Alec Guinness Takes Off His Masks

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In later years Richardson always had a silver tankard of champagne waiting for those who visited him backstage. Once, when Guinness came by, he rose and made a military-style toast: "To Jesus Christ. What a splendid chap!" Another time, when they were both starring in Doctor Zhivago, Sir Alec walked into Richardson's hotel suite in Madrid. "Who can one hit," said Richardson, "if not one's friends?" -- and punched him in the jaw. By the time Guinness raised himself from the floor to ask what was going on, Richardson was sound asleep in an armchair.

Guinness himself seems removed from such mad scenes. Like George Smiley, the most interesting character of his later years, he is more of a reactor than an initiator, an amused but always clear-eyed observer. Part of that ironic aloofness may come from his childhood. His mother lived from hand to mouth, and he never knew who his father was. He was forced to adapt, and he has been doing that ever since, making a brilliant career out of pouring himself into a myriad of molds. He is now a little startled, however, to discover some of his mannerisms in his son Matthew, 45, who is also an actor. "A good actor," says his father, "although out of work at the moment."

Occasionally, while the elder Guinness is turning the TV dial, searching for the news or a nature program, he comes across one of his many selves. "I switch it off within 30 seconds," he says with a slight shudder. "Once I've done something, it doesn't really have any interest for me anymore." He likes movies, but he loves the stage and is even now on the lookout for a good play. At the moment Alan Bennett (The Old Country) is his favorite English playwright; David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), his favorite American. Between roles, Sir Alec and his wife Merula play country folk in a home 55 miles southwest of London, near Winchester. "Farmland round and about," he says. "It's a very simple house, and it's always untidy, always dusty and ill cared for, it seems to me. But we love it."

Hearing that an expressway was to pass close by, they bought another house last September and put the old homestead on the market. But they quickly repented. "That is where half my life has been spent," he says, "and where my various pets are buried. Everything kind of spreads out from there." Now the new house is for sale, and he and Merula are comforting themselves with a wry, Guinness-style logic: "We're going to be so old and blind and deaf by the time the road gets there that maybe we won't notice it." Old age seems a long way off for such a quick mind, and those eyes and ears, which have missed nothing for the past 50 years, will remain keen and amused for years to come.