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(1914–2000). British actor.
Early in his career, he was effortlessly charming and
persuasive in The Man in the White Suit, playing an eccentric scientist
who invents a fabric that never wears out but is oblivious to the harm
it might cause to understandably hostile textile workers. It is a rare
film that challenges comforting assumptions about the benefits of scientific
progress in a manner more subtle than depictions of mutated monsters ravaging
the countryside, and Guinness cunningly portrays the paradox of a man
who comes to realize that his new invention may be less than the unalloyed
boon he imagined, yet remains blissfully determined to carry on with his
research after his purportedly perfect suit suddenly falls apart.
But the high point of his science fiction career is of
course Star Wars. It is a mark of George Lucas's genius that he
pursued Guinness for the role of Obi Wan Kenobi, even though he had to
part with a percentage of the film's profits (while the complete ineffectiveness
of non-actor Francois Truffaut as a comparable authority figure in Close
Encounters of the Third Kind is a mark of Steven SPIELBERG's
ineptitude). You can talk all you want to about Lucas's effective borrowings
from earlier science fiction, the spectacular special effects, or the
appeal of his youthful stars, but it is the quiet sincerity of Guinness's
performance that makes that film believable and involving; he earned every
penny of profit that he made. And the decision to kill off his character
must be regarded as Lucas's greatest blunder, not corrected by Guinness's
brief, ghostly reappearances at the end of the first film and in its two
sequels, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.
The animated alien Yoda of the second film, and the attempted transformation
of Mark HAMILL's Luke Skywalker into a mature and distant presence in
the third film, only represent Lucas's failed efforts to replace Guinness;
but some actors have the ability to make themselves irreplaceable. It
is odd, then, that amidst all the expressions of disappointment regarding
the latest installment in the Star Wars saga, Episode 1: The
Phantom Menace, nobody mentioned one of the chief differences between
that film and its three predecessors—the complete absence of the persuasive
Sir Alec.
Elsewhere, Guinness was as effective as always in two
lesser films: the inept thriller Raise the Titanic and the lame
fantasy comedy Lovesick, where his performance as the ghost of
Sigmund Freud was the film's only redeeming quality. He is an actor who
improves every film he is in, and that is a statement one can make about
few actors indeed. |
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