Guinness, Sir Alec

Guinness, Sir Alec (1914–2000 ), English actor, first seen on the stage in 1934, whose earliest appearances, notably as Osric to John Gielgud's Hamlet and as Yakov in Chekhov's The Seagull, presaged a brilliant career. He first came into prominence as Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night at the Old Vic in 1937, in which year he joined Gielgud's repertory company at the Queen's Theatre, his parts there including an unusually tender and poetic Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice. Returning to the Old Vic, he was seen in 1938 as Bob Acres in Sheridan's The Rivals and then as Hamlet in an uncut modern-dress production by Tyrone Guthrie. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Navy, being temporarily released in 1942 to appear in New York in Rattigan's Flare Path. Returning to London in 1946, he played Mitya in his own adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Garcin in Sartre's Vicious Circle (Huis-Clos), and then rejoined the Old Vic company, where, in addition to a number of Shakespearian parts including Richard II and the Fool in King Lear, he was seen as Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector and Abel Drugger in Jonson's The Alchemist. At the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 (NY, 1950) he appeared in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, and in 1951 he played Hamlet in London in his own Elizabethan-style production. After his Richard III in the inaugural production at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1953 he turned to modern plays: as the imprisoned cardinal in Bridget Boland's The Prisoner (1954), in Feydeau's farce Hotel Paradiso (1956), as T. E. Lawrence in Rattigan's Ross (1960), and in Ionesco's Exit the King (1963). His Dylan Thomas in Sidney Michaels's Dylan (NY, 1964) was followed by Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy (London, 1966). He returned briefly to Shakespeare with Macbeth at the Royal Court (also 1966), and then continued to display his protean versatility: in Simon Gray's Wise Child (1967), in a travesty role; in John Mortimer's A Voyage round My Father (1971), as the Father; in Alan Bennett's hilarious farce Habeas Corpus (1973); and in Julian Mitchell's adaptation of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novel A Family and a Fortune (1975). In 1976 he was Dean Swift in Yahoo, of which he was co-deviser, and in 1977 a British defector living in Soviet Russia in Alan Bennett's The Old Country. After Shylock in The Merchant of Venice at Chichester in 1984 he returned to London in 1988 as a Soviet diplomat in Lee Blessing's two-character play A Walk in the Woods. He is also a major screen actor.