Читать книгу The Secret History of Entertainment - David Hepworth, David Hepworth - Страница 11

Throughout his career the venerable actor Sir Alec Guinness remained obsessed with the fear of losing his new-found prosperity and tumbling back to his very humble origins. (He was born Alec Cuff, the product of a brief liaison between a barmaid and an unidentified toff. ‘My mother’s a whore,’ Guinness once said. ‘She slept with the entire crew on Lord Moyne’s yacht at the Cowes Regatta.’) Even when firmly established as one of the greatest cinema actors of his generation and constantly in demand for work, guests at his Sussex home were horrified at how parsimonious Guinness could be in everyday matters like food and central heating.

In 1975 Guinness had a meeting with an unknown director called George Lucas who wanted him to play Obi-Wan Kenobi in a film he was planning called Star Wars. The initial offer made to him was a fee of $150,000 plus two per cent of the producer’s profit. This was the kind of generosity they needed to show to get a respectable name like Guinness to put on the marquee. The favourable critical reaction to the film’s release cheered him considerably, though he had no inkling of what a monster he had helped spawn: ‘This could bring me in $100,000 if it does Jaws business as predicted.’

Unprompted and encouraged by the early box-office returns, George Lucas then asked him to take another quarter per cent, and Guinness’s diaries record his satisfaction at this ‘temporary fortune’. ‘The bank telephoned to say they’d received £308,552,’ he wrote on 1 February 1978. More money followed, but the publicity attending the movie’s success attracted the Inland Revenue, who subsequently made life hard for Guinness. For the rest of his life he was indignant about claims made in the press about his Star Wars earnings. Even though he found the films irritating and the experience of making them dull, he signed up to do cameos in the next two movies and cheques kept appearing throughout the early 1980s. In November 1983 he greeted one for $250,000 with rare delight: ‘That will pay for our daughter’s schooling, our Italian holiday and our prefilming holiday in India.’ His co-star Harrison Ford, who was one of the few members of the Star Wars cast with whom he struck up a rapport, used to refer to him as ‘The Mother Superior’ behind his back.