Raise your glasses to Guinness

Enigmatic, diffident, introverted, a dark horse, a sort of one-man Tibet - these are some of the descriptions that colleagues have applied to the late Sir Alec Guinness. Two years after his death, aged 86, authors and critics are still trying to work out what drove this most inscrutable and brilliant of actors. Two new biographies are being published this month, while the National Film Theatre is holding a retrospective of his work, but Guinness is as elusive as ever. Even those closest to him acknowledge that there are aspects of his personality that they never fully understood.

"He was a very private man, very difficult to know," observes his old friend, producer and director Ronald Neame. "He was an actor like a chameleon, who could change his colours."

His protean qualities were most evident in the films he made for Ealing Studios after the war. In Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), he played eight members of the blue-blooded D'Ascoyne family, among them an Edith Evans-like matriarch and a stiff-upper-lipped Admiral.

In The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), he was an English bank clerk. In the Man in the White Suit (1951), he was a vaguely sinister inventor. In Barnacle Bill (1957), he was a sea captain whose gills went green at the sight of the first wave. With his Stan Laurel-like face he could convey innocence and venality at the same time.

Thanks to The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he became an international star, but that didn't make him any less mercurial. One moment he'd be an Arab potentate (in Lawrence of Arabia) and the next a stern Bolshevik (in Dr Zhivago). In 1977, he was rediscovered by a new generation thanks to his role as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, a film which, as Neame puts it, "gave him 'f*** - you' money". By then, he had been on screen for almost 40 years without allowing the public to break his carapace.

"He laid false trails about himself and his life
became rich in secrecy and confusion," says one of his biographers, Garry O'Connor, who suggests that Guinness "backed into the limelight".

Even in his autobiographical writing, Guinness didn't reveal much. He was skilled, as O'Connor puts it, "in both self-advancement and self-effacement, which made him a joy for cartoonists and profile writers. Like the most accomplished of drag artists performing a striptease, he showed only little by little more of himself."

Neame still speaks about how Guinness arrived on the set of Oliver Twist (1948) for the first time as Fagin. The actor had worked for hours with makeup artist Stuart Freeborn to make sure he looked as close as possible to the straggly bearded miser drawn by Cruikshank in the pages of Charles Dickens's novel. Critic Kenneth Tynan once described him as an actor "without a face". This was certainly how he appeared to his colleagues back then.

"He came in so early for his make-up that no one else was in the studio," reminisces Freeborn. "Whenever anybody saw him, he was always in full make-up. People knew him as Fagin."

Despite being one of Britain's bestloved actors, Guinness had an affinity for seedy, marginal or downright evil characters: witness his unctuous, toothsome thief in The Ladykillers or the parts he played in Graham Greene adaptations, or even his performance in one film as Hitler.