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Think of Alec Guinness and who is it that comes to mind? The Man in the White Suit? Professor Marcus in The Ladykilers? His priest-detective Father Brown? Obi-Wan Kenobi perhaps, or is it a character from one of his six collaborations with director David Lean - Herbert Pocket (Great Expectations), Fagin (Oliver Twist), the pompous Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the ... [+]

Think of Alec Guinness and who is it that comes to mind? The Man in the White Suit? Professor Marcus in The Ladykilers? His priest-detective Father Brown? Obi-Wan Kenobi perhaps, or is it a character from one of his six collaborations with director David Lean - Herbert Pocket (Great Expectations), Fagin (Oliver Twist), the pompous Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai or Professor Godbole in A Passage to India? Maybe it's the drunken painter Gulley Jimson (The Horse's Mouth) or the vacuum-cleaner salesman Jim Wormold (Our Man in Havana). Or is it his definitive portrayal of George Smiley? (Le Carre was so taken with his performance in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that he based further his characterisations on him).

Guinness is all of them and none. He had a chameleon-like talent for immersing himself to the point of invisibility in his roles, his very ordinariness providing the perfect foil for his multiple characterisations. Nowhere is this better seen than in the wonderful Ealing Comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he plays all eight members of the D'Ascoyne family, standing in the way of one man's inheritance. [-]