Sir Alec Guinness who died on August 5th was a genius of the stage and screen, but very much preferred to keep himself to himself. A profoundly unostentatious and reserved man, he undertook a great variety of roles, all of which were informed at heart with the wisdom of the sad clown.
It was this spiritual severity, together with those cool, clear, wide-open eyes, capable of melting on screen to the most reassuringly serene of smiles, which lent his performances force and authenticity.
Despite his reluctance to live in the limelight, his brilliance as an actor with a career spanning more than 60 years was recognised worldwide.
Born in 1914 in London, he was the son of a banker, but his parents separated soon after his birth. He said he could not remember his father at all. In his unpretentious and beautifully written book, Blessings in Disguise, he exorcised a long-suppressed anxiety about his origins. He was, he made clear, illegitimate - his name a mystery, his father probably called Geddes, the circumstances of his conception vague. His mother was Agnes Cuffe, and he was registered as Alec Guinness de Cuffe.
Alec Guinness had an impecunious childhood, with a modest boarding-school education at Pembroke Lodge, in Southborne, and Roborough, in Eastbourne. At 18, he got a job as a junior copywriter in Arks Publicity, an advertising agency.
In his autobiography, he also describes how the acting bug had bitten him. On the recommendation of John Gielgud, who assumed he was related to brewing and money, he got in touch with the formidable and eccentric Martita Hunt.
She was, he noted, the first woman he had met who wore silk trousers and painted her toenails, and she coached him to audition for a Leverhulme scholarship at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). But RADA were not giving the award that year, so he enrolled at the Fay Compton studio for as long as his money lasted, and then rapidly went to work in the London theatre. He made his debut at 20, walking on in Libel! at the Playhouse.
In 1934 while still only 20, he was a flowery Osric, in Gielgud's Hamlet at the New Theatre. Thereafter, until the outbreak of the second World War, his career alternated between working with Gielgud, or with Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic, where he impressed with a modern-dress Hamlet in autumn 1938.
Even the Sunday Times's formidable critic, James Agate, conceded that his refusal to play the role in a traditional way had "a value of its own".
He married his wife, the playwright Merula Salaman, in 1938 and spent much of the next five years in service with Britain's Royal Navy during the second World War. The couple had one son, Matthew.
But despite the pressures of war service, he managed to squeeze in his New York stage debut while on leave from the navy with a role in Flare Path in 1942.
After returning to the Old Vic in 1946, his jump from stage to screen was made with an adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations in the same year. Later, at the age of 34, he offered the definitive Fagin in a 1948 adaptation of Oliver Twist.
Then came a series of Ealing studio comedies, including the internationally acclaimed Kind Hearts and Coronets in 1949 in which he displayed his versatility by playing eight different characters.
Nevertheless, Alec Guinness always denied having any technique as an actor - or knowing what technique might be.
Yet he was proud of his gift. A favourite story, which he told quite often, concerned his time in The Seagull, in May 1936, playing the small part of Yakov. The director Komisarjevsky, a big influence, was convinced that he was pulling a rope to open the little stage curtains for the play within a play in the first act. But, as Peggy Ashcroft pointed out to Komisarjevsky's chagrin, there was, in fact, no rope.
For Alec Guinness, the purpose of acting was to make believe. The theatre was an act of faith, whose object was to tell the inner truth about situations and feelings, not to embroider falsehood with trickery and display.
His greatest film role was probably Colonel Nicholson, in Lean's The Bridge On The River Kwai (1957), where his quintessentially English stiff upper lip under dreadful Japanese maltreatment and, eventually, obsessive unreasonableness, won him a best actor Oscar and numerous other prizes.
Further work included the artist Gulley Jimson, in The Horse's Mouth (1958) - another Oscar nomination - with his own screenplay based on Joyce Carey's novel.
In 1959, he starred in Carol Reed's Our Man In Havana and a year later gave a brilliantly unpleasant Scottish impersonation of an irascible soldier in Tunes Of Glory.
It was not followed by many more good film-starring roles, and he settled mostly for lucrative supporting parts in films like The Quiller Memorandum (1966), The Comedians (1967) and Cromwell (1970).
A second Oscar (honorary) came in 1980 for "advancing the art of screen acting through a host of memorable and distinguished performances".
Among the best of those performances was his depiction of the Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi in the 1977 blockbuster Star Wars.
Knighted in 1960, he was famous for his humility and refusal to take on the role of a star. "You can only be your own personality and I am just happy to be an actor," he said.
"If I tried to swan around, I wouldn't know how to behave. If I tried to be a superstar, I'd be a laughing stock."
He took that attitude to the extreme in Star Wars, when he persuaded director George Lucas to write his character out of the film by having him killed off by the vicious Darth Vader.
"I just couldn't go speaking those bloody awful lines," he said of the role. "I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."
He was also characteristically humble about his Oscar-winning performance as the Colonel in The Bridge on the River Kwai, saying: "I don't look back on it as a great performance."
He loved his acting life well enough to continue his work well into the 1980s, when he starred on British television as John Le Carre's arch spymaster George Smiley, first in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and then in Smiley's People.
But his love of the simple things in life was also clear: he liked good food and drink. His favourite London hotel was the Connaught, with its superb cuisine. He was not a club man. He was knighted in 1959 and made a Companion of Honour in 1994.
Sir Alec Guinness: born 1914; died, August 2000