Thankfully, a long-lasting career had been firmly established ever since Guinness became associated with Ealing comedies – and in these, he was glorious. Everyone remembers his octet of cameos as every last ill-fated member of the snooty D’Ascoyne family, essayed to comic perfection in the first one, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). He got his first Best Actor Oscar nod as the scheming bank clerk in Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), and was supremely nimble as the runaway chemist in Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit (also 1951). Even greater heights would be reached in Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers (1955), where his insinuating creepiness as the criminal mastermind Professor Marcus – with protruding false teeth and shades of Alastair Sim – added up to an immortal display of deadpan control.
Star Wars shame
Guinness was a consummate professional in those days, realising early what specific talents he had. It was only later in life that he would become sniffy about his opportunities in films, not least the role that made him world-famous: Star Wars. In truth, the idea that he hated everything about playing Obi-Wan Kenobi is a myth that needs dispelling. He was impressed by the credentials of George Lucas, perhaps more than the script per se: “The dialogue was pretty ropey, but I had to go on turning the page.” On Parkinson, and on-message, he praised the “innocence” and “wonderful freshness” of the story, and the fact that it had “nothing nasty” happening on screen: “no horrors, no sleazy sex – no sex at all, when it comes to that”. Clearly, sex for Guinness was something to be stricken from the record. This is the same man who later read Alan Hollinghurst’s breakthrough gay novel The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), with its unabashed eroticism, and reportedly found it so “unhealthy” that he burned his copy.
“I’m getting some pretty strange letters,” he did concede to Parkinson in 1977 about the fan furore. In private letters of his own, he played up how tedious he found the making of Star Wars, dismissing it as “fairy-tale rubbish” with “banal lines” and “mumbo jumbo”. This sounds like classic actorly venting for the ears of friends. It’s true that he petitioned Lucas for Obi-Wan to die in the first film, so that he wouldn’t be held hostage by the sequels. And he did extraordinarily well out of it, thanks to his agents negotiating him 2.25 per cent of the back-end royalties, on top of a $150,000 starring fee, which was already double the initial offer. By the end of his lifetime, the deal had netted him over $95m.
