His idea of Heaven, he once said, was to "sit on the terrace on a summer's evening, enjoy a drink with one or two friends and listen to the silence.''

6/01/06 - The Guinness home in Hampshire is for sale

1/18/05 - Time Magazine Cover Article 1958

11/18/04 - There is a new Yahoo Group called Poet of Anonymity. Click HERE to join

"...Also, was it merciful of them to saddle any modern actor, however skilled, with the task of treading in the footsteps of Alec Guinness?

Guinness, the patron saint of Ealing, played the professor in 1955. Our first sight of him remains one of the most celebrated entrances in cinema: the landlady opens the door to reveal a leering spectre, whose low-voiced attempts at affability simply strengthen our impression that Nosferatu has taken ship to London. The part was purest Guinness, being neither just creepy nor just amusing but always a pungent hellbrew of the two. You caught a whiff of genuine horror in that net-curtained cityscape, still politely exhausted by the strains of war, and so insidious was the central performance, set in relief by the broader jokiness of the henchmen (Herbert Lom and Peter Sellers among them), that, even though Mackendrick shot the movie in color, it lingers and thickens, in one’s mind, as a murk of black-and-white...."

"An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes 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 heaven and hell to mesmerise a group of innocents."

From the prologue of Blessings In Disguise, by Alec Guinness