Obituary: Sir Alec Guinness

By PETER CALDER

Headline writers were fond of calling Sir Alec Guinness "the man of a thousand faces" - his ability to create different characters verged on the chameleonic.

In real life, by contrast, he would often pass unnoticed in the street.

He would tell the story of the day he handed his coat in at a restaurant cloakroom and offered the attendant his name.

"That won't be necessary," came the reply and the great actor felt - for an instant and almost against his nature - chuffed at being recognised. At the end of the evening he picked up his coat. The tag was still attached.

"Short," it read. "Bald. Glasses."

Guinness was never in the league of the three late great knights of the English stage - Richardson, Olivier and Gielgud - and we are the richer for that. They were half a generation older than he (indeed, Gielgud gave the penniless Guinness his first professional job as Osric in a 1934 production of Hamlet).

He often expressed a sense that he was their junior (assisted in some measure by them, it must be said. Olivier's "How clever of you to play Malvolio as a bore!" remains one of the bitchiest putdowns in theatrical history).

But in many ways he knew more about his craft than the rest of them put together.

The great critic Kenneth Tynan once remarked that Guinness would "never be a star in the sense that Olivier is."

"He does everything by stealth," wrote Tynan, and praised his "iceberg characterisations, nine-tenths concealed."

Contrasting Guinness with the work of the Big Actors, Tynan said his parts were "injected hypodermically not tattooed all over him." But Guinness was always rueful about the comparison, regretting that his Shakespearean roles were not better received.

"Deep in his heart," he wrote of himself in his 70s, "he hankers to be an artist of some sort, but he is only an actor."

Yet it was his knowledge that less is more that made him the actor he was. It also brought him success on screen that the other three never enjoyed, because he knew how to handle the camera's close-ups.

He had to chase many of his roles - Fagin in David Lean's memorable 1946 Oliver Twist, for instance - and alert film-makers to his talents.

It was his own idea that he play all eight members of the d'Ascoyne clan in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

For his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars he was paid 2 per cent of the box office, which enabled him to live his later years in rural comfort in Hampshire, refusing most of the roles he was offered. Yet he detested the film and his own performance and never read any of the fan mail it attracted.

His hard-won wealth, however, would have never been taken for granted. Guinness' childhood was impecunious.

This professional chameleon was a private enigma, too, although a second volume of late-life memoirs contained the telling sentence that he was "unaware of ever having lost a friend."

It's a sentence few of his peers, particularly those who saw themselves as his betters, would have been able honestly to write.