Sir Alec Guinness was born Alec Guinness de Cuffe on April 2, 1914, in London and made his stage and film debuts in 1934, each time in a superfluous role. After establishing himself at the Old Vic, he served with the Royal Navy before entering films in 1946. He was quickly recognized as an extroardinarily versatile actor who was scarcely recognizable from role to role; he played eight parts including a woman in one of his first big successes, Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949).

Guinness was Oscar®-nominated for the droll comedy The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), in which he plays a timid transporter of gold bullion who forms his own gang to steal a million pounds worth of gold. In the equally delightful follow-up, The Ladykillers (1955), he is a master criminal who poses as a music professor as he plots a robbery.

Guinness took home the Oscar® itself for The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which he plays Colonel Nicholson, a British officer who is confined in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp and becomes obsessed with building a bridge even though it will aid the enemy.

Highlights of Guinness's career of the 1960s include Tunes of Glory (1960), as a Scottish lieutenant colonel in a clash of wills with fellow officer John Mills; Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as Prince Faisal; The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), as Marcus Aurelius; and The Quiller Memorandum (1966) as the superior of spy hero Quiller (George Segal).

In the 1970s and '80s Guinness reached a whole new audience by playing Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars and its sequels. Knighted in 1959 for his accomplishments in theater and film, he won an honorary Academy Award in 1980 for "advancing the art of screen acting through a host of memorable and distinguished performances." Guinness was married to Merula Salaman from 1938 until his death in 2000, and was the father of actor Matthew Guinness.

by Roger Fristoe