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Seldom so direct, he prefers the dart to the bludgeon. Though not malicious, he is known as a wickedly accurate and irreverent wit, with a special talent for puncturing the pompous, and he does it so delicately that his victims never quite realize where they have been hit. And then suddenly the sly dog turns into a wildly silly puppy. He will dash into a quiet party wearing flap soles and a fright wig, and ramble off in a farrago of slap-happy imitations—invariably topnotch. He is a superb raconteur: his account of Dame Edith Sitwell's recent Roman Catholic baptism ("Can you imagine Dame Edith being borne majestically down the aisle on a little satin pillow?") is simply, as the British say, blue death and ivy. But the special mark of the Guinness humor is a curious mixture of the fey, the sly and the marginally macabre. He would rather get a secret grin than an open laugh.
The Guinness humor, with its turn for the weird, is just one of many signs of a wild Celtic streak in the man. It shows in his flair for the little superstition—he never whistles in a dressing room, never cuts his nails on Friday ("Bizarre, isn't it?"). It shows in his peculiar affinity for the supernatural and in his belief that he has premonitions of dire events to come. In recent years there have been fewer transcendental scrapes and a sense of deepening religious life. In 1956, after taking instructions secretly for a year, Alec was baptized in the Catholic faith.
Personal Abyss. Most of his friends agree that Alec needs a religion. He primly admits to "a certain uncomfortable void" in his life. Says a friend: "I would call it Alec's personal abyss. There is this great sense of absence in the middle of him, this lack of identity. One seldom sees a man who lives so intimately with nothingness."
The feeling of nothingness seems to lie at the base of Actor Guinness' art. It is above all an art of the anonymous—his screen presence itself is actually a sort of commanding absence. The experience of nothingness is a kind of central pain, and pain is at the center of all his characters —the funnier they are, the harder they seem to hurt. He became an actor simply to escape this pain ("One became an actor," as he puts it, "in order to escape from oneself"), but his art is not merely escapism. It seems to resolve itself into a relentless search for his identity, a serious and gifted pursuit of the whole.