Alec Guinness Quotes

George Smiley: [quoting an old letter from Bill Haydon about Jim Prideaux] He has that heavy quiet that commands. He's my other half. Between us we'd make one marvelous man. He asks nothing better than to be in my company or that of my wicked, divine friends, and I'm vastly tickled by the compliment. He's virgin, about eight foot tall, and built by the same firm that did Stonehenge

The point of a knighthood for British actors is to enable them to play butlers.

A refurbished Star Wars is on somewhere or everywhere. I have no intention of revisiting any galaxy. I shrivel inside each time it is mentioned. Twenty years ago, when the film was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. Then I began to be uneasy at the influence it might be having. The first bad penny dropped in San Francisco when a sweet-faced boy of twelve told me proudly that he had seen Star Wars over a hundred times. His elegant mother nodded with approval. Looking into the boy's eyes I thought I detected little star-shells of madness beginning to form and I guessed that one day they would explode. 'I would love you to do something for me,' I said. 'Anything! Anything!' the boy said rapturously. 'You won't like what I'm going to ask you to do,' I said. 'Anything, sir, anything!' 'Well,' I said, 'do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?' He burst into tears. His mother drew herself up to an immense height. 'What a dreadful thing to say to a child!' she barked, and dragged the poor kid away. Maybe she was right but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.

An actor is no more than an assortment of odds and ends which barely add upp to a whole man. An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child, and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who for an hour or two, can call on heacen and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents.

I neither suffer myself, nor other fools, gladly.

The Times reports I've made £4.5 million in the past year (from my Star Wars income). Where do they get such nonsense?

The Times reports I've made £4.5 million in the last year (from my Star Wars income). Where do they get such nonsense?

Sir John is probably touched with some sort of genius, but genius does not normally stimulate me to speculation, since it cannot be held in the hand any more than quicksilver. More important than Gielgud's genius are the years of work and thought which drape about his shoulders almost visibly. He is a lifetime of experience and of practice. On the quieter, less electric days, he sits behind a rehearsal table and interrupts the staging of of a scene with a murmured apology. He then removes his spectacles and rubs his reddened eyes. Perhaps he thinks for a moment. The silence is taut. Rarely does anyone move or speak. He then delivers himself of no more than a sentence or two, but these brief remarks are cornucopias filled with forty years of reading, studying, considering and analysing Shakespearean verse. The words are tightly packed, but Gielgud knows more than what can be gleaned from even the most serious reading, playgoing, and analysis. He remembers, bone-wisely, all the forty-plus years of playing Shakespearean roles; of directing his fellow actors in those; of observing Ralph Richardson rehearsing and playing this part, Laurence Olivier that one; of guiding or acting with... Peggy Ashcroft... Sybil Thorndike... Alec Guinness... Paul Scofield... Richard Burton... on through every degree of accomplishment and competence. At the centre of him there sits a firmness, a certainty. Indeed he is so fundamentally assured that he can admit the most serious doubts and confusions. At times, after delivering himself of what would seem a total idea, he will smile his Gioconda smile and say, 'Of course, you yourself may find a better way.' One might reasonably suspect the words to be disingenuous, but it is an attitude which can work psychic wonders on an actor - most especially a cagey one. Gielgud disarms the actor of his self-protective weapons. He does it by not pushing to hard. He combines an unspoiled intuition with a lifetime of learning. The feel of his rehearsal is most ingratiating... and persuasive.

Barely two weeks into filming Star Wars, and George Lucas was ready to kill Sir Alec Guinness. “It

Another television calamity, broadcast by CBS on November 17, was the Star Wars Holiday Special. The show featured appearances by most of the cast, except Alec Guinness, and took advantage of early McQuarrie artwork for the Wookiee planet (the story has the principals going to Chewbacca’s homeworld to celebrate Life Day). With odd musical numbers; cameos by celebrity TV stars, such as Art Carney, Harvey Korman, and Beatrice Arthur; and a campy, bizarre production décor light-years from the feeling of the first film, the Holiday Special was an example of how Black Falcon and Lucasfilm had yet to hone their approval processes.

Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they learn to put away childish things?) The clouds of incense have dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not moribund. ‘All shall be well,’ I feel, ‘and all manner of things shall be well,’ so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.

Failure has a thousand explanations. Success doesn’t need one.” Alec Guinness

I'm afraid I was a little abrupt recently with a producer who sent me a screenplay. It was rubbish, really. I sent it back with a polite rejection. Then he came back with the plea that 'we tailored it just for you.' I replied simply, 'But no one came to take the measurements.