Alec Guinness

Sir Alec Guinness was a highly successful and versatile actor on both the stage and the screen who also worked as a writer. One of the most famous leading men of the 1950s, Guinness is fondly remembered by younger fans for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century.

Alec Guinness de Cuffe was born on April 2, 1914, to a single mother in London, . A few years after his birth, his mother married a young soldier suffering from shell shock in the aftermath of the Anglo-Irish War. Together, the couple saved enough money to send Guinness to boarding school. This gave him the boost he needed to embark on a career in acting. His first job was as an advertising copywriter, but he had always been interested in theatre and studied at Fay Compton's studio, quickly finding a place in the Old Vic. In 1936 he played Osric in Sir John Gielgud's highly acclaimed production of Hamlet, and he continued to perform onstage until World War II, working alongside such luminaries as Anthony Quayle, Jack Hawkins, and Dame Peggy Ashcroft.

During the war, Guinness served in the Royal Navy, participating in the invasion of Sicily and Elba and ferrying supplies to Yugoslav partisans. On his return, he broke into film, playing Herbert Pocket in David Lean's adaptation of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, a production which also featured Sir John Mills, Valerie Hobson, and Jean Simmons. The film was a great success, and the following year Guinness enjoyed a bigger role in Lean's next Dickens venture, Oliver Twist.

From there he went on to appear in a slew of Ealing comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he played eight members of the d'Ascoyne family murdered by Dennis Price's ambitious young Louis Mazzini. In The Lavender Hill Mob Guinness played a shy bank clerk persuaded to participate in a robbery by the devious Stanley Holloway and Sid James. The Man in the White Suit, which also starred Joan Greenwood and Cecil Parker, saw him on the run as the naive inventor of a fabric that never gets dirty or wears out.

Later career highlights include multiple Oscar Award winning The Bridge on the River Kwai with William Holden and Sessue Hayakawa, the Graham Greene adaptation Our Man in Havana with Maureen O'Hara and Noel Coward, Lawrence of Arabia with Peter O Toole and Omar Sharif, Doctor Zhivago with Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin, and A Passage to India with Judy Davis and Victor Banerjee.

In 1976, he co-starred in the Neil Simon' s comedy Murder by Death, with an all star cast including Truman Capote, Peter Falk, Peter Sellers, Eileen Brennan and Elsa Lancaster.
 

In 1977 he accepted a supporting role in George Lucas's Star Wars, with Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher.  He then spent the rest of his life trying to hide from the attention it brought him.

During his career, Guinness was nominated for five Oscars, won one Oscar, and also received a lifetime achievement award. Guinness maintained that his best performance was as Adolf Hitler in the often overlooked Hitler: The Last Ten Days.

Despite the success of his screen career, Guinness never lost his passion for the theater, where he built up a reputation as one of the most accomplished Shakespearean actors of all time. He also enjoyed a successful television career, appearing in acclaimed BBC dramas like Smiley's People (based on the John le Carré novel) and Eskimo Day (with Maureen Lipman and David Ross).