Alec's Way

Whenever Laurence Olivier and Sir Ralph Richardson, the two leading men of London's Old Vic, took time off to make a movie (and a few quid), the players felt deserted. There was nothing for it, the company decided, but to produce an outstanding young actor to fill in. So they did.

He was 33-year-old Alec Guinness, a balding skinnybones with the wide, dashed look of a boy who has just blown his lines in the Sunday-school pageant. In the last six months mild-voiced young Alec has provoked the Old Vic's stage into varied and resonant life. As the Fool in King Lear, Time & Tide found him near "perfection." The Daily Telegraph thought his cockalorum De Guiche in Cyrano de Bergerac "a remarkable feat."

Last week, after his first postwar leading part (as Shakespeare's penn'orth king, Richard II), Alec had London's dour critics giddily tapping their umbrellas. The Daily Herald: "This is Shakespeare done in a way that gives luster to the English theater. . . ." The Daily Telegraph: ". . . Admirable economy . . . not a touch nor a tone seems wrong." The consensus: Alec Guinness is the most versatile new actor to appear on the British stage since the war.

Alec had no histrionic forebears and no early encouragement. But "Somehow," he says, "I always knew I wanted to be an actor." Funds in the Guinness family (no kin to the stout fellas from Ireland) being tight, when Alec finished Roborough School in the bottomless '30s, he took a -L-2-a-week apprenticeship in a London advertising agency. He studied acting at nights and (in the finest tradition of the theater) lived in a garret for a year, mostly on borrowed jam sandwiches and card board soles.

Finally he got a part: as a walk-on at the Playhouse Theater. Within a year he had a bit in John Gielgud's Hamlet and met his wife-to-be, Actress Merula Salaman, in Noah. (She was a tiger, he was a wolf.)

When war came, Alec joined the Navy -- and so to Broadway. In 1942, in Boston to pick up and deliver home an L.C.I., which was delayed, he popped down to New York for a visit. Result: he got a speaking part in Terence Rattigan's RAFizzle (a hit in London) Flare Path.

Alec's first screen role -- Herbert Pocket in Dickens' Great Expectations -- decided him that here was the life. He promptly hired an agent to rustle him up some more movie jobs, preferably "a Hollywood picture for the good it does one -- not financial especially, but for one's reputation." His agent's impression: "There's no bloody nonsense about Alec."

At week's end Guinness, the Old Vic and the rest of British theater were momentarily ignored by the press. Oklahoma!, now in its fifth year on Broadway, finally opened in the West End.

The audience went positively crackers. They dragged the cast back for 14 curtain calls. One of the cast had to fire a stage pistol into the air to quiet them down, but they kept yipping until the company did another encore of the Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' number. "Why," first-nighters griped as they filed out, "can't England do these things?" England's most famed producer of musicals, 73-year-old Charles Cochran, excitedly admitted that he had never seen a better show -- "and those well-fed chorus boys, what a pleasure . . . not a pansy amongst them." One first-nighter voiced the only complaint : "I say, who was Oklahoma?"

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