Alec Guinness
April 2, 1914 — Marylebone, London, England
Sir Alec Guinness was one of the finest character actors British cinema ever produced — a master of disguise and transformation who could play eight roles in the same film, win an Academy Award for his portrayal of a British colonel in a Japanese prison camp, and become a science-fiction icon as Obi-Wan Kenobi, all without ever recognizing himself in the mirror.
Stage Training and Early Career
Born on April 2, 1914, in Marylebone, London, under somewhat mysterious circumstances — his mother never disclosed his father's identity — Guinness trained at the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art and came of age as a stage actor under John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier. He was a disciplined, cerebral actor who trusted technique over instinct, studying observation of real people to construct his characters from the outside in. His early stage work in Shakespeare established his reputation as a classical actor of the first rank, but it was film that made him a star.
Kind Hearts, Kwai, and the Art of Transformation
In the Ealing comedies of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Guinness demonstrated extraordinary range: in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) he played eight members of the same aristocratic family, including a woman, each with a distinct physicality and voice. The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) cemented his status as a comic genius. But his most celebrated dramatic role came in David Lean's The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), where he played Lt. Col. Nicholson, a rigidly principled British officer who slowly and tragically compromises himself in a Japanese POW camp. The role won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Did You Know?
Guinness had a remarkable prescient encounter with James Dean just days before Dean's fatal car accident in September 1955. After dining with Dean at an Italian restaurant in Hollywood, Guinness felt a sudden dread when he saw Dean's new Porsche Spyder. He told Dean, "If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week." It was, Guinness later recalled, "an odd thing to say." Dean died exactly a week later.
Obi-Wan Kenobi and Later Work
In 1977 George Lucas cast the sixty-two-year-old Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, a role he initially considered beneath him but negotiated to include a percentage of the film's profits. As the film became the highest-grossing movie ever made at the time, those percentages made Guinness wealthy for the rest of his life — and, he later admitted, something to be deeply ambivalent about, as he despised being recognized only for the role. He continued in distinguished stage and screen work, including Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and won an honorary Academy Award in 1979. He died on August 5, 2000, widely considered one of the greatest actors who ever lived.