August 7, 2000 Sir Alec Guinness, Elegant Actor of Film and Stage, Is Dead at 86

By ALBIN KREBS The Associated Press Sir Alec Guinness in the film "Star Wars" in 1977.

Sir Alec Guinness, the elegant and versatile British actor known to older audiences for films like "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and to a whole new generation for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars," died late Saturday at a hospital in West Sussex, England. He was 86. Possessing a plain-as-porridge but chameleonlike face, Sir Alec was one of those gifted actors who left audiences awed with his seemingly effortless, perfect performances, which he carried off with quiet subtlety and undemonstrative skill. Although his notable career encompassed the stage and television, it was in motion pictures that a much wider audience found Sir Alec unforgettable almost from the moment he first appeared on screen. He was a most versatile performer, capable of playing a wide range of roles, beginning in 1946, when he was Herbert Pocket in the movie adaptation of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations." He delighted millions with his wittily etched, tour-de-force delineations of assorted members of an eccentric English family (including a spinster and a character in an oil painting) in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" in 1949. And he developed a cult following for his merry antics in "The Lavender Hill Mob" and "The Captain's Paradise." One of his most memorable dramatic roles was the driven regimental colonel in postwar Scotland in "Tunes of Glory." And another military role, as the slightly mad military prig of a colonel in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" in 1957, won him an Academy Award. He was knighted in the late 1950's, but still had a long career ahead of him. Although it was often said that as a master of disguise he was an actor with no face of his own, it was, in fact, the intelligent use of his malleable features that served him so extraordinarily well. In situations where lesser performers required several lines of dialogue to accomplish an effect, Sir Alec used his own facial shorthand -- the faint curling of a lip, a seemingly apologetic furrowing of the brow, the quizzical upturn of an eyebrow, a sudden brief smile that could radiate approval or signify chilly disdain. Particularly in motion-picture close-up, he did not so much act as allow his face to react to what another actor was saying. He was the antithesis of the personality player or star, for he accepted small and large roles that ranged from the starkly dramatic to the predictably melodramatic to the maniacally whimsical. "Everything I've done has been on the spur of the moment," the actor said some years ago. "That's why my career has been so haphazard." Haphazard or not, it was a notable career, one in which Sir Alec triumphed in the theater in roles as startlingly dissimilar as Hamlet and the suave psychiatrist in T. S. Eliot's "Cocktail Party." He was the drink-sodden and doomed Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in Sidney Michaels's biographical drama "Dylan" and the tragically broken and brainwashed prelate in "The Prisoner." He also played a Japanese businessman in "A Majority of One" in 1962, the same year that he was seen as the Arab prince, Feisal, in "Lawrence of Arabia." He had business savvy as well -- for his memorable role in the 1977 blockbuster "Star Wars," he received a percentage of the gross. Sir Alec was born in London on April 2, 1914. He was often mistaken for one of the "brewery Guinnesses," he said, and in his adulthood several members of that family of millionaires cultivated his friendship. In his autobiography, "Blessings in Disguise," published in the United States in 1986, Sir Alec cleared up longtime speculation as to whether he was an illegitimate child. He was indeed, he said. "My birth certificate registers me as Alec Guinness de Cuffe," he wrote. "My mother at the time was a Miss Agnes Cuffe; my father's name is left an intriguing, speculative blank. When I was five years old my mother married an Army captain, a Scot named David Stiven, and from then until I left preparatory school I was known as Alec Stiven (a name I rather liked, although I hated and dreaded my stepfather)." His mother's "violently unhappy marriage" lasted only three years, ending when Captain Stiven was posted to New Zealand, Sir Alec said. At Pembroke Lodge, a boarding school, the headmaster discouraged the youth from student theatricals by telling him, "You're not the acting type," but later, at Roborough School in Eastbourne, he won the role of the breathless messenger in "Macbeth." The skinny, wild-eyed boy prepared for his bit part the night of the performance by running around the football field twice, timing himself to dash through the auditorium's side door and run onstage at the moment of his cue ("Enter a Messenger") and collapse in front of Macbeth. "Gracious," he genuinely gasped, "my lord (gulp!), I should report (gasp!) that which I . . ." The schoolboy audience burst into applause, and that night an actor was born. His schooling finished in 1932, he went to work as an apprentice copywriter in a London advertising agency. "The very first thing I did was on impulse to phone Martita Hunt and ask her to give me acting lessons," he recalled years later. "After a few lessons she sent me packing." In fact, after 12 lessons, Miss Hunt, a renowned actress who later played Miss Habersham with him in "Great Expectations," told the drab and emaciated young man in 1933, "You'll never make an actor, Mr. Guinness." Nevertheless, the would-be actor applied to the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art, which gave him a modest scholarship, and he was able to study and live on a single baked-beans-on-toast meal a day. He went to classes but augmented his training by following Londoners about, mimicking their gait, their traits and their gestures -- all of which would be put to good use in a brilliant career to come. On the other hand, he found the studio tiresome. "We did dancing and singing in the mornings," he recalled later. "Tap dancing was very much in vogue then so I'm afraid we did an awful lot of that. In the afternoons it was drama, and I remember we were taught that there was a correct and an incorrect way of executing the most detailed stage business." Partial Filmography Great Expectations, 1946 Oliver Twist, 1948 A Run for Your Money, 1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949 The Mudlark, 1950 The Man in the White Suit, 1951 The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951 The Captain's Paradise, 1953 The Malta Story, 1953 The Detective, 1954 The Prisoner, 1955 The Ladykillers, 1955 The Bridge on the River Kwai, 1957 The Horse's Mouth, 1958 The Scapegoat, 1959 Tunes of Glory, 1960 Lawrence of Arabia, 1962 Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964 Doctor Zhivago, 1965 Hotel Paradiso, 1966 The Quiller Memorandum, 1966 Scrooge, 1970 Cromwell, 1970 Murder by Death, 1976 Star Wars, 1977 Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, 1980 Raise the Titanic, 1980 Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, 1983 A Passage to India, 1984 Little Dorrit, 1988 A Handful of Dust, 1988 Kafka, 1991 Mute Witness, 1994 Mr. Guinness left the Compton Studio after seven months, but not before an annual recital at which the judges, John Gielgud among them, awarded him a major prize. In the years to come he was to refer often to the older actor as "the great hero of my youth," and in fact on more than one occasion the older man helped him along in his career, encouraging him and offering him money when he needed it. Some Struggles at the Beginning In 1934, literally a starving young actor, Mr. Guinness got work in a lurid shipboard melodrama called "Queer Cargo," in which he played three small roles. Then Gielgud gave him his first big break, casting him as Osric and the Third Player in a production of "Hamlet." "My theater tide began to come in because of Sir John's generosity, for from that point on I was never truly out of a job unless I wanted it that way," Sir Alec recalled in 1982. He was from the start a sort of critics' darling -- one called his Osric in "Hamlet" an "admirable popinjay," and later his Sir Andrew Aguecheek in "Twelfth Night" was pronounced "a collector's item." At age 24 he played his first Hamlet in a Tyrone Guthrie production at the Old Vic, and although it was, on the whole, an ego-chastening experience, one critic kindly conceded that if the young actor's Hamlet was short on force, his performance was "touched with sweetness and an aching sincerity." Of his apprenticeship under Gielgud, whose London company he had joined in 1937, Sir Alec said, "Working with him in the 30's was a great and good discipline because his precision demanded the same from you." And, he said: "Going into Tyrone Guthrie productions on the other hand was a great liberating influence. He could relax you as an actor where Gielgud could make you feel stiff. I was extraordinarily fortunate to be oscillating between these opposite poles." Sir Alec, a quietly modest man known for his unelaborate courtesy, was equally grateful to others in the theater. "Martita Hunt had been the first truly sophisticated person I had met, and she developed in me a sense of taste," he said in an interview. "So did Edith Evans, from whom I learnt things of value technically." Speaking of a producer and director at the Old Vic, he said: "Michel Saint-Denis, on the other hand, woke me up to what theater was really all about and was the first person to give me a sense of reality for the words I was speaking. Gielgud, Guthrie, Martita Hunt, Edith Evans, Michel Saint-Denis -- they were the formative people in my life." Before enlisting in the Royal Navy in 1941, the actor had learned many lessons well, having played 34 parts in 23 plays by Shakespeare, Pinero, Chekhov, Shaw and Sheridan. "It was obvious," Tyrone Guthrie said about that period, "that he was going to be tremendously talented. It was not so obvious that he was going to be so popular." Mr. Guinness's "war" was distinguished only by an incident that might have made a vignette in a Guinness comedy. In the invasion of Sicily, the actor-turned-landing-craft-skipper was actually the first person ashore, a nonheroic deed of derring-don't blamed entirely on an hour's error in orders. When the admiral in charge blustered his way ashore at last, the young Mr. Guinness is said to have blandly assured him that such tardy timing of an entrance would never be tolerated in the theater. On being mustered out, he resumed his writing and stage career in the role of Mitya in his own version of Dostoyevski's "Brothers Karamazov," an artistic success that failed at the box office. His other stage appearances in the postwar period included roles in Sartre's "Vicious Circle," the Dauphin in Shaw's "Saint Joan" and the title role in Shakespeare's "Richard II." Of the last, the critic for The Sunday Express of London wrote: "Mr. Guinness is slight, with an interesting angular face and a clear, flexible voice. He has dignity, but no majesty; he has range and control, but no surprises. He is intensely good without being great -- yet. His future may bring that." Shifting Over to the Movies Having played so many classical roles, he decided it was time to tackle the movies, commenting, "On the stage I never seem to have a chance to wear trousers." He had been an extra in his first movie, "Evensong," in 1934, and remembered it as "a horrible experience." But in 1946, the director David Lean cast him as Pocket in the now-classic film version of "Great Expectations." Mr. Lean then allowed him to play an extremely wicked Fagin in a controversial version of "Oliver Twist," whose release in the United States was held up for more than two years because of pressure brought by groups that considered the Guinness characterization anti-Semitic. The American version was also censored, but among moviegoers worldwide, Alec Guinness had clinched his claim to fame. Now much in demand on the screen, in 1949 he made "A Run for Your Money" and "Kind Hearts and Coronets"; in the latter, he played several members of a dotty family who fall prey to a murderous relative. It was that set of performances that forever sealed the actor's reputation as a rubber-faced British zany in the tradition of Sir Harry Lauder. He was thenceforth to be hailed as the actor who could play any part. In 1949 he also created the role of the seemingly omniscient psychiatrist in T. S. Eliot's "Cocktail Party" at the Edinburgh Festival, and the following year went with it to Broadway, where his performance bowled over critics and audiences alike. His first films were making him famous and moderately wealthy, but he fancied himself rather a tragedian than a comedian and, once more, in 1951, assayed "Hamlet" on the West End, directing the play himself and presenting the tragic Dane as cold, existential and matter of fact. The flop, which he was to brood over for years, propelled him more and more into movies. In early 1950's films he was a shrewdly wary Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in "The Mudlark"; a droopy-lidded, bowlered and bespectacled bank clerk who engineers the smuggling of a hoard of gold bullion out of England in "The Lavender Hill Mob"; and, in "The Man in the White Suit," a chemist single-mindedly devoted to developing a miracle fabric that would never soil or wear out. Yet another choice comedy role came in 1953 in "The Captain's Paradise," when he played a Mediterranean ferryboat skipper who commutes between wives as well as ports. Audiences delighted in his sly, mirthful charm as G. K. Chesterton's priestly sleuth Father Brown in "The Detective," also in 1954. Then along came "The Ladykillers" in 1955, closely followed by his first Hollywood film, a glossily cold remake of Molnar's "The Swan" in which he starred with Grace Kelly. Unlike many of his compatriots who despised Hollywood, Sir Alec said, "I found it warm in every way, and would have stayed on had there been work for me." In his greatest film triumph, "The Bridge on the River Kwai," Sir Alec was called upon to be "both admirable and tiresome," he said, as the fascinatingly paradoxical Colonel Nicholson, a British officer interned in a hellish Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. He made Nicholson at times infuriating, at times pitiable, a man whose strict adherence to an old-fashioned code of military ethics was both his scourge and his moral salvation. The next year he gave a full- rounded portrayal of Gulley Jimson in "The Horse's Mouth," a Swiftian satire in which he was an unkempt old rogue of a painter so obsessed by his art that he had no regard for the feelings or needs of anyone who dared impinge on his creativity. Sir Alec received an Academy Award nomination, not for his acting, which was splendid, but for the screenplay he wrote from the novel by Joyce Cary. Other film roles included "The Comedians," "The Quiller Memorandum" and Franco Zeffirelli's "Brother Sun, Sister Moon," none of which reversed the descending trend of the actor's film fortunes in the early 1970's. In 1976, however, he easily stole all his scenes in Neil Simon's "Murder by Death," a mystery spoof in which he played a blind butler. Then, in 1977, came the first installment of George Lucas's legendary space sagas. "I might never have been heard of again if it hadn't been for 'Star Wars'," Sir Alec once said. Yet he also said that he didn't care for the "Star Wars" frenzy. Among Sir Alec's later films were "A Passage to India" (1984) and "Little Dorrit" (1987). He also wrote another book late in life, "My Name Escapes Me: The Diary of a Retiring Actor" (1997). Acclaim in London and on Broadway Although films occupied most of his time, Sir Alec did not entirely desert the stage. He opened Canada's Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, in 1953, appearing as "Richard III." In London the following year he was praised for his harrowing performance in "The Prisoner," Bridget Boland's intense study of the brainwashing of a Roman Catholic cardinal in an Iron-Curtain country. (He made the film version in 1955.) He was also seen onstage as a would-be adulterer in Feydeau's "Hotel Paradiso" in 1956 and in 1960 had the title role in Terence Rattigan's "Ross," a portrait of the enigmatic T. E. Lawrence. His greatest success on Broadway came in 1964, when Peter Glenville prodded him into taking the tricky and difficult title role in "Dylan," an anecdotal drama dealing with the self-destructive poet Dylan Thomas's last liquor-sodden months. Sir Alec was the antithesis in character of the Welsh poet, but he gave a performance so heartwrenchingly sad that he won almost every available acting prize that season. Walter Kerr termed the performance "mesmerizing," adding, "There is a still center in the actor, a coal in the ashes that defies us to will our eyes away." (Years later, commenting on a trifling play superbly acted by Sir Alec in London, Mr. Kerr, not content with the title Queen Elizabeth II had conferred on the actor, dubbed him "St. Alec.") Sir Alec's appearances on television were rare but memorable. His most notable achievement was the character of George Smiley, the retired British intelligence officer he created in two multipart series seen in Britain and the United States in the early 1980's -- "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and "Smiley's People," written by John le Carré. His understated characterization of the aging, forlorn former spy underscored his reputation as "an actor who makes you forget that he is acting." Sir Alec, who had been almost bald since his late 20's, was often described as "dignified" and "quiet, unassuming." He lived in an unpretentious house in Hampshire, in the south of England, with his wife, Merula Salaman, who survives him along with their son, Matthew. They were married in 1938 when both were appearing as animals in John Gielgud's production of "Noah." Of Sir Alec's acting technique, Kenneth Tynan, the late critic, writer and director, once said: "My point is that the people Guinness plays best are all iceberg characters, nine-tenths concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in how their minds work. The parts he plays are, so to speak, injected hypodermically, not tattooed all over him; the latter is the star's way, and Guinness shrinks from it." The actor was mildly amused by such esoteric analyses of his art. "I have no ax to grind, and no interesting theories to propound," he said. "If a play comes my way which appeals to me and which I am free to do, I do it. It's as simple as that." There was, however, one sort of script he avoided, the sort proffered with the assurance, "It was written just for you." "I'm afraid I was a little abrupt recently with a producer who sent me a screenplay," he once confessed. "It was rubbish, really. I sent it back with a polite rejection. Then he came back with the plea that 'we tailored it just for you.' I replied simply, 'But no one came to take the measurements.' "