The genius of Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness was gossipy, nervous and greedy – and ticked off Madeline Smith for drinking on the job. But he was a genius Guinness was good for me

Pinewood Film Studios, 1973

I was cuddled up in bed with the new James Bond, Roger Moore, filming Live and Let Die. He whispered in my ear, ‘This job is nothing compared with your next one.’

This next job was in a new play, Alan Bennett’s Habeas Corpus. Starring Sir Alec Guinness, it was an end-of-the-pier, black-humoured pantomime written partly in verse, with plangent fairground musical interludes composed by Carl Davis. Recorded on a Wurlitzer, the music set the tone of the play each night at exactly 8.10pm. That’s when I knew it was time for me to scamper down the concrete stairs to make my first entrance.

On the first night, I did the unforgivable and glugged a full glass of red wine before curtain-up. My knees locked and so did my brain. Afterwards, Sir Alec told me that I was a very foolish girl, and I never drank a drop before the show again.

Roger Moore was in awe of Alec Guinness – and his modesty was no act. It set Roger apart in my estimation, then as now.

Sir Alec’s body was quite portly for his mere 59 years. An actor’s vanity would not allow him to expose it to the audience – so he wore a corset underneath his sharp suit, in his role as Dr Wicksteed, a GP from Hove. He also sported a wig which made him resemble Peter Cushing in Baron Frankenstein mode.

Food was Alec’s god, and he was a regular frequenter of Fortnum & Mason and many other favourite haunts between theatreland and his second home in Smith Square, Westminster.

My role as pert ingénue Felicity Rumpers was a device to represent temptation. Dr Wicksteed, riddled with unresolved desires, conjures visions of himself entwined in her arms, sampling the forbidden fruit. Alan had me wear a floating pink dress and beads, reminiscent of an era long past.

For a month, our assorted crew of writer, director, actors and stage management occupied the Brass Rubbing Centre in the former Crypt of St James’s Church, Piccadilly.

Alan Bennett lay asleep atop the old honky-tonk piano. On the piano stool each day, there was an assortment of cream cakes for sustenance.

While Alan snored, director Ronald Eyre was busy tearing apart the unwieldy script – politely termed ‘pruning’. There was never any complaint from the author.

The only problem was Patricia Hayes, the second lead.

Patricia had just broken everybody’s heart with her recent TV performance as Edna the tramp in Edna, the Inebriate Woman. I adored her.

From day one, Alan Bennett wanted her to play the cleaning lady, Mrs Swabb, with a northern accent. Pat could not master it. After many days, and to her great relief, she was allowed to revert to Cockney and her endless lines, moves, entrances and exits all fell into place.

Patricia was unique. A true character in every sense. As Mrs Swabb, she wore a small, dark hat – scarcely noticeable. One night, well into the run at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, a phosphorescent, green hat lit up the stage. Patricia had seen no reason to reveal it to Alec before the show, and he was incandescent. She never wore that hat again.

Each night, Patricia arrived just in time to catch the closing of Berwick Street Market, where she picked up the fruit, fish and meat at knocked-down prices. Her basement dressing room was filled with strange, stray objects gleaned from local dustbins, including a bright red broken telephone.

Pat had a seeming frailty and wistfulness that hid a very independent and determined lady who had suffered much in her 60 years. One day, in conversation over tea, she told me that when her husband walked out for good, she caught sight of herself in the mirror and said out loud, ‘So that’s how somebody looks when her husband leaves her!’

Pat lived quietly on Putney Hill. A black tracksuit was her daily uniform, and her companions were an assortment of much cosseted and noisy dachshunds.

As an actor, Sir Alec was a genius; he was equally faultless as a company leader, but Patricia’s occasionally gauche behaviour was irksome to this detailed perfectionist. Her bohemian lifestyle and wayward eccentricities were not to his well-honed, sophisticated tastes. For Alec, image was everything.

Each night, backstage, I heard him gossip with his stage wife, Margaret Courtenay. I sensed his frustrations with Patricia. I knew also that Alec, in particular, needed these gossipy intimacies to rid him of the ennui that a long run in the theatre can induce.

Maggie was a past master at buttering up her leading men, and thrived on these precious moments with him.

Our one stop en route to the West End was a brief try-out in the Playhouse Theatre, Oxford. Audiences were lean but not hungry, and reviews were less than glowing. Alec nearly walked.

It was a very depressing time. Bigwigs stayed at the Randolph, and my choice of the rundown Eastgate Hotel was a mistake. A police car picked up my scent each night and its occupants kept me in their sights until I had reached my dismal destination. Did they think I was on the game?

Alec honed and fine-tuned his performance, underplaying his part to perfection. You could honestly never take your eyes off him.

Nerves caused him to ask the management to remove distracting programmes being waved about by members of the audience or placed in his eyeline on the plush box sills. The cardinal sin was an actor’s watching from the wings.

After we had run for a month in London, Sir Alec peered through his customary spyhole in the curtain when ‘Beginners’ had been called, and said, ‘They’re all Japanese.’

Tradition has it that, after four weeks, anybody who is anybody has seen the show, and now it’s only tourists – who won’t understand it anyway.

Things were so bad in the afternoons that we were given freebie tickets to pad the theatre. He and Maggie Courtenay would time the sadly deserted Wednesday matinée to see how fast they could play it.

He had a short fuse with the constant announcements coming through the ancient Tannoy in his dressing room. William, Alec’s personal dresser, held his breath one night when ‘Sir’ took aim and threw his shoe at the Tannoy, shouting, ‘OH DO SHUT UP!’

The masterstroke was the finale of the show, when Alec, alone on stage, performed a macabre dance of death of his own devising. Dressed in top hat and tails, Alec then utters his last lines before the spotlight is cut:

‘This is my prescription: grab any chance you get; because if you take it or you leave it, you end up with regret. Put it this way: whatever right or wrong is, he whose lust lasts, lasts longest.’

CURTAIN