The special genius of Guinness

On screen and on stage, from the classic comedies “Kind Hearts and Coronets” and “The Man in the White Suit,” through turns as Hamlet, Richard II and Shylock, the colonel in “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to a triumphant comeback in “Star Wars,” Alec Guinness -- a dapper, bald man with sticking-out ears -- left audiences with indelible memories of scores of wildly different characters. What was the key to his range and talent? Who was he at heart and out of makeup? In “Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography,” Piers Paul Read sifts every aspect of his subject’s life, looking for clues.

There is a certain type of applauded actor who ends up deemed by knowing peers and by posterity to be hollow at the core. Charismatic and versatile onstage or before the camera, but chilling up close. The emptiness of the actor-vessel, some argue, is exactly what creates a perfect medium, ready to be filled up with new characters by the playwright and director. Entire theories of acting encourage the condition. Laurence Olivier might be said to personify it.

The young Guinness knew that type and feared he might be it. In fact, he was its polar opposite. While benefiting on his way up from working onstage with the already famous Olivier, in “Romeo and Juliet” and as Fool to Olivier’s Lear, he kept a critical distance from his “technically brilliant” mentor. “[Olivier] would only read his own part ... in marked contrast to Alec’s intelligent and meticulous study of a play as a whole,” notes Read.

As this thorough chronicle shows, “intelligent and meticulous” sums up Guinness’ approach to his art. His immersion before playing the title role in the 1973 release “Hitler: The Last Ten Days” went so far that, according to his co-workers, “by the time filming started, empathy with the dictator had brought the tyrannical side of Alec’s personality to the fore.”

The complex personality of the actor, born Alec Guinness de Cuffe (a name concocted by his unwed mother) in London on April 2, 1914, comprised a great many sides. Not all were for public display. Some were kept shadowed, even denied, throughout his life. Some, such as a streak of enthusiasm for the talents of his actor-artist wife, faded with his own success, while others, such as domestic despotism, emerged later. His enduring qualities included ambition; physical courage; intense sensitivity to criticism; a spiritual side in which intellect, intuition and superstition mingled; and a bruised child’s capacity to love. His deepest love was reserved for his wife, Merula, and for animals -- especially one small dog named Walter. The couple’s only child, Matthew, who barely saw his naval commander father for the first few years of his life, had a harder time breaking through the actor’s line of defenses.

For this biography, Read had open access to all of Guinness’ diaries and family correspondence and, not least, Matthew’s recollections. In 600-odd pages, cataloging among other things the actor’s preferred restaurants, meals eaten and gripes over price or service, it sometimes becomes hard to see the forest of the man for the trees of sheer information. Real criticism, while discernible, is muted.

Would Guinness have liked this biography? Not so clear. On one hand, Read concentrates on what he sees as Guinness’ struggles with latent (or not so) homosexual leanings. Every potential encounter with a sailor or chauffeur is parsed in painful detail.

On a more flattering yet closely connected plane, Read delves deeply into one of the most fascinating sides of the actor: his spiritual journey, including close friends made along the way, and his thoughts on salvation. Read conveys the richness of Guinness’ conversion to Catholicism, which son and wife followed. It was not easy. In a diary entry four years before his death in 2000, Guinness confessed an unorthodox credo: “I believe time ceases for the individual at death, so there can be no after-life (as there was no before-life) but that probably the personality lives in God’s keeping.”

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Kai Maristed is the author of the novels “Broken Ground,” “Out After Dark” and “Fall.”