Steyn on Guinness

Mark Steyn has re-posted the obituary he wrote for Alec Guinness six years ago.

He brings up that rather cute anecdote regarding the letter Guinness wrote to the editor in response to Steyn’s review of the Gwyneth Paltrow version of Emma (1996), and he mentions Guinness’s turns in various David Lean films — including Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and A Passage to India (1984) — as well as his roles in Cromwell (1970) and, of course, Star Wars (1977-1983) and the Ealing comedies:

His two great period roles, in their different ways, are Charles I in Cromwell and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. The consensus is that, unlike most movie actors, Guinness never played ‘himself’. But who else is Obi-Wan? The quiet authority, the dignity, the spiritual strength of the character come from Guinness, not from George Lucas and what the actor called the ‘second-hand, childish banalities’ of the dialogue.

Incidentally, for a classic Guinness performance, look up any old talk-show or interview where he’s asked if it’s true he gets 2¼ per cent of Star Wars plus additional points from the videos, sequels etc. There’s a beatific smile he nailed down early on, as he replies that, my word, yes, apparently, he does. Lots of British actors despise movie work, not least their own, but Guinness pulled off a deal that must have made him one of the wealthiest of English thespians: according to some accounts he made over £150 million from Star Wars. That’s a long way from his Ealing salaries, though even then he impressed his colleagues. Meeting Edith Evans at a swank restaurant, he told her not to worry, lunch was on him. He was making The Lavender Hill Mob, and they were paying him £6,000. Dame Edith went into full handbag mode. ‘£6,000!’ she gasped. ‘I must make another film. Or do you call them movies?’ . . .

But, Obi-Wan aside, most of Guinness’s screen characters belong to the day before yesterday — Ealing England, Graham Greene’s Havana, Forster’s India, Lawrence’s Arabia. He was a character actor in the sense that he acted characters, and some of them were strong enough to make him a star. According to J.C. Trewin, his was ‘a player’s countenance, designed for whatever might turn up’, though not everything took. His glassy-eyed, monotone Prince Faisal in Lean’s Lawrence (1962) may qualify as his worst performance in a good film, and set the tone for a disappointing mid-career patch in which he seemed by far the most boring of Britain’s theatrical knights. ‘Alec!’ sighed Noël Coward apropos Our Man in Havana. ‘It is a faultless performance but actually, I’m afraid, a little dull.’ It was around this time that Peter Sellers cooked up a character called Sir Eric Goodness, a theatrical grandee with a penchant for elliptical spiritual roles. Some years later, Guinness seems to have returned the compliment by playing Professor Godbole in A Passage to India as Sellers in ‘Goodness, Gracious Me’ mode.

But even in these weaker performances you see flickers of the great, defining characteristic of his best: his ability to project the sense of characters who have a life independent of the needs of the film. Colonel Nicholson in A Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) is the finest example, with a stiff, resilient, very British devotion to a soldier’s code that incubates into something insane. William Holden and the rest of the gang are perfectly fine as far as the stock types of war movies go, but the film stands or falls on Guinness: Nicholson could so easily be either risible or pathetic or implausible; instead, it’s a beautifully balanced interpretation.

Interestingly, Steyn does not mention Tunes of Glory (1960) — a film that boasts a dynamic Guinness performance and figured rather prominently in Steyn’s obituary for John Mills last year.