A Force in acting
By Michael J.Roberts
"An actor is at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents."
~ Alec Guinness
Alec Guinness may have arrived into the world in 1914 unsure of his identity, his father’s name was not on his birth certificate, but he left it with the world knowing exactly who he was – one of the greatest stage and screen actors of the twentieth century. As many of his peers did, in a generation of British actors that remains unparalleled, Guinness started on the stage and in 1936 at the New Theatre he played support to John Gielgud in Hamlet and soon signed a contract with the renowned Old Vic company where he worked with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson and Michael Redgrave et al. Guinness himself adapted the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations to the stage and David Lean was amongst one of the audience members and several years later offered to film it with Guinness reprising his role as Herbert Pocket.
The war intervened for Guinness and most of the actors of his generation and he did his service in the Royal Navy. After the war his film career began in earnest with the Lean adaptation of Great Expectations, scripted by Lean and Ronald Neame, and it was such a success that they followed it 2 years later with another Dickens, this time a version of Oliver Twist with Neame producing. Guinness played the Jewish character Fagin, taking his lead in appearance and demeanour from contemporaneous images from the era but it caused a controversy and offense to audiences unable to imagine the context of the writing. Some things never change.
Guinness then settled in to a wonderful series of projects for Ealing Studios during the next decade and delivered some of his finest and most beloved performances in
- Kind Hearts and Coronets – where he played 8 different roles under the astute direction of Robert Hamer.
- The Lavender Hill Mob – a fun caper comedy for Charlie Crichton, with Stanley Holloway.
- The Man in The White Suit - a satire directed by Alexander Mackendrick.
- Father Brown – a comedy/mystery with Joan Greenwood, directed by Robert Hamer.
- The Ladykillers – a black comedy for Mackendrick again alongside Peter Sellers.
Interspersed with his Ealing efforts he made a couple of films with his colleague Ronald Neame directing – The Card, with Glynis Johns and Valerie Hobson and the excellent The Horse’s Mouth, which had a screenplay from Guinness himself, an adaptation of Joyce Carey’s book about an eccentric artist. It contains one of the most bold characterisations in the Guinness catalogue and was a favourite of the actors for the rest of his life. David Lean resurfaced in 1957 with a film that would launch the actor to global stardom with Bridge On The River Kwai. The film won many awards, including Best Picture at the Oscars and BAFTA’s and Guinness walked away with Best Actor awards from both institutes as well. Colonel Nicholson is simply an indelible character in all of cinema with a note perfect characterisation from Guinness who was at the top of his form.
The end of the 1950s saw the actor reteam with Robert Hamer for The Scapegoat, an interesting but poorly received dual role and with directing great Carol Reed for the very fine Graham Green adaptation, Our Man In Havana. Neame came knocking again in 1960 with one of the roles of his life, Colonel Jock Sinclair in the brilliant army film Tunes of Glory, opposite his old friend John Mills. It remains one of the finest screen performances of his career. The 1960s saw the ageing actor take on some odd Hollywood projects from the likes of Mervyn LeRoy and Anthony Mann – the latter being the obligatory toga and sandals epic The Fall of The Roman Empire but broken up with key supports in two of the most successful epics of the era by David Lean, Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, both near the high water mark of what a big screen epic can accomplish.
Tepid comedies (Hotel Paradiso) routine spy capers (The Quiller Memorandum) and all star dramas (The Comedians) rounded out the decade and the 1970s offered nothing remarkable – a solid turn in Cromwell against Richard Harris and a dud adaptation of Scrooge for Ronald Neame, opposite Albert Finney didn’t trouble the box office but Guinness was as reliable as ever. After a lovely and unexpected turn in the film version of Neil Simon’s Murder By Death, Guinness received the role that would for most people define his legacy – Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.
The Star Wars role (which he hated because of the 'banal dialogue') would set him up for the rest of his life and provide him two lucrative sequels in The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, and a legacy beyond his death in 2000. He managed a part in his pal David Lean’s final film, A Passage To India and in between provided a brilliant turn as George Smiley in the TV production of John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and reprised it in Smiley’s People a few years later.
Alec Guinness left an indelible mark as a versatile, chameleonic and masterful actor on stage and screen, and in an era when the British stage and screen was adorned with a richness of talent that will never be repeated, that is no small thing. His screen legacy is not defined by quantity, he was involved in less than 50 features over nearly 50 years - many actors made a lot more films - but the ratio of quality within that modest output is significantly high. Although he is most widely known in popular culture for his Obi-Wan persona, it is simply the fact that any Alec Guinness film will be worth watching for his presence alone, a special talent who draws the eye and a force stays in the memory.