Actor Sir Alec Guinness Dies at (2)

[GypsyCaine]

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No: HPFGUIDX C6245
From: GypsyCaine
Subject: Re: Actor Sir Alec Guinness Dies at (2)
Reply To: [Yahoo! #6244] Actor Sir Alec Guinness Dies at 86
Date: 8/8/00 12:32 pm  (ET)

His death further thins Britain's ranks of elder statesmen actors,
following the loss earlier this year of Sir John Gielgud, one of
Guinness's lifelong friends. Few actors shared Guinness's genius for
submerging himself in a role, so that the part _ not his personality _
came through. But Guinness gently dismissed the tag once given him by
his agent: ``The man of a thousand faces.''``It's absolute rubbish _
it has plagued me all my life,'' he complained. Guinness was born out
of wedlock on April 2, 1914, and did not
know until he was 14 that the name on his birth certificate was
Guinness.``I wasn't miserable _ children accept what happens _ but I
had a lonely childhood and I suppose acting came from inventing things
for myself,'' he once said. Following boarding school, Guinness worked
briefly as an advertising copywriter, spending most of his pound-a-week
salary on theater tickets. After lessons with the actress Martita Hunt,
he won a place at the Fay Compton School of Acting. There, Gielgud
judged the end-of-term performances and chose Guinness as the winner,
later giving him a break as Osric in ``Hamlet'' in 1934. Guinness married
actress Merula Salaman in 1938. They had a son, Matthew, and lived in
the country 50 miles southwest of London. Guinness helped define 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, ``Kind
Hearts and Coronets,'' in which he played the entire d'Ascoyne family. His
collaborations with director Lean were a career constant, from ``Great
Expectations'' and ``Oliver Twist'' in the 1940s through ``River Kwai,''
``Dr. Zhivago,'' and, finally, ``A Passage to India'' in 1984. He won a
Tony award as best actor for playing poet Dylan Thomas in ``Dylan'' on
Broadway in 1964. But it was his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in ``Star Wars''
and its two sequels that brought Guinness pop culture celebrity _ and some
dismay. Guinness said he detested the ``Star Wars'' phenomenon and once
described the films' dialogue as ``frightful rubbish.'' On television,
Guinness distinguished himself as John Le Carre's
quiet spy, George Smiley, in ``Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy,''
and ``Smiley's People'' in 1979 and 1981. Guinness's 1985 memoir,
``Blessings in Disguise,'' told more about the talented and eccentric
people he knew than about himself. 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 says,
smiling. 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.''