Reposted from August, 2005
The Search for Alec Guiness
What are your favorite roles? The Horse's Mouth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, and of course, George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor is the best made for TV movie ever made, bar none - a masterpiece), are mine. Oh, also, Bridge Over the River Kwai. But who was he?
Piers Paul Reid's authorized biography is out, and it doesn't seem to answer the question. From the Boston Globe's review:
Piers Paul Read, a friend of Guinness's, was asked by the actor's widow to write this book, which is, in part, an assiduous record of the signal events and experiences in Guinness's life and career. There is the drunken, mendacious, cadging mother -- the great scourge of his life; the putative, though not positive, father paying for his support and education; the cruel stepfather; acting lessons with a stage legend who believed him to be one of the real Guinnesses; his debt to John Gielgud as a patron; courtship and marriage; wartime in the Royal Navy; and a recounting of his subsequent stage, movie, and TV career. All this is embedded in a stifling quantity of routine business on the lines of guest lists and restaurant expenses. Here we feel the authorized biographer's weary duty to comprehensiveness and his reluctance or inability to apply a shaping hand.
Read entire.
