From The Bard To The Force
Alec Guinness, whose acting career ran from Shakespeare to Star Wars, has died at a hospital in England. He was 86 years old.
Guinness became ill at his home near Petersfield, southern England, and was taken by ambulance to the King Edward VII Hospital where he died Saturday. The cause of death was not released.
His first Oscar and his early fame in the United States came from The Bridge on the River Kwai. CBS News Correspondent Richard Roth reports that Guinness said what he admired in an actor was what he strived for himself: simplicity, purity, clarity of line.
His professional life spanned more than 60 years on stage and screen. His credits are a catalog of versatility, and he was called the chameleon of British character actors, a man of a thousand faces.
While at first his performances on film were a little too stagey, he eventually learned about the lens and the intimacy of film. But he was a private star, and he once said he picked his roles on the spur of the moment.
Star Wars, in which he played Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, made him famous all over again, and he claimed he hated his role. The checks made him a millionaire, though.
He was described as quiet, unassuming, but always with a talent shining through, said a critic, of an actor who made you forget that he was acting.
CBS News Correspondent Kimberly Dozier reports that he was an actor so modest, he threw away his own fan mail. Guinness despised Star Wars fame, and playing Obi-Wan Kenobi. He campaigned to get the Jedi knight killed off.
Fellow actor Sir John Mills said he had no time for airs, or attitudes: "He was immensely popular, because he was a no-nonsense actor. He just got on with it."
A deeply religious man, friends say his Oscar and knighthood meant little. To him, the ultimate reward was doing the job.
Guinness was one of the last surviving members of Britain's greatest generation of actors, which included Sir Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson.
Guinness was a tall man with large, expressive blue eyes and otherwise unremarkable features "a player's countenance, designed for whatever might turn up," critic J.C. Trewin once said.
His precise, modulated baritone voice was distinctive, but if ever there was an actor who never played himself, it was Alec Guinness.
"I had countless first impressions of him," playwright Ronald Harwood wrote. "Each time I saw him, in films, later in the theater, I had the uncanny feeling I had never before watched him act."
Guinness first made his mark in films in the Ealing Studio comedies of the late 1940s and the 1950s: The Man in the White Suit, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Lady Killers, and most remarkably in Kind Hearts and Coronets. In that classic black comedy, he played the entire d'Ascoyne family -- in his own words, "eight speaking parts, one non-speaking cameo and a ortrait in oils."
In parts such as Fagin in Oliver Twist, Guinness was barely recognizable behind his makeup and costume.
But with The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957 he established that his versatility had nothing to do with disguise. He won an Oscar for his performance as the disciplined, inflexible Col. Nicholson in a World War II Japanese prison camp.
Three years later, he played Nicholson's opposite -- the boorish, hard-drinking Scottish Lieut.-Col. Jock Sinclair in Tunes of Glory.
He once described it as his favorite film role -- "perhaps the best thing I've done."
Guinness had a long film partnership with director David Lean, beginning in 1946 as Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations, through Oliver Twist, The Bridge on the River Kwai Dr. Zhivago, and finally A Passage to India in 1984.
His 1977 role as Obi-Wan Kenobi introduced him to a new generation of filmgoers and made him financially secure. "I might never have been heard of again if it hadn't been for Star Wars," he said.
Guinness did little television, but became John Le Carre's quiet spy George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, and Smiley's People in 1979 and 1981.
Some of his best-known stage performances were in T.S. Eliot's Cocktail Party; in Ross as T.E. Lawrence; Dylan Thomas in Dylan; and as a blind lawyer in John Mortimer's Voyage Round My Father.
His considerable fame left Guinness unmoved.
"You can only be your own personality," he once said. "And I'm just happy to be an actor. If I tried to swan around, I wouldn't know how to behave. If I tried to be a superstar, I'd be a laughing stock!"
Born April 2, 1914, Guinness was an illegitimate child who did not know the name on his birth certificate was Guinness until he was 14.
"I have to admit that my search for a father has been my constant speculation for 50 years," he said.
The mysterious father, whose identity he never learned, provided money for private schools, but not university. Guinness worked briefly as an advertising copywriter, spending his pound-a-week salary on theater tickets, and survived on sandwiches and apples given him by friends at work.
After scraping together the funds for some elementary lessons, he won a place at the Fay Compton School of Acting. There, John Gielgud judged the end-of-term performance and chose him as the prize winner.
Guinness had some of his first stage roles in Gielgud's plays.
In one of them, Guinness met actress Merula Salaman, whom he married in 1938. They had a son Matthew and remained happily married, living in a country house in Petersfield, 50 miles southwest of London.
Guinness's entertaining memoir, Blessings in Disguise, published in 1985, told more about the talented and eccentric people he knew than bout himself.
He was seldom recognized in public.
In one of the stories he told about himself, Guinness checks his hat and coat at a restaurant and asks for a claim ticket. "It will not be necessary," the attendant smiles.
Pleased at being recognized, Guinness later retrieves his garments, puts his hand in the coat pocket and finds a slip of paper on which is written, "Bald with glasses."
Guinness converted to Roman Catholicism in 1956, but resisted attempts to paint him as a pious person.
In 1985 he told the Guardian newspaper that he hoped by the end of his life to have put everything in order -- "a kind of little bow, tied on life. And I can see myself drifting off into eternity, or nothing, or whatever it may be, with all sorts of bits of loose string hanging out of my pocket. Why didn't I say this or do that, or why didn't I reconcile myself with someone? Or make sure that someone whom I like was all right in every way, either financially or, I don't know."