Biography: It was illegitimacy and resentment of his mother that lit a fire under Alec Guinness, writes Hugh Leonard
'My mother was a whore." Perhaps Alec Guinness, like his present biographer, Piers Paul Read, had an instinct for a buttonholing start to a story, or it may have been that his kind of Catholicism made little or no distinction between promiscuity and whoredom. He went on to say - his listener was John le Carré - "she slept with the entire crew on Lord Moyne's yacht at the Cowes Regatta and when she gave birth she called the bastard Guinness, but my father was probably the bloody cook". She never revealed his exact identity, but the hallowed phrase "son of a sea-cook" comes irresistibly to mind.
One image lingers, and it is of a stage-struck youth living on jam sandwiches and baked beans and, to save shoe- leather, walking barefoot to his acting class - he had won a scholarship. Near the other end of his acting life, his percentage of the producer's gross of Star Wars had made him seriously rich, and he was regretting that he was wasting his talent on the tawdriness of it, never mind about sharing the screen with such nonentities as one Harrison Ford, who referred to him as the "Mother Superior".
In his youth, the generosity of other actors - Martita Hunt, Edith Evans and, above all, John Gielgud - helped him to get a foot, bare or shod, in the door. In the 1930s, Gielgud was a great star who brought crowds to the box office and the stage door alike; and, purely on a whim, he cast the young ragamuffin as the affected courtier, Osric , "spacious in the possession of dirt". His Hamlet ran for 10 months and set Guinness on his road.
Like Walt Whitman, he contained multitudes: stage actor, husband, father, dandy, film star, closet gay and - it became almost a role in itself - convert to Catholicism. He courted Merula, the second daughter of a wealthy Jewish couple named Chattie and Michel Salaman. She herself was, by all accounts, a wonderful actress in the making, but gave it up to marry young Alec. Years later, when she thought of resuming her career, he made it plain that his was and would continue to be a one-actor marriage.
She was his slave. When he proposed and then had second thoughts, there were hysterics; it was the end of her world. They married, however, and when Guinness became a Catholic, it was inevitable that in time she would follow in his steps, just as, when he died in 2000, aged 86, she lived for only 72 days after him. In newspaper excerpts from Read's book, much has been made of his small cruelties, often in the presence of guests, when he would criticise her cooking - "the dinner is disgusting, it's uneatable" - and was once heard to refer to her as "Merula, who understands nothing of my life".
It might be said that his illegitimacy had lit a fire under him. He had a dislike of his mother, who not only continued to be an affliction but a drunk and petty thief as well. Once, when he was all but destitute, she not only rifled his bedsitter but left a pile of pawn tickets in the place of her loot. As for Guinness himself, it was not enough for him that he should be a great actor - I saw him on the stage in Bridget Boland's The Prisoner, Eliot's The Cocktail Party and his disastrous Macbeth co-starring Simone Signoret who could speak English of a kind but Shakespeare not at all, and in each play he performed his unique feat of hamming by underplaying - but he assumed the outward signs of a gentleman.
He had his suits made in Savile Row; he was a member of the Garrick and Athenaeum clubs; when in town he stayed at the Connaught; he was generous and dispersed hospitality like a grand seigneur. He detested the new kind of actor who came to work in denims; he even rebuked them at rehearsal for their want of respect to a "great" actor. They giggled.
As for his Catholicism, it seems to have been of that French kind which suggests a kind of aristocratic kinship with God. Once, another convert, Evelyn Waugh, was rebuked for being a detestable person and found a splendid escape clause by urging his critics to reflect on how truly dreadful he would have been if he were not a Catholic. Guinness liked that. And he delighted in finding fellow converts; one might almost say that he pimped for the Almighty.
His screen career began with David Lean's Great Expectations, in which, as Herbert Pocket, he acted John Mills off the screen, which was never difficult. Later, his Fagin in Lean's Oliver Twist was astonishing; he defied us to catch even the most fleeting glimpse of himself under the make-up and within the performance. It was the beginning of his "chameleon" years, and then The Bridge on the River Kwai made him a star and brought him an Oscar.
If he had gay adventures, they were no more than flirtations. Handsome young men attracted him, but were kept at a distance, by either Merula or the threat of hellfire; or of course it may have been no more than the elephantiasis that a biographer inflicts on an unyielding subject. At any rate Piers Paul Read tells his story wonderfully well, but in rather a hurry. A photograph of Noel Willman, Guinness's co-star in The Prisoner, is actually of quite another actor, the great Wilfrid Lawson, who is not even given a mention in the text.
Also, in very large print as a chapter heading on page 119, we read the word "Leiutenant". I fine-combed most of the text a second time, just in case this might be a joke, but threw my hat at it. If Read has a hat to throw, he might fling it at his editor.
Hugh Leonard is a playwright and columnist. His novel, Fillums, will be published in June 2004
Alec Guinness: A Biography. By Piers Paul Read, Simon & Schuster, 640pp. £20