Another Draft of Guinness

Ah, well this came out unbeknownst to me... The authorized biography of legendary English actor Sir Alec Guinness is being released today in the UK. Guinness' earlier 'autobiographical' books were very worthwhile reads, and it'd be interesting to see what is included (if anything) in this biography that Guinness himself chose not to discuss. I wonder if and/or when the volume will find release in North America. It looks promising....
		.... as opposed to this controversial piece of autobiographical slurring that was concerned only with labeling Sir Alec as a closet homosexual. Even if by some stretch of the imagination he was gay or had gay tendencies (dubious: he was married for 60+ years, and had a son, Matthew, also an actor), what bloody difference does it make? This project strikes me as yet another reprehensible attempt to use sexuality as a lurid trump card in a sickening game of biographical euchre, as if some rumour of sexuality legitimized another opportunity to revisit an old well. Sexuality has always been something that only the person in question can discuss honestly and accurately: in the hands of anyone else, I'm bound to be skeptical, and, indeed, hostile, for good reason. God save me from blathersome gossip claiming to be biography.

Of the latter, see this review from The Telegraph which seems to me very astute in its assessment, and this from The Guardian by actor Simon Callow (from Four Weddings And A Funeral and A Room With A View) that is more sympathetic to O'Connor's argument but which strikes me as being of greater interest than O'Connor's obsessive interest in Guinness' sexuality (though it's worth noting that Callow, too, seems to have a private matter with Guinness). I don't blame Guinness for not wanting his friends to say anything to O'Connor when he first wrote about him in the 1990s: perhaps he knew what was coming, a kind of of combination sexual-psycho-analysis cum character assassination.

Or, perhaps, he simply believed it was none of anyone's bloody business, especially in a world that uses sexuality as a means to label and to pigeon-hole (and perhaps otherwise assail) people.

Here, by the way, is the NYTimes obit of Guinness when he died three years ago.

I'd rather remember the performances, all those magnificent moments, than anyone's (factual or otherwise) driftwood remarks on his sexuality. You know the moments-- his brilliant little smile before Obi-Wan Kenobi is struck down; his manic eyes as Holland in The Lavender Hill Mob; his gentle doddering as Monsignor Quixote; his absolute disappearance into Arab guise in Lawrence of Arabia; his brilliantly cipherous Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai, a part other actors (including Charles Laughton and James Mason) thought unplayable; his ability to render even Hitler as more than a historical caricature.

Survey an artist by his or her work, that's my motto. I think it would have been Sir Alec's, too.