Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "In the late summer of 1988, when he was about to make his last stage appearance in Lee Blessing's A Walk in the Woods at..." (more)
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When Guinness died in 2000, his widow designated Read (Alive!) as the actor's authorized biographer, and the results are mixed. Read doesn't allow his friendship with Guinness to interfere with an honest account of some unsavory aspects of the actor's personality (e.g., his frequent cruelty to his wife). But Read's treatment of his subject's professional career is spotty—while Guinness's early years in London theater are well represented, some of his best films from the 1950s are barely mentioned, and even his most famous role, as Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and its sequels, gets less than 10 pages. Instead, Read offers repeated, lengthy speculations about his subject's sexuality. Anecdotal evidence and cryptic diary entries do suggest Guinness may have wrestled with an attraction to men, and might even on occasion have acted upon it and felt guilty afterward, but the issue probably doesn't require quite so much attention. Read fares better in discussing other aspects of Guinness's emotional life, including his ambivalence toward the mother who conceived him out of wedlock, and an adult conversion to Roman Catholicism. Readers hoping for the usual celebrity biography filled with the star's encounters with other stars, however, will likely be disappointed. B&w photos.
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From The Washington Post

Like the other most celebrated British actors of his time -- John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Laurence Olivier -- Alec Guinness loved the stage above all but became known throughout the world for the roles he played in movies. Like those other actors, he had mixed feelings about this to the end of his life, hewing to the conventional view of his time and place that movies are somehow less serious and important than the theater, but unlike the others he rarely went back to the stage after his first important movie appearance, as Herbert Pocket in David Lean's adaptation of "Great Expectations." That may have troubled him, but not enough to do much about it -- for which we must be grateful, for his enduring legacy is a long succession of brilliant performances that can be enjoyed and marveled at as long as movies exist.

It is the way of the world that he became most famous for one of his least important roles: as Ben (Obi-Wan) Kenobi, the Jedi knight of the "Star Wars" series; this made him a bundle of money and brought more fan mail than he cared to read, much less answer, but, Piers Paul Read reports, "he was depressed that his celebrity was based on work that he himself did not esteem." Presumably he would have cited as his best work the roles of Col. Nicholson in "The Bridge on the River Kwai," Gully Jimson in "The Horse's Mouth" (to my mind best of all) and Jock Sinclair in "Tunes of Glory," but many others would insist on including Herbert Pocket, Fagin in "Oliver Twist" and the many roles he played in the immortal Ealing Studios comedies of the late 1940s and early '50s, notably "Kind Hearts and Coronets," "The Lavender Hill Mob," "The Man in the White Suit" and "The Ladykillers."

Just typing out the titles gives me a frisson: All of the films cited above are among the treasures of my youth and have remained treasures ever since -- and credit for that goes to Guinness. Like millions of others, I was captivated by his range, his sympathy, his wit and -- this above all -- his ability to lose himself so completely in the characters he played that they became utterly real and discrete. Unlike almost all other movie stars, whose presence as stars, as themselves, is always on the screen, Guinness was "a man of a thousand faces," none of them his own.

For this he was occasionally criticized, as being a superb character actor but nothing more. Gielgud, who was his mentor and whom he revered, cut him to the quick when, as a young man, Guinness aspired to play Hamlet. "I can't think why you want to play big parts," Gielgud said. "Why don't you stick to those funny little men you do so well instead of trying to be important?" Guinness's ambition was "to escape from the confines of character acting into the amplitude of a major role," as eventually he did on stage and in the movies, but when he got them he brought the character actor's sensibility to them. It was his greatest strength.

So now, five years after his death at age 86, comes Piers Paul Read to honor him -- suffocate him, more than a few readers will think -- with the proverbial doorstopper of a biography. As Guinness's ardent admirer, I don't really mind excess piled atop excess in his case, but there's a lot more here than most people will want to know. The biographer of an actor who played a couple of thousand roles is faced with the same problem as the biographer of a famous athlete: Does the reader really need play-by-play of every game? It's a forest-and-trees problem, and Read hasn't solved it. Too much space is given to minor and/or forgettable parts that Guinness played, while some of his more interesting and consequential ones -- Prince Faisal in "Lawrence of Arabia," for instance -- are rushed past in an unseemly and unhelpful hurry. Read, best known as the author of Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, is a good writer and diligent researcher, but in this case less would indeed have been more.

Still, for those curious about the man behind the thousand faces, there is much here to savor. To Read's credit, at the end of his nearly 600 pages of text, a bit of the mystery about a singularly mysterious man has been lifted, if not wholly removed. Born in 1914 to an unmarried woman who never told him who his father was -- it appears to have been a Scottish banker named Andrew Geddes, who gave young Alec a measure of financial support and included him in his will -- he mostly loathed her to the end of her own very long life. A boozer and (her son's word) a "whore," she often mortified him yet repeatedly clung to him. In a class-conscious country, all this left him "uneasy about his own standing in English society, and acutely embarrassed by his own lack of a background" as well as with "awkward and inhibited feelings for his human relatives," on whom he lavished less overt affection than he accorded his beloved dogs and other animals.

He was deeply reserved and deeply private, though Read senses strong passions beneath that serene exterior. The precise nature of those passions remains yet another mystery. Guinness was happily married to the former Merula Salaman for more than six decades, and they seem to have shared a powerful physical attraction -- in one of his many letters to her he said, "And the hours of love making we can have my poppet -- just you and me -- oh its too exciting, and heavenly" -- but there is also a good deal of essentially anecdotal reason to believe that he "enjoyed the company of homosexuals, and a degree of voyeuristic flirtation with handsome young men."

Whether this is all merely a matter of the higher gossip or points to things deep in Guinness cannot be known, and indeed no one appears to have claimed to have had a homosexual encounter or relationship with him. Ambivalence about one's sexuality obviously is scarcely uncommon, and perhaps even more widespread in the theater and films, where the incidence of homosexuality is high. Obviously, conflicted sexuality and repressed passions could have had more than a little to do with Guinness's commitment from a very early age to acting, which permits people to channel their own feelings into the characters they portray and thus to express those feelings while simultaneously concealing them.

He was in any case a complicated man, capable of friendship and gregariousness but also aloof and self-contained. He was orderly to a fault, nagging Merula about her indifference to domestic neatness, yet often pulling back with an expression of affection and admiration for her. She absolutely adored him, but he cannot have been easy to live with, since pouring himself into his characters meant becoming them at home as well as on the stage or the set. He was given to depression and self-doubt but never capitulated to either; at his core, he was strong. He was a convert to Catholicism, which played a large role in his life, though he was torn between "the man who loved 'gossipy wicked' lunches and the man who yearned for the serenity that came when he felt filled with the Grace of God." Apart from animals, he loved to garden, to loll about his handsome house in the country and to travel -- which was fortunate, as his movie roles took him all over the world.

In his work he was utterly professional. David Cornwell (aka John le Carré) found him "amazing" as he worked on his brilliant television portrayal of George Smiley in "Smiley's People," amazing "in that he not only knew his own lines, he knew everyone's lines, and he had a clear idea of how a scene should play. What the dramatic energy was. What story point was being made and where the camera would be looking. And he would write himself out of the dialogue if necessary -- he could steal a scene with his back. You couldn't take your eyes off him. I found him hypnotic on stage or on the screen."

Absolutely correct. It was my good fortune to be in London in the winter of 1989 and to acquire a ticket for "A Walk in the Woods," the two-character play in which he and Edward Herrmann starred. It isn't much of a play, as both actors seemed to know, but in the role of the Russian diplomat Guinness dominated the stage; since Herrmann is himself an accomplished and highly professional actor, that is saying something. As it turned out, that play was Guinness's final appearance on the stage. Lucky me, to have seen it.
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 640 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Edition edition (June 21, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743244982
• ISBN-13: 978-0743244985
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #624,323 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sad look at the personal life of a legendary actor, August 2, 2005

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

Alec Guinness's career spanned generations. Great-grandparents might recall his days on the British stage. Grandparents may have seen such classics as The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. Younger cinemaphiles still picture him as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.

Like most actors, Guinness had more than his share of success with a few clinkers thrown in. Piers Paul Read reveals the enormity of his life's work, along with a massive account of Sir Alec's personal side, in ALEC GUINNESS: The Authorised Biography.

Read, author of more than a dozen books, has done a huge amount of research, culling letters and journals from Guinness and his extended Guinness family, as well as a large circle of friends and acquaintances, to produce an intimate portrait of one of the greatest actors --- along with fellow Englishmen Olivier and Gielgud --- of stage, screen and television.

Guinness came from humble roots. His mother was an alcoholic who never married his father and became an embarrassment to the celebrity as he grew older. It was a stigma that no doubt weighed heavily on him as a young man and beyond, and formed his persona. He was at the same time generous and tight with his money, easily offended but quick to make friends. These paradoxes form the main theme for ALEC GUINNESS.

He found a soul mate in his wife, Merula, to whom he would be married for more than forty years, but once their son, Matthew, was born, their conjugal relationship was non-existent. Nevertheless, she was the perfect partner, casting a blind eye to his moodiness and confusing behavior, especially when it came to Guinness's "infatuations" with pretty young men.

Read is very careful in his phraseology, employing language such as "While there is no evidence whatsoever of a sexual relationship between Alex and this, or indeed, any other man..." and "The exact nature of Alec's sexuality, however, is not at all clear." Such refusal on the part of the author to take a stand can be infuriating, since so much of this psycho-biography is devoted to Guinness's "leanings."

Perhaps as a method to fight his demons, the actor sought refuge in religion, converting to Catholicism and putting great stock in his friendships with priests and nuns. A significant portion of the book flips back and forth between the sacred and the profane, so to speak, with Read reporting dozens of instances of behavior that can only be viewed as questionable, despite the fact that Guinness does not seem to have ever acted on his confusing urges. "It would seem...that Alec felt disordered passions could be controlled, if not cured, by prayer, repentance and the Grace of God. Yet he was never able to detach himself altogether from his homosexual alter-ego."

As can be expected from books of this type, the author covers the major accomplishments in his subject's life, for which movie fans can be grateful. The details can get a bit much; the book no doubt could have been shorter than its 600-plus pages but no less interesting had Read omitted copious recounts of how much Guinness spent on hotel rooms or lunches.

Ultimately, ALEC GUINNESS is a sad book. One has the feeling that between the sexual situation, concerns over finances, and relationships with family and friends --- and despite all of the artistic accomplishments --- Sir Alec was rarely truly happy. Read makes us actually feel sorry for the legendary actor.

--- Reviewed by Ron Kaplan (...)

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unlikeliest Of Stars, October 18, 2005

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

When Alec was a young boy, he figured out that his mother was something of a tart. She infuriated him by refusing to reveal the name of his real father. Out of such childhood trauma an unpleasant personality was born, but Piers Paul Read shows us that the same whirlpool of insecurity and class consciousness was the birthplace of Guinness' amazing talent. He could slip so deeply into character that oft-times those directing him worried that he would never again come out, and indeed, as Read ably shows, aspects of some of his roles seem to have grafted themselves onto his personality aftewards, so that a few of his roles marked him deeply. Sometimes this seems silly; imagine that his famous conversion to Roman Catholicism was due to him playing a priest early on and liking the way he was feeling.

The reader ponders all these imponderables, and quietly gives up hope for Alec Guinness about halfway through the book. He was so mean and nasty to poor Merula, who authorized Piers Paul Read to write this biography. I bet she did, if only to get her own back. But alas she died before it could be published. Read interviews many members of her family all of whom lived in fear of Alec Guinness, who admittedly was in a difficult position. He was making huge sums for his acting, and he began to feel, not without warrant, that some of Merula's relations were just leeching onto them for the money involved. Thus he treated them like scum and they had to learn to take it, or do without the necessary. Little Matthew, his only child, had a troubling bout with polio in the 1950s, and Alec met a bet with God; if he would cure Matthew, then Alec would convert to Catholicism. What kind of God makes bargains like that? And yet that is exactly what happened.

Was Alec Guinness gay? Read says he can't find a single believable account of anyone who slept with him (outside of Merula). However on the other hand every other thing in the book seems designed to persuade us that this was Guinness' big secret. Just printing that one photo of ultra-sexy Omar Sharif that Alec is said to have snapped while making LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is enough to convince me. No straight man took that photo, I could swear to it!

It seems he was in love with Glenn Ford, which I did not know, and that one way or another Glenn decided to cool Alec's jets by eventually withdrawing from his company. Kind of sad.

Poor Eileen Atkins deserves a medal, the way she sought to maintain a friendship with the ultra-difficult Alec. And yet he could be charming when he wanted to. People say he was the most amazing conversationalist and could make anyone feel at home, feel loved; and then he would turn on you when you did something wrong. He was the unlikeliest of stars, and the most self-effacing, disappearing into his roles like a tortoise withdrawing his head into his shell.