Death of a great actor, a gentleman and a Catholic (England).

London--Sir Alec Guinness, who died on August 5 at the age of 86, was the last of the knights of the stage who dominated the English theatre in the latter half of the 20th century--the others being Olivier, Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson. The obituary tributes to him emphasized, first, the enormous range of his performances, all the way from Hamlet to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars; from a psychiatrist in T.S. Eliot's play, A Cocktail Party, to a secret agent in the television versions of two spy stories by John Le Carre; and second, his chameleon-like quality: he was "a man of many faces," and when he entitled a volume of memoirs My Name Escapes Me he made his mark in a number of comic films, including one called Kind Hearts and Coronets, in which he displayed his versatility by playing the entire d'Ascoyne family, both males and females, in his own words "eight speaking parts, one non-speaking cameo, and a portrait in oils." A few years later he gave a memorable performance in The Prisoner as a Cardinal under p ressure from his Communist captors to confess to crimes which he had not committed.

One of his most striking roles was as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai; it was a classic example of his ability to suggest the inner life of the character he was depicting. He managed to suggest not only the Colonel's indomitable character, which proved too much for his Japanese captors, but also his inflexibility and lack of imagination. This role won him a well-deserved Oscar. He had an important connection with Canada: he was the first star to appear on the stage of the Stratford Festival, in the title role of Richard III, in 1953, when the festival opened with a tent theatre.

In his autobiographical book Blessings in Disguise he described, in a mixture of seriousness and humour, the process of his conversion to Catholicism. The fourth chapter, "Quintessence of Dust," began as follows: "At the age of sixteen, one early summer day, I arose from under the hands of the Bishop of Lewes (Anglican) a confirmed atheist." Years later, in the summer of 1955, he pedalled almost aimlessly into Petersfield in Hampshire and stopped outside the Church of St. Lawrence. There he met "a tall, gentle, civilised-looking man" who was a Catholic priest, Fr. Henry Clarke. After they had had several pleasant meetings, Guinness began to suspect that Fr. Clarke was concealing some of the real horrors of Catholicism from him and determined to see it at its worst. So he arranged to go for a few days to a Trappist monastery, where they woke him at 4:30 in the morning and fed him on flabby bacon and wet toast. Still, the atmosphere of "prayer without frills" made a much greater impression on him than he had ex pected. On March 25, 1956, "Fr. Clarke accepted my reconciliation with the Church, with tact and kindness, at St. Lawrence's, Petersfield. Like countless converts before and after me, I felt I had come home--and known the place for the first time."

Some months later, while he was in Ceylon making The Bridge on the River Kwai, his wife Merula made her submission to Rome too. "All shall be well," he wrote, "and all manner of things shall be well, so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns." In Blessings in Disguise, he quotes a very penetrating statement by G.K. Chesterton, "The Church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

Let us hope that the Lord gives him the reward he deserves for the moral and artistic standards which he upheld during the course of his long and honourable career.