Word: alec
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...DIED. ALEC GUINNESS, 86, actor; in West Sussex, England (see Eulogy...
...Alec Guinness," wrote critic Kenneth Tynan admiringly, "has no face." So true. Sir Alec, who died this month at 86, was the most self-effacing screen actor imaginable, often retreating under a mountain of makeup. He borrowed the props of anti-Semitism to create a monstrously engaging Fagin for Oliver Twist. He found the proper wigs and noses and shadings for each of the eight doomed D'Ascoynes, one of them a woman, in the elegantly misanthropic high comedy that was Kind Hearts and Coronets...
...memoir he spoke of himself in the third person, as if Alec Guinness were another, lesser role: "He is well aware he is not in the same class as Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson." Guinness is certainly in the class of these great actors, but he is not of their species. They were always out front, filling a stage or a screen with their presence. Guinness was an inside man, guileful--a master spy, all the more imposing for his invisibility. And more than any other British actor of his stature, Guinness had a miniaturist style that was made for movies...
Guinness can no longer take comfort in camouflage. The death mask is no mask at all; it is an old face seen in a naked light. Yet in our memory, that face magically morphs into a hundred others--all of them Alec Guinness, whoever he was. His career was a bold statement comprising 60 years of whispers. In an era when grossness is king, subtlety needs to be honored. That was Sir Alec's priceless gift. He revealed himself through the protean cunning of a "faceless" film artist...
...large flag. There was another fellow carrying around a sign that read "Nominate Jimmy Carter to Unite the Reform Party." And there was Jim Bourassa, founding chairman of the Arizona Reform party, who wears on his jacket not a political button but a large photograph of recently-deceased actor Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Bourassa says the photo gives him otherworldly powers to wrest political might away from Buchanan. "We're using the Force to save the party," he says with a straight face. "I am Arizona's Luke Skywalker." Well, if John McCain's not using that shtick...