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Alec Guiness

© Wyn Middleton

You might know him as a Jedi in Star Wars, but that's by no means the role Alec Guinness would pick as the highpoint of his career. Reportedly the actor hated working on the 1977 sci-fi film. He claimed that the death of his character Obi-Wan Kenobi was his idea as a means to limit his involvement in the film: "I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."

Guinness received a scholarship to study acting at the Fay Compton School of Acting in 1933, secured his first film work (as an extra) that same year, and by 1935 was working in John Gielgud's acting company.

Guinness' reputation increased as he worked with the Old Vic and the Queen's Theatres, and during wartime service in the Royal Navy, the actor's ship was assigned to New Jersey, allowing him to make his American stage debut in Flare Path. His film career began properly after World War II when he took on the role of Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), the first of six films with director David Lean.

A string of films showed off his ability to look different in every role. He even played eight different characters, including a woman, in the comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Associated with the comedies of Ealing studios, he took on roles such as the timid bank clerk in The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), the inventor of The Man in the White Suite (1951) and as the leader of the inept crooks in The Ladykillers (1955).

Guinness was knighted in 1955, and two years later won both the Academy Award and the British Film Award for his performance as stubborn POW Col. Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The actor's willingness to tackle any sort of role has resulted in a misstep or two over the last few decades, notably his bold but ineffectual portrayal of a Japanese gentleman in A Majority of One (1961) and his curiously British take on the title role in Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973).

He continued acting throughout the 1980s and '90s, notably in David Lean's 1984 A Passage to India, the 1987 film Little Dorrit (for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, as well as several other awards), and Charles Sturridge's A Handful of Dust (1988).

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