Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness started on stage in 1934, playing Osric in Hamlet at 22 and joining the Old Vic soon after. During the Second World War he commanded a landing craft in the Royal Naval Reserve, seeing action at Sicily and Elba. After the war he became one of the great British theatre actors to cross into film, making his name in six Ealing comedies starting in 1949 with Kind Hearts and Coronets, where he played eight different characters, then leading The Man in the White Suit and The Lavender Hill Mob. His six collaborations with David Lean brought the Academy Award for Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, plus roles in Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. George Lucas cast him as Obi-Wan Kenobi in 1977, earning another Oscar nomination and a global second act he never sought. His later life belonged to George Smiley, John le Carré's spymaster in the BBC's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People - the role he considered definitive. He was knighted in 1959, received the Academy Honorary Award in 1980, and died in 2000.