“He was a handsome old man, white haired. After the spectacular success of “Star Wars,” which earned Guinness an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, producer-director George Lucas admitted that he had not allowed his backers to read a complete script until the picture was finished and ready for cutting, lest they discover that he intended to kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi halfway through. Guinness joined the Royal Navy as a seaman in 1941, was commissioned a year later, and subsequently found himself commanding a landing craft, ferrying butter and hay to Yugoslav partisans. The couple was blessed with a son, whom they named Matthew Guinness. They had one son, Matthew. His father, he told an interviewer years ago, was “a bank director, quite wealthy, who generated me in his 64th year and died about three summers later. In his last book, “A Positively Final Appearance” published last year, he saved his sharpest barbs for “Star Wars,” its merchandising and its long-term effect on motion pictures. “One hesitates to limit oneself,” he explained. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Pedro Borges Spouse (1) “His pleasure is in putting little bits of things together, as if playing with a jigsaw puzzle.”. It wasn't an emergency.". Three months after this triple professional debut, he was playing Osric to Gielgud’s Hamlet, and the critics took notice of the “admirable popinjay.” They continued their approval as he moved on to the part of William in “As You Like It,” Sir Andrew Aguecheek in “Twelfth Night,” Lorenzo in “The Merchant of Venice,” and then—at 24—his first Hamlet, in an Old Vic production directed by Tyrone Guthrie. Bernie Madoff, who came to epitomize Wall Street corruption with his epic $65-billion Ponzi scheme, has died in prison of natural causes at age 82. Graduated near the top of his class at 18 but unable to afford dramatic school, Guinness took a job with an advertising agency, dropped it after 18 unrewarding months, and finally managed an interview with his favorite actor, John Gielgud. DMX rapped, and lived, with a ferocity unmatched in the annals of hip-hop, Britain mourns as leaders honor his service to queen and country, He had a rich Hollywood history. Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977's Star Wars. Patrick Jordan, left, with Kirk Douglas in The Heroes of Telemark, 1965. Continental Distribution 1955 Show More Show Less 4 of 14 Alec Guinness … “One hates,” he said long ago, “to let oneself get into a rut.”, Yet in all the public exposition, all the thousand faces of the performer, one face seemed never to appear: “Alec Guinness himself,” said an actor friend, “is perhaps the best-kept secret of modern times, a sort of one-man Tibet.”. “Twenty years ago, when it was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. ", Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, Sir Alec's former publicist and agent, said: At the end of the war, Guinness was very much in demand. He was also a public recluse in the grand theatrical tradition of Greta Garbo and Paul Muni: “A dark horse,” said his friend, Laurence Olivier, “and a deep one.”. Funeral arrangements were not immediately available. When asked what it was that drew him to acting, Guinness was fond of telling interviewers, “One became an actor to escape from oneself.” That Guinness might have a deep-seated need to escape was understandable. "The greatest British screen actor of the last century", "He became the character that he played like a chameleon", Monday, 7 August, 2000, 07:32 GMT 08:32 UK, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------. “He is well aware he is not in the same class as Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud or the other greats,” he writes in the third person. Cause of Death. (AP Photo) Show More Show Less 3 of 14 Alec Guinness in The Lady Killers." His performance as the Colonel in Bridge On the River Kwai won him an Oscar and led to his knighthood in the same year, 1959. He was close to starvation when he wandered unheralded into a small theater and asked for a tryout. From the Archives: Passionate Star Anthony Quinn Dies, From the Archives: Mel Ferrer, versatile actor, dies at 90, From the Archives: Laurence Olivier, Called Greatest Actor of His Time, Dies, Omar Sharif dies at 83; heartthrob actor starred in ‘Doctor Zhivago’, Maureen O’ Hara, the ‘only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne,’ dies at 95, Helen McCrory, ‘Peaky Blinders’ and ‘Harry Potter’ actor, dies of cancer at 52. … Guinness played a British veteran mentally incapacitated after being struck by shrapnel during the D-day landings. Alec Guinness is a renowned name in the English film industry till date, best remembered as one of the three actors who successfully transitioned from Shakespearean theatre to Hollywood blockbusters following World War II. He was 86. Guinness, who earned his last Academy Award nomination for “Little Dorrit” in 1988, gave up acting, he said, in part because he could not remember his lines. Her lessons permeated everyday life through art and conversation. At 6 he was packed off to boarding school, his expenses paid from an education fund set up by his father. But no jobs. Bernie Madoff, notorious financier who pulled off history’s biggest swindle, dies at 82. Merula Salaman (20 June 1938 - 5 August 2000) ( his death) ( 1 child) Generally regarded Laurence Olivier with feelings of disdain and anger. The cause of … His first appearance was as Mitya in “The Brothers Karamazov” at the Lyric theater in Hammersmith, after which he rejoined the Old Vic, appearing sometimes as the lead but more often as a strong supporting character in such productions as “King Lear,” “An Inspector Calls,” “Cyrano de Bergerac,” “The Alchemist,” “Richard II,” “St. Undaunted, he joined the school’s dramatic society. Alec Guinness in “Bridge on the River Kwai.”. “One wonders that one was not stoned to death in the street. ... Anne Archer and Sir Alec Guinness. Encouraged, Guinness applied to the Fay Compton Studio of Dramatic Art and somehow won a two-year scholarship. . Guinness would later claim that he had a premonition that the young actor would be killed in his Porsche 550 Spyder and that he’d cautioned Dean not to get into the car, warning him that he’d be dead within a week if he did. “You’ll never make an actor, Guinness,” he said. 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