Article: Sir Alec Guinness: April 2, 1914-Aug. 5, 2000.(TRANSITION)(News of the Week)(Brief Article)(Obituary)

He was the perfect person to play John Le Carre's spymaster George Smiley, for he possessed all the necessary talents for a life of stealth: a face so ordinary as to approach anonymity, a mastery of disguise so accomplished he could vanish without a trace inside a role and a wary intelligence that allowed him to reveal the deepest secrets of his characters while slyly protecting his own.

Alec Guinness, who died on Aug. 5 at 86, was perhaps the greatest example of a character actor in our century. His tour-de-force performance as all eight members of an aristocratic family in "Kind Hearts and Coronets" set the tone of a shape-shifting 60-year career that would ...

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