ALEC GUINNESS: Celebrities of Stage and Screen (7)

[This is the seventh in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

Many actors have an elusive personality; their outer appearance is a kind of tabula rasa awaiting the influence of the various roles they are called upon to play. Their inner life is often repressed and intensely private. Alec Guinness falls into this category, a most accomplished actor giving immense pleasure but underneath a somewhat tormented man. More than almost any other actor, Guinness changed his appearance constantly, almost obsessively, as if he needed to disguise, or perhaps at last to discover his real persona.

Alec Guinness in his prime

 Alec Guinness (1914-2000) was the illegitimate son of Agnes Guinness de Cuffe and Alec believed his father was a Scottish banker called Andrew Geddes who paid his school bills and was known as “uncle”, dying in 1928. His mother, to whom he was not close, eventually married twice, finally to a wife-beating veteran of the Irish Civil War of the 1920s. This fractured family life no doubt contributed to Alec’s insecurity and search for his identity.  Alec was brought up in a succession of cheap lodgings in the South of England, became very keen on the theatre, but was discouraged by his lack of amateur success and started work as an advertising copy-writer.

He persisted with the stage and won a place at drama school and in 1936 joined the Old Vic, playing increasingly significant Shakespearean and other classic roles, including a fine Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night (modelled on Stan Laurel) until he starred in a well-received modern dress version of Hamlet in 1938, directed by Gielgud. During the war he served in the RNVR, later as a master of landing craft in Sicily and the Adriatic.

Earlier he had written an abridged version for the stage of Dickens’ Great Expectations which had some success and the film director David Lean liked the script and offered Guinness the part of Pip’s friend Herbert Pocket in the 1946 movie. This was his movie debut and although Guinness always maintained that the stage was his first love, his popular fame rests on his glittering cinema career.

He made a memorably flamboyant Fagin in Lean’s Oliver Twist in 1948, offending some Jews, and then scintillated in various “Ealing” comedies, most famously as 8 members of the D’Ascoyne family, targets for vengeful assassin Dennis Price in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). His performance(s) were a comic tour de force. He was the sinister Professor Marcus leading an incompetent criminal gang in The Ladykillers and featured as The Man in the White Suit upsetting the textile moguls and unions with his invented indestructible fabric.

        

Guinness as Fagin

   

                                         

As Lady D'Ascoyne in Kind Hearts and Coronets

 

 

As Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers

Alec was of a religious cast of mind and during the war had spoken of his intention of joining the Anglican ministry. In 1954, while filming Chesterton’s Father Brown in France, he was moved by the trust shown by a French boy in his local curé. In 1956 he converted to Catholicism to be followed in 1957 by his artist wife Merula (née Salaman, whom he married in 1938). Religion gave him much comfort, but also sharpened his feelings of guilt. This guilt may have arisen from his bi-sexuality, well known to his theatrical friends but concealed totally from Merula, whom he adored.

Guinness became an international star as Col. Nicholson, stubborn commanding officer of his fellow-prisoners, in David Lean’s 1957 blockbuster The Bridge over the River Kwai, appalled that his bridge should be destroyed, even by the Allies.

Col. Nicholson and The Bridge over the River Kwai

He also shone in the film of Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth as the shambolic artist Gulley Jimson, a role which Alec himself thought was a career highlight. Its anarchism probably appealed to him – in his later memoirs he regretted that “he had not taken enough risks” professionally.

As Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth

As Maj.Sinclair in Tunes of Glory

 

He was knighted in 1959 and playing against his usual grain, Guinness was in fine form as the rumbustious Major Sinclair, undermining disciplinarian John Mills in the Scottish Regimental drama Tunes of Glory in 1960. Alec took on a richly ironic role as the vacuum-cleaner salesman-turned- spy in Carol Reed’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. Alec had played T E Lawrence on the London stage in Rattigan’s thoughtful Ross, and when David Lean directed his 1962 Lawrence of Arabia he found a place for his old colleague as the subtle but scheming Prince Faisal. 

As Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia

Alec was above all a character actor. He did not have the commanding presence or dash of an Olivier or a Burton, nor the sonorous voice of a Gielgud, but he was in all ways a consummate performer, imbuing understanding and intelligence.

 His later career was full of pleasures. He was a dignified and sympathetic Charles I, with a light Stuart Scottish accent in Cromwell (1970), and later an excellent gouty Earl of Dorincourt in the sentimental Little Lord Fauntleroy. The international audience came most to connect him with the supporting role of Obi-wan Kenobi in the Star Wars trilogy between 1977 and 1983. He received a huge windfall by negotiating a generous fee but also 2% of the royalties (20% of the gross take) paid to director George Lucas. The trilogy was an immense box-office hit and Guinness became seriously rich.

His UK fans were gripped by his role as George Smiley, MI6 spy-catcher in two TV serials based on John le Carré’s character. Smiley’s polite and secretive persona, with a glint of steel when his prey is uncovered, suited Guinness admirably.

As Obi-wan Kenobi

 

As George Smiley

Guinness’ diaries were published after his death and they are in the feline theatrical tradition. He moans about the quality of modern stage and film audiences. This sounds like cantankerous old age but he was particularly disobliging about Olivier’s “cruel and destructive streak” and never forgave him for snubbing his wife.

He died in 2000 aged 86 laden with honours. With all his hang-ups about his origins, his religion, and his sexuality, he remains personally elusive. Never a “Luvvie” and more acutely intelligent than many Thespians, he will always be respected and admired for his astonishingly many-faceted career.

SMD

29.3.14

Text copyright © Sidney Donald 2014

SCOTLAND: LONG LIVE THE UNION

             

I know many intelligent and rational Scotsmen, my esteemed fellow-countrymen. They form the sensible majority in my homeland. I also know many less intelligent Scotsmen ranging from the somewhat deluded to the terminally moronic. All nationalities have a minority group like this. The sensible will always prevail over the deluded. I refuse to believe that there is the slightest chance that a majority of Scots will vote with the separatists for independence at the Referendum on Thursday 18 September 2014. I am confident that after all the debate and controversy, a resounding “No” vote will carry the day and the Union will thankfully be preserved.

The debate has been furious and bitter. The Unionists have demonstrated the fragility of a Scots economy highly dependent on volatile oil revenues: Scots businesses have warned that they will move to England: Scotland’s benefits in terms of UK public spending per head under the “Barnett Formula” have been emphasised: David Cameron has promised enhanced taxation powers for the devolved Scottish government: the EU has confirmed that Scotland would have to apply for membership from scratch and the Bank of England has stated that the pound could not be used by an independent Scotland.

The SNP/Nationalists/Separatists pooh-pooh these objections, claiming that they are largely bluff, likely to be moderated on actual independence. The Yes lobby (posing as the impartial Scottish government) produced a weighty tome on an independent Scotland, full of tendentious projections of economic growth and fiscal viability. A weary unravelling of these claims and counter-claims has bored the Scottish public, but the Unionists have won the intellectual argument. 

The Yes campaign is focussing on its strongest suit – the emotional appeal of A Braveheart Nation Once Again! Somehow rationality disappears from the debate in this scenario fuelled by a surfeit of shortbread-tin patriotism, sporrans, skirling bagpipes, soused herrings and delectable Speyside Scotch. The SNP shout from the roof-tops that Scotland will never again have this real chance to break free – to stick a thumb in the eyes of their viscerally-hated caricature of the English, and to avenge themselves on their bug-bear, the shade of Maggie Thatcher, saviour of our united nation. Chippy, contrarian propaganda of the kind peddled by Alex Salmond and his acolytes is frankly shaming.

There are many good Scotsmen tempted by and hesitating before taking the separatist plunge. They need to be inspired by a fresh vision of the United Kingdom. David Cameron, Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, supplemented by all articulate Scots, need to turn up the oratorical heat and defend the Union with real passion. It seems obvious to me that the Scots get an excellent deal out of the Union, financial and cultural: that a leap in the dark to independence is imprudent folly doubly damned: that the Scots nation has prospered mightily in the Union and can long continue to do so. 

To be sure, the United Kingdom is not without her faults, both historically and at present. The Westminster political arena and devolved government are designed to rectify these difficulties. I am sure that the United Kingdom is greater than the sum of its parts – the poetic inspiration of the Welsh, the rugged charm of the Irish, the confident energy of the English, the passion and application of the Scots. United we make a world-class team. Scotland, stay a cherished member of a winning side and please deliver a suitably robust “No” to independence!

SMD

25.03.14.             

Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014

HOORAY FOR GAYS

If we conducted a pogrom against those who are left-handed or who have blue eyes we would be mocked for our absurdity and condemned for our ignorance. The days of pogroms and of such absurdity and ignorance are hopefully long past. We Westerners now live in a blissfully tolerant society and no group has so rapidly moved from the shunned to the wholly accepted as have gays. I reckon this is a mark of a developed civilisation and I here celebrate the distinctive and highly valued contribution of male gays to our society. I leave Les Girls to an informed lady chronicler.

The struggle for acceptance has been long and arduous. It is said that the Ancients were tolerant of gay relationships and while this may be broadly true, the evidence is contradictory. The Theban Band was a famous group of warrior male lovers, Plato recommended gay relationships and Roman Emperors from Augustus to Hadrian had their pampered boyfriends. Ancient pottery graphically promoted these liaisons, yet there were many, Aristotle included, who disapproved of what was seen as a frivolous aristocratic pastime. Eventually Theodosius and Constantine suppressed gays and when Christianity held sway, condemnation of gay behaviour was complete. The Ancients did not share our concepts of sexuality and easy conclusions are unwise.

The long Christian supremacy from the 4^th to the early 20^th century often cruelly persecuted or at least marginalised gays, who had to conceal their preferences sometimes on pain of death. Some great Renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo and Donatello, earned a homo-erotic reputation but were left alone. With the crumbling of Christian belief, these negative attitudes gradually changed. In Britain there were gay Victorian literary worthies, but Oscar Wilde came sadly unstuck though there was certainly a strong gay presence in the Bloomsbury group, including the brilliant talents of Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and E M Forster. Across the Channel, matters were much more relaxed with Verlaine, Rimbaud, Proust, Gide and Montherlant climbing to the intellectual and literary leadership of France. Their proclivities however remained a private and undiscussed subject.

David by Donatello

In Britain, hostility to gays was rapidly declining and the watershed was the Wolfenden Report in 1957 which recommended "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". A cross-party consensus was established and legislation de-criminalising gay acts in private was accepted by Home Secretary Roy Jenkins in 1967. There remained many who were nonetheless uneasy at this development. In the US, events took a noisier turn. Gay behaviour was criminalised in many states, but an anti-police riot objecting to a NYPD raid on the sleazy Stonewall Inn, Christopher Street, New York in 1969 polarised opinion. Soon Gay Liberation became a progressive cause to the embarrassment of more moderate gays. Gay Pride festivities spread, giving a forum to the more exhibitionist and swishy members, but in time the full constitutional rights of gays were recognised.

Thus the Americas, North and South took on the same liberal attitudes as Europe and Australasia. Even Russia felt obliged to fall in line, though Putin’s welcome to gays at the Sochi Olympics was uttered through clenched teeth; the itch to wield the knout and the Cossack whip against such dissidents was barely suppressed. Of course there survived many pockets of hostility among the rednecks of the Bible Belt, among skinhead “queer-bashers” in Northern British cities, among the fascist hard core in Germany, Italy and France. The permissive viewpoint is far from universal. India criminalised gay sex in 2013, rather retrogressively, China is as ever enigmatic but the Islamic world is furiously hostile, especially the usual suspects, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Of the 54 African countries, 38 have anti-gay laws, hardly in the vanguard of progress.

Now science lends a hand to the gay cause. It seems likely that a gay nature is “hard-wired” into the embryo at the intra-uterine stage in the testosterone soup of the womb. Neuroscience points in this direction with all of us having a genetic variety of sexual natures which later Presbyterian upbringing, cold baths or Oedipal complexes will little change. If we are born gay or straight we can hardly ascribe guilt or blame to this outcome.

Yet the point is that gays are fun. Where would ballet be without Tchaikovsky, Nijinsky and Nureyev; or the theatre without Wilde, Coward, Maugham or Rattigan; or comedy without Frankie Howard, Kenneth Williams or Larry Grayson; or song-writing without Cole Porter or Ivor Novello; or diaries without Chips Channon, James Lees-Milne and Cecil Beaton; or politics without Michael Portillo or Peter Mandelson; or movies without Montgomery Clift, James Dean or Anthony Perkins? Who could replace wittily outrageous Gore Vidal and his Myra Breckinridge? Even forgetting such celebrities, who has not enjoyed the irrepressible cross-talk of gay friends or their gales of laughter at a well-told story?

They have won their battle and the tumult is over; full integration is proceeding – civil partnership giving way to gay marriage which even prudently-PC David Cameron supports. A gay US President cannot be far away, nor a gay UK monarch. Their sexuality should not define them; gays. like us all, will be judged by their virtues. As John Gielgud did and now Elton John, settling for cosy domesticity with their partners, surely the sensible thing is to grudge them nothing, wish them well and move on with living our own lives in our own unique fashion.

The Author when young! (after Michelangelo)

SMD

14.03.14

Text Copyright Sidney Donald 2014

RICHARD BURTON; Celebrities of Stage and Screen (6)

[This is the sixth in an occasional series describing British actors and performers who achieved fame in the theatre or in the movies.]

Richard Burton (1925-84) was a mega-film star, a greatly admired Shakespearean stage actor and an intelligent man. Yet in many ways his early promise was not fully realised. His life is an example of the perils and pitfalls of celebrity and I imagine he is less well remembered by the current generation than his illustrious career might have merited.

Richard Burton

Burton’s background was certainly unpromising. He was the 7^th son of a Welsh coal miner who had 13 children and was born, Richard Jenkins, into the Welsh-speaking village of Portrhydyfen in Neath Port Talbot. His mother died in childbirth when Richard was 2 and he was taken in and looked after by his adored sister Cecilia and her husband living in the English-speaking town of Port Talbot. Richard’s father was a rough and much absent parent – Richard declined to attend his funeral in 1957. Richard was much helped and encouraged in his acting by his teacher, Philip Burton, and at the local school he developed that love of and facility with words and language which was to hold him in such good stead in later years. Eventually Philip Burton became Richard’s guardian and Richard subsequently changed his own name to Burton.

Richard was not notably academic but loved acting; he was a promising athlete playing rugby well as a wing forward (a “flanker” in modern parlance). Inevitably, Richard was imbued with the macho “boyo” culture of the Welsh valleys in which the rowdy locals revelled but which can be somewhat tiresome to outsiders. He was smoking from the age of 8, chased the far from unwilling girls in his adolescence and, like many Welshmen, tried to prove he was a heavier drinker than the famously bibulous and disreputable poet Dylan Thomas. Richard met that challenge easily.

Taken in hand again by Philip Burton, he joined the local dramatic society, performing in amateur plays and, as an RAF cadet in 1943, spending 6 months under a wartime scheme at Exeter College, Oxford, much involved in acting there.  He made his professional debut in Liverpool in 1944 in a play by Welsh dramatist and actor Emlyn Williams. After his National Service, in 1947 Burton went to London to seek his fortune and married actress Sybil Williams in 1949. He had small parts including one in Gielgud’s highly successful The Lady’s not for Burning in the West End. His breakthrough came in 1951 as Prince Hal in Henry IV Part 1, his performance electrifying critics and audience alike. His voice and virile bearing were astonishing.

Burton signed an Alexander Korda movie contract. He made his Hollywood debut in My Cousin Rachel (1952) a mystery romance from Daphne du Maurier, playing opposite Olivia de Havilland. He followed this with the smash-hit The Robe, a biblical epic with Jean Simmons and Victor Mature.

Burton and Simmons in The Robe

He played in several sandals and breastplate epics, a genre he affected to dislike, like Alexander the Great (a flop) and of course later the wildly extravagant Cleopatra. In 1954, Burton established his leading position in the Shakespearean stage by his Hamlet and, even better, his Coriolanus, and was also a fine Othello and Henry V. He was hailed flatteringly by Tynan as the natural successor to Laurence Olivier. Switching constantly between the stage and screen, Burton was a good Jimmy Porter in the movie of John Osborne’s Look back in Anger in 1958. He triumphed on Broadway with the role of King Arthur with Julie Andrews in the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot in 1960 – he had won a prize as a boy soprano at an Eisteddfod years previously!

He was entering his most successful period. His 1964 Hamlet on Broadway, directed by Gielgud was the apogee of his stage career. He did not appear on stage again for another 12 years. He had box-office success playing opposite Elizabeth Taylor in The VIPs set in the exclusive passenger lounge at Heathrow. Then fatefully he replaced Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony in the epic Cleopatra whose filming cost $40m and was in danger of busting 20^th Century Fox. The wayward diva behaviour of Liz Taylor drove the director to distraction but the situation was made more explosive by Burton’s enchantment with Taylor, the start of an affair which dominated the gossip columns and fan magazines for years. Humiliated by their affair, Sybil Burton fled the film-set for their home in Switzerland and divorce soon followed.

Burton and Taylor, The Great Lovers

Somehow the movie was completed and while it was spectacular, it was decidedly boring; apparently Fox eventually recovered its massive outlay. Burton and Taylor had become the The Great Lovers – marrying in 1965 (despite Richard’s friends advising him against). Yet the truth was even sadder. Liz Taylor was a lush, like Richard, and a pill-popper too nursing all manner of neuroses, no doubt exacerbated by her unreal Hollywood child star upbringing. She loved diamonds and all material things – he famously paid $1.1m for the so-called Taylor-Burton South African diamond, 64 carats and pear-shaped.

They lived the stereotypical lives of kings and queens – Richard had become the highest-paid actor in the world - but they quarrelled constantly and violently, got divorced and then remarried. Ironically their marriage is best depicted in Albee’s brilliant 1966 Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? where a bickering university couple row fiercely in front of younger academic guests. Burton and Taylor played the leads in the movie, but it was too near the bone to be comfortable for them.

Liz and Richard in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard still made decent films – The Night of the Iguana with Burton a whisky-priest trying to seduce Ava Gardner, Sue Lyon and Deborah Kerr was well received as was his war action movie Where Eagles Dare with Clint Eastwood; his The Taming of the Shrew with Liz Taylor in Zeffirelli’s colourful production was also enjoyable. But there were several flops and Burton became less “bankable”.

With all their extravagance, he needed to work and he appeared in third-rate movies. His heavy drinking had become alcoholism, undermining his health. To film The Klansman (1974) he was unable to stand and delivered his slurred lines supported in a seat. He dried out in a clinic sufficiently later to make the successful The Wild Geese (1978) but that was his movie box-office swansong. He unexpectedly had a stage success in 1976 with Equus, later an admired film.

His great days over, the appalling Burton-Taylor marriage finally ended in 1976; he married Suzi Miller, model ex-wife of racing driver James Hunt; for his last three years he was married to Sally Hays, a make-up artist. With severe back and spine problems, cirrhosis of the liver and kidney problems, his formerly athletic body was ravaged and his arms became matchsticks. He died of a stroke in Switzerland in 1984.

Richard Burton could and should have done much better. His talent was immense but he was seduced by the flashy world of money, tinsel and baubles. His alcoholism was a tragedy, much experienced in Celtic Britain among the Welsh, Irish and Scots, which ruined him physically. He had lost his moral compass and balance in life and paid a fearful price.

SMD

9.03.14

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2014