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Guinness Backstage.

Article Excerpt
ALEC GUINNESS: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY By PIERS PAUL READ Simon & Schuster 624 pp. $30.

APROPOS BIOGRAPHY, Samuel Johnson once said that "the business of the biographer is to pass lightly over those performances and incidents, which produce vulgar greatness" in order "to lead the thoughts into domestic privacies, and display the minute details of daily life, where exterior appendages are cast aside and men excel each other only by prudence and by virtue." In Alec Guinness: The Authorized Biography, Piers Paul Read does not neglect the performances that won his subject "vulgar greatness." Read's observations on Guinness' acting career are incisive and shrewd. But he puts them into perspective and shows how Guinness' moral development--played out in the "minute details of daily life"--constituted his true career.

Read fully appreciates the centrality that Catholicism came to have for Guinness. Two years before he converted at the age of forty-two, Guinness confided to his diary: "My soul, my body, my brain longs for religion. The world is too bleak and blank without a sense of worship." Even in his twenties, while an officer in the Royal Navy, he recognized Catholicism as "the crack regiment," though at the time he felt he could not afford its "expensive uniforms." When his son Matthew fell ill with polio in 1952, Guinness made a pact with God that if Matthew recovered, he would convert. Matthew recovered and Guinness converted. Or so he recalled in his autobiography, Blessings in Disguise (1985). Read shows that his conversion was much more gradual, taking root slowly but tenaciously in a nature avid for the life of faith.

GUINNESS' CHILDHOOD was rackety. Born in London in 1914 and educated at private schools, he never knew his father and grew up in lodgings with a mother who was as improvident...