Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Alec Guinness, my favorite male actor, was a magnificent chameleon.

He disappeared into his part, always.  No one on the track of Guinness's actual personality ever found any revealing spoor to trail.

Others besides myself have admired this trait.  Actor John Hurt stressed Guinness's "taking himself to the part, rather than the other way round."  Producer and director Ronald Neame asserted, "The wonderful thing about Guinness was he became the part he was playing, he was like a chameleon, he would change colors."  Anthony Hopkins submerges his own personality in the same way as Guinness did.

Shy, introverted, reclusive, Guinness surmounted difficult early privation and a scanty education to become a largely self-educated man and to build success as both a stage actor and a film/TV actor.  Born in London in 1914 as an illegitimate child to a mother he disliked, he eventually attended the Fay Compton School of Dramatic Art despite his cocoa-nourished poverty. He attracted the notice of John Gielgud, who cast Guinness as Osric in a staging of "Hamlet."  Success at the Old Vic and other theatres followed, as did service during World War Two in the Royal Navy as an officer.  The veteran Guinness then returned to the stage intermittently for most of the rest of his life; from 1934 to 1989, he played 77 parts in live theatre. Balancing out failed turns as Hamlet and Macbeth, he won acclaim as the soldier T. E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") and the poet Dylan Thomas.

Having seen Guinness portray Pip's friend Herbert Pocket in a 1939 stage production of "Great Expectations," film editor and new director David Lean cast Guinness in the same role in his 1946 film of Charles Dickens's novel.  Guinness then starred over the next decade in dramatic films like Lean's "Oliver Twist" and "Father Brown" as well as comedies like "The Man in the White Suit," "The Lavender Hill Mob," "Kind Hearts and Coronets," and "The Ladykillers."  Notably, in "Last Holiday," Guinness plays a man who has breathed rather than lived but who receives a fatal diagnosis and advice to take a posh last holiday.  In addition, Guinness is well-matched against Jack Hawkins in "The Prisoner," a riveting psychological duel between an imprisoned, self- and mother-hating cardinal and his communist interrogator. I'm not sure Guinness was ever better.

From the middle Fifties through the middle Seventies, Guinness became even more world-renowned, especially after he received the Best Actor Oscar as the imperturbable and dauntless Colonel Nicholson in "The Bridge on the River Kwai."  This David Lean production preceded other Lean-Guinness collaborations like "Lawrence of Arabia" (as Prince Faisal) and "Doctor Zhivago" (as Lieutenant General Yevgraf Andreyevich Zhivago).  Besides writing the Oscar-nominated screenplay for "The Horse's Mouth" and starring in the film as a randy artist, Guinness memorably portrays the bad-tempered, red-haired, boisterous, Scottish Major Jock Sinclair in "Tunes of Glory," his own favorite performance.

In his last two decades of TV and film performance, until 1996, Guinness is endlessly watchable as the embittered intelligence agent and handler George Smiley in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Smiley's People"; as the gentle, unworldly "Monsignor Quixote"; as Mr Todd, The Man Who Loved Dickens, at the end of "A Handful of Dust"; and as a brain-damaged veteran of the D-Day landings in Normandy in "A Foreign Field."

In 1980, he accepted an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement.  In a world overrun by showy actors and overbearing personalities, Guinness impressed with his invisibility.  He was so much The Man Who Wasn't There. 

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent