Word: tynan
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...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...
...English theater. He was a stage actor who will be remembered by audiences for his movie roles, the times when they got to see that infinitely and economically expressive face magnified by the big screen. The virtuosic underplaying of his roles - the best ones of which critic Kenneth Tynan called "all iceberg characters, nine-tenths concealed, whose fascination lies not in how they look but in how their minds work" - became evident, at that proximity...
...gave such passionately acute readings in works sublime and not so; what other actor would be pleased both to be the definitive romantic Hamlet, which he acted some 500 times, and to lend regal pedigree to Bob Guccione's pornific Caligula? Who else could earn critic Kenneth Tynan's prickly compliment "the finest actor on earth, from the neck...
...Olivier was all sexy, pyrotechnical danger, a swashbuckler and a rogue, a bounding bounder. Gielgud was more remote, passionate mainly in melancholy. If theater is drama, then Olivier is your man of the century. If it is poetry, the mining of meaning from sound, then Gielgud fits another phrase Tynan applied to him: "Not so much an actor, as the actor...
...Tynan to the office...