Sir Alec Guinness: a great actor who remains modest

Press, 5 December 1985, Page 22

Sir Alec Guinness: a great actor who remains modest

By

DAVID LEWIS

of Reuters through NZPA London

In or out of character, Sir Alec Guinness shuns the limelight and never acts the star. Though one of Britain’s great stage and screen artists, he has been dubbed the world’s most famous anonymous actor by one critic because of his private and professional modesty. “I have been so amazed by the comparative success of my silly book,” said the double Oscar-winner after his newly published memoirs, “Blessings in Disguise,” had topped England’s bestseller lists for several weeks.

Preferring cheese, scrambled eggs and beer to haute cuisine offered by the select Covent Garden restaurant he had chosen, Sir Alec, who is 71, was equally modest about his long career as “only an actor” in more than 40 films and 60 plays. His range has been wide, from Hamlet at London’s Old Vic in 1937 to Fagin in David Lean’s “Oliver Twist” in 1948, from his Oscarwinning Colonel Nicholson in Lean’s "The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957) to a Jedi knight wielding a laser sword in George Lucas’s record-breaking sci-fi epic, “Star Wars” (1977).

For a while he was known as “the man of a thousand faces.” Yet Sir Alec dismisses much of his work and says some of his acting has been far too tame. The prologue of his book, in which he writes of his own ego in the third person and compares himself unfavourably with Lord (Laurence) Olivier, the late Sir Ralph Richardson, and Sir John Gielgud, is similarly self-effacing.

“The bold statement is never likely to be his: he is well aware he is not in the same class as Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud or the other greats,” he says. Others disagree. The novelist, Anthony Burgess, has written: “His admirers, who include myself, are rather less aware.” The critic, Ken Tynan, said he was “the best living English character actor.” Sir Alec was born in London on April 2, 1914. He has never been certain who his father was, although he suspects a certain Andrew Geddes, a director of the Anglo-South American Bank.

“The search for a father has been my constant, though fairly minor, speculation for 50 years,” he writes.

A childhood spent drifting with his mother from one lodging to another, and in boarding schools paid for by his stepfather, led to a small job in advertising when he was 18. He fell in love with the theatre as a small child, but his headmaster told him at 12 that he would never make an actor. But he did direct and act at school, and his professional ambitions were fired when he heard at 15 “that one could earn as much as 16 pounds ($22) a week” on the stage. “It hadn’t quite occurred to me that you could earn a living as an actor,” said the man later to make a fortune

by having negotiated a percentage of the profits of “Star Wars”.

Through the advice of Sir John Gielgud, whom he telephoned out of the blue, he took lessons with borrowed money, won a two-year scholarship to a school of dramatic art, and left ad- ’ vertising. His money ran out after seven months, but he managed to find a non-speaking part on the, London stage as a junior lawyer in “Libel!” in 1934. Sir John gave him the part of Osric in “Hamlet” later that year, and his career was on its way. Sir Alec seems loathe to talk about acting — “I don’t know what it means” — and he claims not to find fulfilment in applause or the act of performance itself. “The only excitement is the rehearsal period. All

your antennae are up, ac- - cep ting, rejecting, feeling your way inside and out... everything’s functioning.” He likes the periphery of stage acting, the feeling of belonging to a company. “I love the life of the theatre. I love not having to act in fits and starts. I love getting down there of an evening and making myself up. Converted to Roman Catholicism in 1956, he writes: “An actor is ... at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents.”

But though he prefers theatre to cinema — “filming doesn’t interest me at all” — his appearance as Shylock in Chichester last summer was his first stage appearance since “Yahoo” The reason, he says, is simply the material he is offered. “It’s either lame or a masochistic, sadistic kind of horror in a brothel ... I know I’m sent certain sleazy stuff because people think that if they’ve got me .it will sound all right and also make it doubly shocking.” He has just turned down the chance to act under Sir Peter Hall at Britain’s National Theatre: “I jumped on it avidly, thinking ‘Ah!’ but I was bored by it... a sense of deja vu.” However, film and tele-

vision work has kept him

busy. He scored a major success in 1979 as the spymaster, George Smiley, in a British television series of John Le Carre’s “Tinker, Taiior, Soldier, Spy,” and in its follow-up, “Smiley’s People.” He continued his long association with Lean as Professor Godbole in the film of “A Passage to India” (1984). In 1980, the American Film Academy awarded him an Oscar for a lifetime’s service to film. His memoirs are being translated into French, German, and Swedish and will be published in the United States next year. His next film, “Little Dorrit,” is an adaptation from Charles Dickens. He begins filming in February and is looking forward to playing the colourful William Dorrit

“I love to play a rather over-the-top character. It extends me in some way. For the most part I get offered rather mild characters.”

In London from Hampshire, where he lives with Merula, his wife of 47 years (their actor son, Matthew, has two children), Sir Alec left the restaurant for a wig-fitting as Dorrit. Always an actor to take his work seriously, he shaved his hair for a role back in 1934, and it never properly grew back.