Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness (1914-2000) was an Academy Award-winning British actor acclaimed for his work on stage and film, including classic movies The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago, as well as several Dickens adaptations. To a later generation, however, Guinness is best remembered for playing Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Following Shakespearean stage work, Guinness worked with director David Lean in Great Expectations (Herbert Pocket) and Oliver Twist (Fagin) and years later played Jacob Marley in the musical Scrooge. Other early film work was for Ealing Studios in a string of comedies. These included 1949's Kind Hearts and Coronets (playing eight characters) and The Ladykillers (1955, with Peter Sellers). The latter was remade as The Ladykillers with Tom Hanks as a reworked version of Guinness's character and animal effects by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. He won the Oscar for Best Actor as the rigid Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and was knighted two years later.
Guinness was part of all-star casts in The Comedians (with Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Ustinov) and the Neil Simon spoof Murder by Death (with Peter Falk, James Coco, and Nancy Walker). Post Star Wars credits included playing George Smiley on the TV version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its sequel Smiley's People, the Dudley Moore comedy Lovesick (as Sigmund Freud), and the Evelyn Waugh adaptation A Handful of Dust.
==References==
* Guinness is caricatured as Only One Cannoli, a spoof of Obi-Wan, in the Cookie's Crumby Pictures installment "Star S'mores."
==Notes==
* Roscoe Orman, in his memoir Sesame Street Dad, describes watching a performance by Guinness in the 1964 Broadway play Dylan as Dylan Thomas, calling it a "spellbinding portrayal."Orman, Roscoe. Sesame Street Dad. 2006. p.22
==Sources==
==External links==
*IMDb
Category:Celebrity References
Category:Movie References