Alec Guinness: The stranger in our midst

Alec Guinness was an actor with a taste for disguise. And in real life he was introverted and shunned intimacy. Matthew Sweet goes in search of the man behind the masks

Shortly before his death, Sir Alec Guinness decided that he wanted one last look at his 1952 comedy, The Card. The National Film Theatre arranged a public screening, at which its director, Ronald Neame, said a few words, while Guinness – unannounced – took a seat in the auditorium. Up on the screen, Denry Machin, a knavish clerk from the Potteries, shuffled his way to the top of the provincial pack. Once the lights had gone up, an appreciative audience filed out of the cinema. So did Guinness, pleased by the film, but more delighted that nobody in the auditorium had recognised him.

Guinness was born with a capacity for anonymity. The illegitimate son of a barmaid named Agnes de Cuffe – from whom he dissociated himself at the age of 18 – his birth certificate bore a blank space where the name of his father should have been. (With characteristic drollery, he called his memoirs My Name Escapes Me.) He was fond of relating how he had once handed in his coat at a hotel cloakroom, been told that it was unnecessary to give his name, and discovered at the evening's end that his ticket bore the inscription "Bald with glasses". He would have been less enchanted by the stories that broke after his death, describing how, in 1946, he was collared by the police in a Liverpool public lavatory, and gave the name of Herbert Pocket – the role he was about to play in Great Expectations – to the court.

"Alec as a person was almost invisible," recalls Ronald Neame, who produced the film. "He was like one of those dolls which I remember from when I was a kid, on which you would hang different things to make them a soldier, or a pilot."

Knowing his predilection for disguise, directors dressed him up in wigs, skins, epaulettes, corsets, cassocks, turbans and ghutra: he was haunted by six ancestral versions of himself in Barnacle Bill (1957), slaughtered several times over in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), attempted to murder himself in The Scapegoat (1959) and everybody else in Murder by Death (1976). He frequently played across racial boundaries: he is quietly imperious as Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), preposterous as Professor Godbole in A Passage to India, and knowingly foolish in The Comedians (1967), as a bogus Major who drags up as a Haitian washerwoman in order to escape the rifle butts of the Ton Ton Macoute. (The sequence in which Elizabeth Taylor happens upon Peter Ustinov, Richard Burton and a floral-frocked, boot-polish smeared Guinness standing in her hallway, is the most peculiar moment in the careers of all four.)

It was Guinness's performance as Fagin that convinced his future employers that he was capable of anything. Ronald Neame, who produced Oliver Twist (1948) with David Lean, remembers being sceptical when Guinness announced that he wanted to play the part; recalls agreeing, rather hopelessly, to give him a screen test. Stuart Freeborn, the film's make-up designer, remembers panicking when he realised he had been charged to transform a puckish, prematurely bald young man into Dickens's extravagant monster. "In the illustrations Fagin has a nose much longer than any human being would have," says Freeborn, rehearsing his thoughts from 1948. "That's acceptable in a cartoon. If I make him up like that he won't look like a human being. But if I tone it down, he won't be that character." Freeborn took two different approaches: one highly exaggerated, one very subtle, and both were filmed. At the test screening, Lean put it to the vote. "Everybody put their hands up for the cartoon one," remembers Freeborn. "So that's the way I had to do it, never mind how over the top it was." In New York, the performance was denounced as anti-Semitic, and the film remained unscreened until 1951. But those who knew Dickens's novel could see exactly what Guinness was up to: he had made Cruickshank corporeal.

"Unlike a lot of people," reflects Ronald Neame, "he didn't want to be liked. A lot of stars are always themselves. Rex Harrison was always Rex. Alec is always coming out of a different hole." In The Man in the White Suit (1951), he is an idealistic, amoral research chemist, capable of a chameleon-like inconspicuousness. In Last Holiday (1950), he is a clerk whose misdiagnosis with a fatal disease allows him to discover his capacity for desire. In Tunes of Glory (1960) he is a scarlet-bristled Major driven to suicide by a growing cognisance of his own brutality. In Star Wars (1977) he is a cowled mystic, and it was only his admission that he binned fan letters for Obi-Wan Kenobi that rendered visible his contempt for the Force. But for all the variety of these roles, these characters do share something. They are men at one remove from the people who surround them; men suspended in a private dream; men who know something we don't, and will never blab. Little wonder that John Le Carré was so satisfied when he heard whom the BBC had cast as George Smiley.

Guinness's memoirs construct another persona: the Knightsbridge curmudgeon, grumbling about the regional accents of radio announcers, shopping for Issey Miyake shirts, swapping pleasantries with Dirk Bogarde at the veg counter. Sometimes this voice seems nothing more than an amusing noise, like the brilliant impersonation of a London tram that he performs in The Malta Story ("mmmmm-mmmmm-yngggggg-yaaaaang," near enough). Indeed, his literary tastes may offer a better map of his true nature. Guinness was fond of quoting TS Eliot, another artist who sought sanctuary from the bleak conclusions of his work in the rose garden of Catholicism. Nobody has bettered Guinness's readings of Eliot's poetry: that ruminative, resonant, gurgling voice cleanses every "weialala leia wallala leialala" of a sense of the ludicrous.

And when he appeared as the Unidentified Guest in the original production of The Cocktail Party (1949), Guinness became the mouthpiece for the poet's meditations upon the malleable nature of identity. "Nobody likes to be left with a mystery. But there's more to it than that. There's a loss of personality; or rather, you've lost touch with the person you thought you were. You no longer feel quite human."

"The diffident, the introvert side of him is something that's been slightly questioned," asserts Neame. "Was he doing a Greta Garbo, telling the world he wanted to be alone but wanting to be a star? No. Alec was self-effacing, and that was genuine. But he was an extremely difficult person to know. There is a kind of loneliness in his performances, which is him in life. I very much doubt even if his wife really knew him. I got fairly close to him, but I didn't really know him. Nobody did." Speak to other friends – his neighbours in Hampshire, for instance – and they'll tell you the same. He never gossiped. He provided swift and practical help in a crisis. He foraged for treats in London delicatessens and invited friends round to devour them. "He was impossible to get to know!" exclaimed one friend of 40 years' acquaintance, who shared as many Christmas dinners with Guinness and his late wife Merula in their Hampshire home. "Absolutely impossible."

And yet, Alec Guinness was no blank space, no man who wasn't there. He wasn't like Peter Sellers, whose disguises concealed nothing but panic at his own emptiness. He wasn't like Dirk Bogarde, whose career became one long exposure of the appetites beneath the smooth patina moulded for him by the Rank Organisation. Guinness was more genuinely inscrutable. What thoughts are really moving behind those feline eyes? What is it, this knowledge that he nurses, but never yields? Only this, perhaps: that the secret of great screen acting is secrecy itself.