Word: alec
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...into Great Expectations. Miss Havisham's subtle attorney Jaggers (F. L. Sullivan) holds a fortune in trust for him, the gift of an anonymous benefactor. Pip sets out for London to learn to be a gentleman. He shares lodgings with a rickety, charming young man named Herbert Pocket (Alec Guinness),and learns, instead, to be a snob. As he helps his old criminal friend to escape arrest and rescues Miss Havisham's ward, the beautiful Estella (Valerie Hobson), from a psychological trap, the noble and weaker sides of Pip's nature so con-.tend that he emerges...
...both casting and composition, there is a good deal of intelligent derivation from Dickens' inspired illustrators, Cruikshank and "Phiz" (Alec Guinness as Pocket is a Cruikshank in the flesh). Besides the principal actors, all of whom are excellent, the most notable (and equally good) are Bernard Miles-another living Cruikshank-as the blacksmith, Anthony Wager as the boy Pip, O. B. Clarence as a deaf-&-daft gaffer, and 17-year-old Jean Simmons as Estella in her teens...
...Alec had no histrionic forebears and no early encouragement. But "Somehow," he says, "I always knew I wanted to be an actor." Funds in the Guinness family (no kin to the stout fellas from Ireland) being tight, when Alec finished Roborough School in the bottomless '30s, he took a ?2-a-week apprenticeship in a London advertising agency. He studied acting at nights and (in the finest tradition of the theater) lived in a garret for a year, mostly on borrowed jam sandwiches and card board soles...
When war came, Alec joined the Navy - and so to Broadway. In 1942, in Boston to pick up and deliver home an L.C.I., which was delayed, he popped down to New York for a visit. Result: he got a speaking part in Terence Rattigan's RAFizzle (a hit in London) Flare Path...
...Alec's first screen role - Herbert Pocket in Dickens' Great Expectations - decided him that here was the life. He promptly hired an agent to rustle him up some more movie jobs, preferably "a Hollywood picture for the good it does one - not financial especially, but for one's reputation." His agent's impression: "There's no bloody nonsense about Alec...