A Positively Final Appearance: a Journal 1996-1998 By Alec Guinness Hamish Hamilton 246 pp, £16.99 in UK
Great actors can be divided into two categories. First, and more numerous, are those who succeed through the sheer force of their personalities and/or their looks and voices. They are the types who, when they appear on stage or screen, seem larger than life and invite us to know everything we can about them. Alec Guinness belongs to a smaller group. There is nothing extraordinary about his voice or his face - and as for his personality, he always seems to be holding one at an invisible arm's length. He is an essentially English type, friendly, courteous (except, perhaps, to his over-importunate fans) but never inviting intimacy, never giving away an inch more than he wants to. Yet, indisputably, he is one of the unforgettable actors of our time.
How is it done? I'm damned if I know. I have never seen him live and probably never will now, for it is 10 years since he last performed on the stage, but to most people over 40 he is an essential part of their cinema-going past. Who can forget him in the Ealing comedies, as the Man in the White Suit, who invented an indestructible fabric and ran foul of big business; as the villainous, inept, bucktoothed gang leader in The Ladykillers, or as all eight victims - including a woman - of the young man who murdered his way to a title in Kind Hearts and Coronets?
Then there were his roles in David Lean's Great Expectations and Oliver Twist - still the best screen versions of Dickens - as the stiff British officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai, as Smiley in the television shows based on John le Carre's spy stories and many, many others.
Now 85, he has published a second volume of diaries to follow his splendidly-titled My Name Escapes Me. As in the previous volume he chronicles a life in retirement mixed with reminiscences of the great but not always good and, as before, he tells us no more and no less than he wishes. There are frequent mentions of his wife of 61 years, including an account of a sinister bed and breakfast house encountered on their honeymoon in pre-war Donegal. His children and grandchildren remain firmly in the background, however - none of our business, quite rightly. Naturally the slings and arrows of old age are chronicled, mainly failing sight and hearing, but the tone is of exasperation rather than self-pity.
To try him there are his fans, many of them American and many of them devotees of Star Wars, now 20 years old, a film which with its appeal to nutcases everywhere has come to haunt him. My favourite story concerns the 12-year-old boy who tells him that he has seen it over a hundred times. "I would love you to do something for me," says Guinness. "Do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?" The boy bursts into tears, while his mother draws herself up and says: "What a dreadful thing to say to a child." "Maybe she was right," comments the star, "but I just hope the lad, now in his thirties, is not living in a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities."
Meanwhile life goes on. There are numerous books, old and new, to read and re-read, there are the great events of the day from the death of Diana to Tony Blair's election victory, there is the never-ending fascination of Shakespeare, trips abroad to Germany, Greece and elsewhere, visits to the theatre with the perceptive comments one would expect, reminiscences of actors - Marlene Dietrich told him she visited the desert outside Las Vegas every year to commune with a visitor from outer space. It's a book for dipping into, rather than reading cover to cover, good for a beach or beside a fire, and one hopes that, despite its title, there may be another volume to come.