Name: alec guinness,the authorised biography
Price: 747.88 ZAR
Availability: InStock
Author: Read, Piers Paul
ISBN: 9781451636444

portada alec guinness,the authorised biography

Type

Physical Book

Author

Piers Paul Read

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Year

2011

Language

English

Pages

632

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9 x 15.2 x 4.2 cm

Weight

0.79 kg.

ISBN13

9781451636444

Synopsis "alec guinness,the authorised biography"

Sir Alec Guinness was one of the greatest actors of the twentieth century. With a talent recognised by discerning critics from his very first appearance on the stage, he gained a world-wide reputation playing roles on the screen such as Fagin in Oliver Twist and Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit. His performance as Colonel Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai won him an Oscar and, in his later years, he captivated a new generation of admirers as George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. Guinness was a man who vigorously guarded his privacy and, despite publishing an autobiography and two volumes of his diaries, he remained an enigma to the general public and a mystery even to his family and closest friends. After his death in August 2000, his widow, Merula, asked the author Piers Paul Read, who had been a friend of her husband, to write his authorised biography. Given full co-operation by the Guinness family and free access to Sir Alec's papers, including his private and unpublished diaries, Read has written an enjoyable, yet penetrating and perceptive account of an intriguing and complex man. Read shows how Guinness's quirks of character and genius had roots in the circumstances of his early life. His marriage to Merula Salaman, a young actress of great promise, is chronicled by the many hundred letters Guinness wrote to her when serving in the Navy during World War II, while his post-war diaries reveal that readjustment to civilian life was traumatic, with doubts about his talent and a confusion about his sexual nature leading to bouts of severe depression. Guinness's conversion to Catholicism in 1956 partly exorcised his demons, but he never wholly escaped the contradictions of his life -- his domestic ties vying with wayward passions, a yearning for holiness with an intolerance of constraint, a raw sensitivity to the feelings of others with an irascible and domineering nature. Yet from the diaries and letters to his friends quoted extensively in this biography, there emerges a man of great compassion, generosity, wit and charm -- intellectually curious, a talented writer, a great gossip, bon viveur and munificent host.

Piers Paul Read

(Author)

View Author's Page

(Buckinghamshire, 1941). Author of fiction, reports, history, biography, and journalism. At the beginning of his career, Read wrote a series of scripts for film and television. He is best known for Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, published in 1974, but has won a series of literary awards for his novels.

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