Word: actor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reserve is one of the most difficult, complex and enigmatic Englishmen who ever reached for the rouge. "A dark horse," says Sir Laurence Olivier, "a deep one." Director David (Kwai) Lean adds: "Alec is one of the most fantastically knotted-up men I know." And all agree with the actor who called him "the best-kept secret of modern times, a sort of one-man Tibet...
...situation, to realize what the character feels and is; and so he takes more trouble to hide what he feels than to reveal it. It is more than the usual British understatement; it is a highly developed art of camouflage and a complex grammar of indirect discourse. Actor Guinness is probably the greatest living master of the invisible gesture and the unspoken word...
...that Guinness seems fated to do his best work. In comedy he has shown what he can do wonderfully well-the little men with the monstrous obsessions, the secret lives of the wicked Walter Mittys. In Kwai and in The Prisoner he suggests that, as well as any living actor, he can interpret a specifically modern sort of hero-the man who is not meant to conquer the world but to battle within himself...
...Never Make an Actor." Alec never speaks of the first six years of his life, but they were apparently fairly grim. His mother drifted from one resort to another along the Channel coast, from one boarding house to another. Little Alec tagged along, a quiet child, well-behaved, playing alone in corners. At six he was packed off to a middle-class English boarding school called Pembroke Lodge, where his expenses were paid from an education fund set up by his father. Being shy and peculiar and no good at sports, he came in for plenty of ragging. Says Alec...
...twelve he was transferred to Roborough, a somewhat better-known school, where the dramatic society specialized in Gilbert & Sullivan. Since Alec could not (and still cannot) carry a tune, he shifted scenery. One day he ventured to say he wanted to be an actor. One of the masters sadly shook his head. "You'll never make an actor, Guinness...