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No moon. A bat whirred by invisibly, black against black. The football green, solid and trustworthy in the daylight, was a black hole now. At the edge of it a small, skinny boy stood staring big-eyed into the darkness. A tree creaked in the night wind. The boy looked wildly over his shoulder. He almost wished that somebody had noticed him slip out, but people hardly ever noticed little Alec. "Come on, Guinness!" he told himself between chattering teeth. "Come on!" He began to run. He ran clear around the football field as fast as his scrubby legs could carry him, and then ran round it again. He ran through the side door of the school auditorium. He ran onstage at the instant of his cue (Enter a Messenger), staggered up to the startled young Macbeth and collapsed in a spectacular wreckage of words: "Gra,(gasp!)cious my (gulp!) lord, I (sob!) should report that (wheeze!) which I (glug!) . . ." The audience gasped, gulped, stared, roared, crashed into applause.
Alec Guinness had arrived in the theater. Out of obscurity and a world of terrors, a faceless child with haunted eyes had rushed into a place of light; and from that night, the greasepaint stick became his lollipop. In 30 years of play acting. Alec Guinness has made himself one of the most expert living masters of his craft. On the stage he ranks with Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson, in the Big Four of British acting, and he is recognized as the most gifted character actor of the English-speaking theater. On the screen his 17 films—among them such comic classics as Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob, The Man in the White Suit and The Captain's Paradise—have won him a world audience as one of the most subtle and profound of all the clowns since Chaplin, and as a jackpudding genius of hilarious disguise.
Putty & Wax. Smeared with collodion, hung with plastic eye-bags, festooned with soup strainers, monocles, nippers, wax teeth, putty nebs, and anything else he could find in his makeup kit, Guinness gleefully paraded himself before the public in a glorious album of absurdities. He has been a larcenous bank clerk, a commuting bigamist, a middle-aged suffragette, a bootleg genius, a buck-toothed fiend, a garden editor who liked vegetables better than people, the contents of a cannibal stew, a family of eight, an intellectual ant.
Since 1950, when Kind Hearts cleaned up at the art houses, British Cinemactor Guinness has steadily built his mass appeal in the U.S.—largely with his marvelously comical knack of hooking the odd fish. But his audience is not limited to moviegoers. As the star of hundreds of filler shows, which exhibit his comedies habitually, he is a stalwart TV attraction too. By the middle '50s, Guinness was pulling his TV audience into U.S. movie theaters, and movie publicists were bragging that, on the list of British exports, Guinness Stout was hardly as well known as Guinness, Alec; that in fact, when it came to making a bundle for Britain, the Guinness movies were in a class with Scotch whisky and Harris tweed.