Wednesday, April 2, 2014

"Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love" (ESV)

On what would have been the hundredth anniversary of his birth, a remembrance of Alec Guinness:
...[H]is film career, spanning 60 years, formally [began] in 1946 when he played Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations.

He was off to the races, making film after film—Oliver Twist (1948), in which he played Fagin; Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), playing multiple D’Ascoyne Family roles (The Duke, The Banker, The Parson, The General, The Admiral); The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), in which he played Holland; The Man in the White Suit (1951), Jim Wormold; and The Ladykillers, Professor Marcus (1955), among other British films and roles.

Hollywood finally snagged him for the role of Prince Albert in The Swan (1955). This laid the groundwork for his selection as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), directed by David Lean, for which he won the Best Actor Oscar. It was one of many Oscar nominations he would receive. ....

.... There was, of course, more to the man than his acting—a taste of which is conveyed in his poignant faith journey, the dramatic turning point occurring during the filming of Father Brown (1954) when a small French child mistook Guinness for a priest.

That little encounter inspired him to return to his Anglican faith. Soon thereafter, his son Matthew, then just 11, tragically contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down. A grief-stricken Guinness began stopping by a little Catholic Church every day, praying to God that if He would let his son recover, he would not stand in the way should he wish to convert to Catholicism, which was his son’s desire. ....

Every morning, Guinness recited a verse from Psalm 143, “Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning.”

He died on August 5, 2000, this time winning a greater much greater prize—Heaven. [more]
Guinness is one of my favorite actors and I own DVDs of almost all of the films referred to above [and more] — the exception is The Swan. It was very pleasant to learn that he was a Christian.

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