Alec Guinness: Why he was at his best as the king of creeps

The parrots know it. Guinness gives one of his most memorable performances as the "professor”, hiding out with his thuggish accomplices in Mrs Wilberforce’s rickety, bomb-damaged house while plotting a robbery in nearby King's Cross. “Can’t say I’m enjoying the film,” Guinness wrote in a letter that was quoted in Piers Paul Read’s authorised biography of the actor to a friend early during shooting of the first Star Wars. “He does everything by stealth,” critic Kenneth Tynan wrote about Guinness in Harper’s Bazaar in 1952. "He was an actor like a chameleon, who could change his colours,” his old friend Ronald Neame, producer on Leans’s Dickens movies and who directed Guinness is some of his best, and most underrated film roles, said of him.