Word: alec
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...theater. Lightheaded and confused, he found himself asking for a tryout-at the box office. The stage manager happened to be there, and ten minutes later he had three parts: Chinese coolie, French pirate, British sailor. Salary: ?2 a week. "But isn't the Equity minimum ?3?" Alec shyly inquired. "None of that talk around here," the manager snarled. Alec said no more, but next day he quietly called Equity and got his ?3. He was worth every penny. He threw himself passionately into the role of the coolie, even shaved the top of his head. "It was great...
After the war, Alec resumed his prewar stride with scarcely a hitch, and somehow there seemed to be more muscle in it. In the 1946-47 season he played a deeply original Fool that struck the critics almost as strongly as Olivier's Lear, and he did a swingeing good De Guiche in Guthrie's Cyrano. About the same time he considered working in the movies ("On the stage I never seemed to have a chance to wear trousers"), and Director David Lean gave him the role of Herbert Pocket, the young swell in Great Expectations. The next...
...year of decision in Guinness' career was 1950. As T. S. Eliot's psychologist in The Cocktail Party, he fetched Broadway quite an intellectual wallop. His third movie, Kind Hearts and Coronets, established him as a world figure, the most famous British zany since Sir Harry Lauder. Alec was not quite sure he liked it. Like most British actors, he looked on cinema as a lower art form.* Besides, he fancied himself rather as a tragedian than as a funnyface. But there it was. And when his cold, existential, matter-of-fact Hamlet ("He was acute and intelligent...
...made no more than token appearances in the theater-in Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, in The Prisoner in London. In 1955 he succumbed at last to Hollywood's enticements and starred with Grace Kelly in The Swan. He liked Hollywood ("so friendly"), but Hollywood figured Alec for an oddball. For one thing, he had a very peculiar diversion. He took walks. He took them, moreover, in Beverly Hills, where a man without a car is regarded with a good deal more suspicion than a man without trousers. The police stopped the fellow for questioning several times...
Work on Kwai began late in 1956. Three times Alec had refused the part ("a dreary, unsympathetic man"), and he arrived on location in Ceylon with deep misgivings. They deepened when Director Lean informed him casually that he had really wanted Charles Laughton for the part. Alec brooded, and a couple of days later tried to quit. Lean talked him out of it. "Lean!" snarls one of the crew. "That bloody perfectionist! He shot 30 seconds of film a day and then sat on a rock and stared at his goddam bridge.'' Alec tried to quit again. Lean...