “Our Man in Havana” (1960)

* “Tunes of Glory” (1960)

* “A Majority of One” (1961)

* “H.M.S. Defiant” (1962)

* “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962)

* “The Fall of the Roman Empire” (1964)

* “Doctor Zhivago” (1965)

* “Situation Hopeless . . . but Not Serious” (1965)

* “Pasternak” (1965)

* “Hotel Paradiso” (1966)

* “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966)

* “The Comedians” (1967)

* “Twelfth Night” (1969) (TV)

* “Scrooge” (1970)

* “E.E. Cummings” (1970) (TV)

* “Cromwell” (1970)

* “Hitler: The Last Ten Days” (1973)

* “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” (1973)

* “Caesar and Cleopatra” (1976) (TV)

* “Murder by Death” (1976)

* “Star Wars” (1977)

* “To See Such Fun” (1977)

* “The Empire Strikes Back” (1980)

* “Raise the Titanic” (1980)

* “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (1980) (TV)

* “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (1980) (TV)

* “Smiley’s People” (1982) (TV)

* “Return of the Jedi” (1983)

* “Lovesick” (1983)

* “A Passage to India” (1984)

* “Future Schlock” (1984)

* “Edwin” (1984) (TV)

* “Monsignor Quixote” (1985) (TV)

* “Little Dorrit” (1988)

* “A Handful of Dust” (1988)

* “Kafka” (1991)

* “Tales From Hollywood” (1992) (TV)

* “A Foreign Field” (1993)

* “Mute Witness” (1994)

* “Eskimo Day” (1996) (TV)

Source: The Internet Movie Database