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“... Alec Guinness got off on the wrong foot. Like a great many actors he had an unsuccessful childhood. In adolescence he tried to be someone else and after a time succeeded. He never forgave his mother for not telling him who his father was. He never forgave his mother – period. She did, however, care for Alec after her fashion and brought him up and sent him to boarding school, and even for a while provided him with a stepfather, who from time to time held him upside down over bridges, threatening to drop him into the running water to convince him that it was in his best interest to persuade his mother to disgorge part of his patrimony ...”

“... Filming a few years back in Paris, we were visited on the set by a cardinal. Alec Guinness being absent, I took it upon myself to show him around and at the same time express my sorrow that he had missed so recent a convert to his faith. His Eminence allowed himself a rather wintry smile. ‘That,’ he observed, ‘is a conversion I understand we owe more to the cinema than the Church ...”

“... money, but that’s it. Dennis Price as Louis, a distant relative of the aristocrats all played by Alec Guinness (eight roles plus another cameo in a flashback), doesn’t at first take his mother’s fantasies seriously. She married beneath her rank, and had to live in Clapham rather than the family castle, but still dreams that one day Louis will ...”

“... posters picture it. The posters show Gary Oldman as George Smiley – or rather they show him as Alec Guinness made a little taller, thinner, cooler. The trick, it seems, is to acknowledge Guinness’s ownership of the icon – broad horn-rimmed glasses, dark suit, tie, longish hair swept back, glazed look of the ...”

“... submerged but always interesting Johnson is so perfect in Brief Encounter. It also explains why Alec Guinness is such a godsend to Lean. Guinness always seems to be doing the job in hand with exemplary skill while at the same time doing several private jobs of his own – as if the eight parts he played in Kind ...”

“... part of it. At times the family was so poor they had to rent it out and live in the studio annex (Alec Guinness was one tenant). ‘Low, small, with four deep windows in which were all kinds of flowers’, a Dutch visitor wrote. On the walls paintings by Camille Pissarro, Lucien Pissarro and others. The dining-room is even smaller. When you sit down ...”

“... of carnations and the sharp fresh green of the alchemilla light up the room. 13 June. At supper Alec Guinness tells a curious story apropos of a BBC documentary on Anthony Eden last night. In prewar days Eden used to see a good deal of the theatre director Glen Byam Shaw and when he was contemplating resignation over Abyssinia in 1938 he sought Byam ...”

“... Arabic head dress, and displayed next to John’s portrait of King Faisal – whose resemblance to Alec Guinness, the man who played him in Lawrence of Arabia, is uncanny. When the two pictures were first exhibited at the Alpine Club in 1920, Lawrence was a frequent visitor, as ‘enraptured by his own image’, John said, as he was with ...”

“... Even if Tom Hanks is funnier in that film than our idea of Tom Hanks ought to allow, he’s not Alec Guinness. And what about Intolerable Cruelty (2003), with George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones, which doesn’t look like a Coen Brothers movie because it doesn’t look as if it was directed by anybody? Still, they can’t be after a single perfect ...”

“... man with a mellifluous voice, but the first inkling I had that he’d been an actor was when Alec Guinness had him down to Steep Marsh for a weekend. I’d no notion that, as recounted in the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 ...”

“... back.’ Miss Bennett landed a film part with Alan Ladd, Godfrey was doing a commentary for an Alec Guinness film. Robert Hardy came to see him one evening while she was still at the studios and scolded: ‘Godfrey, you’re very lazy sitting about like that. You know what you should be doing? Preparing to play Lear.’ ‘But I didn’t ...”

“... to follow unless you read the book). Smiley’s People is a sequel to Tinker Tailor, and it stars Alec Guinness as Smiley, supported by a number of other characters you will now be able to put a television face to. So all that couldn’t be better and probably was set up (not Blunt, though, I suppose) by wily publicists. And then there is the revived, or ...”

“... but wrapped up inside this genre piece is a powerful fantasy of escape. Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness, the film’s partners in crime, are at heart romantics and dreamers chafing to break free from the conventions of postwar Britain in all its drabness, austerity and repression, and Continental Europe provides the closest escape route (even the ...”

“... with a Communist Party friend and as a ‘round-faced Graham Greene figure’, closely studied by Alec Guinness when he was preparing to become George Smiley; he ‘could never make close ties with people’. Guy Burgess was ‘always dirty and smelt’. This diary is also a love story: ‘The sun was shining and Alan took my hand.’ Eva Taylor ...”

“... skill, accenting and phrasing even the most trivial script in order to get the rhythm right. And Alec Guinness would work on a text for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud. 3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly ...”