Times Colonist from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada • 27

mteColomt CHURCHC8 LIVINGC10 EXPO PARK AND RIDE McDonald Park Road, Sidney 1000 Supwviud Puking SptCM Shuttle Sarvie to Swtrtz Bty jl, Dwtct Strvic to Exoo 388-5248 For Information Saturday, May 31 1 986 I M4 1 i By Stephanie Mansfield II 4 li i 'fU'i V1 1 w. The Washington Post LM 1 ,11 SWJ lCS'i fefSlw i OR WEEKS, the cast and crew of the comedy film Lovesick awaited the arrival of Sir Alec Guinness. A master of many "Sir Alec is coming," they whispered excitedly. "What do we call him?" costars Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski worried. Tales of the esteemed actor began circulating.

He was a stickler for punctuality. He had it written in his contract that the dialogue would not be changed at the last minute; he was too old to learn it on the set. On the day of arrival, a storm dumped 15 centimetres of snow on Manhattan, and Guinness was shown to his trailer. Director Marshall Brickman hurried over to greet the actor and found the trailer listing at a 30-degree angle. Two burly Teamsters had jacked up one end and were rocking it back and forth, trying to get the generator started.

Inside, the lights were flickering on and off, and Guinness stood, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders Navaho style. "I'm terribly sorry," a flustered Brickman said, opening the trailer door. "No, no," Guinness calmly replied. "I happen to like being rolled back and forth in the dark." 'I don't have many says a reserved but warm Alec Guinness, two cf whose cartoons are shown, along with a recent portrait and a scene from Star Wars in which he played Obi-Wan Kanobi Hi I LUMBERS through the door, a On his social life: "I don't have many friends. I don't like parties.

When I go into a pub, if I see people I don't know or don't feel secure with, I go in one door, say, 'How lovely to see and I'm out the other door within three minutes." In this decadent decade, when Miami Vice passes for culture, it's comforting to know there still exists an Alec Guinness. At 72, he's been married to the same woman for 48 years and still thinks the telly box is brazen. never have been heard of again if it hadn't been for Star Wars." But being every young boy's Merlin is sometimes a burden. "I was in San Francisco about three or four years ago and a mother brought her 12-year-old boy very proudly to me for an autograph and said he had seen Star Wars a hundred and twelve times He was a nice-looking boy. He didn't look like an idiot.

His mother said, 'Have you got an advice for I said, 'Do you want any advice from He said, 'Oh I said, 'You mustn't be angry with me, but you must promise me something. You must never ever see Star Wars again." "Thereupon," says the actor, "he burst into tears." surprisingly burly man in a blue worsted three-piece suit, carrying a tired-looking hat, his eyes moist from the cold, his bulbous nose slightly pink at the tip. His lips are chapped, his hands are puffed and ruddy, and his fingers look like plump, raw sausages. A photographer suggests a pose. Guinness looks uncomfortable.

What should he do with his hands? Should the coat be over the shoulders? Suddenly, the great actor is seized with insecurity. "I've no part to play, you see." Then, he brightens. "The Reluctant Lunch Guest!" He has been invited to lunch to talk about his recently published memoir, Blessings in Disguise. The interview embraces a number of topics, including stage fright, William Holden's chest hair, the death of James Dean, country houses, tarot cards, Catholicism, surrogate motherhood and lamb cutlets. On his knighthood: "I suppose they think you'll carry out some public function and not misbehave yourself too terribly.

I'm not a person who misbehaves." On his voice: "It's extremely gravelly and low today. Maybe I've had a stroke and don't know it." On his career: "I get awfully irritated with taxi drivers. If you haven't been on the telly box or on the screen for a few weeks then the taxi drivers will say, 'Are you I shall NEVER retire." was awfully proud of a paragraph or two, and my wife would be doing the vegetables" here, he imitates a woman peeling a carrot, preoccupied with her task "and she'd say, As for his recall of facts and language, which is extraordinary: "Actors on the whole have a very good memory for dialogue particularly. I've always been interested in the focusing on someone. Trying to absorb something on them." And what a stellar cast of comrades to focus on: Noel Coward, Edith Evans, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Laurence Olivier, Ernest Hemingway, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene.

They travelled and drank and fought and said bitchy things about each other. But while everyone else in the book is drawn with a fine pen, Guinness himself is a blur. As critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in 1953, he is "a master of anonymity The whole presence of the man is guarded and evasive. Slippery sums him up; when you think you have him, eel-like he eludes your grasp." "It was never meant to be an autobiography, you know," Guinness says, turning prickly at the mention of his own reticence. "I told the publishers I'd try and GUINNESS C6 kS IF it weren't enough to be rich, "When I press a button here (in the U.S.), I see 3z a lady in a shiny purple leotard doing things I wouldn't think of doing." He speaks in paragraphs, gesturing with his hands, mimicking different voices and accents.

He is reserved, yet also warm and garrulous, with a touch of the fuddy-duddy, using words like gramophone, higgledy piggledy and willy-nilly. His eyebrows arch quizzically over bulging blue eyes, and his mammoth ears protrude like paddles from a bald head fringed with silver fuzz. David Letterman told him he had beautiful eyeballs. Says Marshall Brickman, "He's the fifth face on Mount Rushmore." His career has spanned more than half a century, including roles in 44 films, 66 stage productions, eight television specials. Guinness has embodied a flotilla of unforgettable characters: Herbert Pocket (Great Expectations), Fagin (OJiver Twist), the entire d'Ascoyne family (Kind Hearts and Coronets), Colonel Nicholson (The Bridge on the River Kwai), Gulley Jimson (The Horse's Mouth), Jock Sinclair (Tunes of Glory), George Smiley (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People), cardinals, popes, Hitler, Caesar, Romeo, Hamlet, Freud, Disraeli and, of course, intergalactic wizard Obi-Wan Kanobi.

Playing Obi-Wan not only gave the actor a certain financial security (in lieu of a salary, he took 2 per cent of the gross; Star Wars, the biggest box office moneymaker of all time, has made well over $200 million), it also introduced him to a new generation of filmgoers. "I might famous and internationally beloved, Guinness is now garnering praise as an elegant writer. The New York Times called Blessings in Disguise "charming and gushed People, "There won't be another actor's autobiography published for a long time that provides as much enjoyment as this book." "I can't emphasize enough that it was an amateur job," Guinness says, "therefore I tackled it with amateur enthusiasms. I would rush down to the kitchen, because I A comeback is in the script By Scott Armstrong Christian Science Monitor million revamping. It is considered the anchor for the comeback of Hollywood Boulevard.

Not far away, local developers have restored the six-storey Barker Brothers office building, once the home of the famous El Capitan Theatre. Farther up the street, the old Hollywood Congregational church, a local landmark, is being turned into a new national headquarters of the Screen Actors Guild. Until recently, the guild was planning to move from its outgrown offices on the edge of Hollywood to another town. All this coincides with a recently developed movement to preserve Hollywood's past and rediscover its roots. A few years ago, the "entertainment capital of the world" had no museums.

Today it has four celebrating different aspects of its colorful past. At the same time, a section of Hollywood Boulevard has been declared a national historic district, which will bring tax benefits and is expected to save landmarks from the wrecking ball. Some new projects are under way as well, including the building of a new library. Yet even the most ardent local boosters concede that neither nostalgia nor new construction will return Hollywood to its halcyon days. Instead, they envision the town recreating an "aura" of the past, while trying to build on a shifting economic base.

founder of Hollywood Heritage, a local preservation group. "We have shed our image as Hollyweird." The cradle of the movie Industry will require more than a nip and a tuck. Hollywood started to decline as early as the late 1950s, when television began to rise and motion pictures faded as a mass medium. Increasingly, film work began to be shot "on location" elsewhere. Some entertainment businesses sprang up in surrounding suburbs.

The industry went into such a deep slump that one chronicler wrote a piece in 1960 entitled Visit to a Ghost Town. At the same time, Hollywood was becoming a magnet for drifters, prostitutes, and runaway teenagers. Along Hollywood Boulevard, once the glittering main thoroughfare of a thriving film capital, tacky storefronts replaced deluxe department stores and "porno" signs went up over movie marquees. Even today many of the 4 million tourists who come to Hollywood each year the largest number to visit any California attraction other than Disneyland expect to see celebrities and chic shops and instead often find panhandlers and rundown buildings. All that, however, may be slowly changing.

While numerous attempts have been made to revitalize Hollywood in the past most launched with black-tie hoopla and little else this time around community activists believe matters will be different. A chief reason is that late last month Los Angeles city council approved a 922-million plan to revitalize Hollywood over a 30-year period. The Community Redevelopment Agency project will be the largest undertaken in Los Angeles outside of the downtown area. "This is more than just boosterism," says David Wilcox, a senior vice-president of Economics Research Associates, a Los Angeles-based urban consulting firm. "We will for the first time have substantial financing power to see that redevelopment will occur." The project will focus on reviving an 440-hectare area in the heart of Hollywood, including the main commercial district.

The redevelopment agency, which wields the power of eminent domain and backs projects through tax income derived from rises in property values, will seek to spur new construction as well as preserve historic buildings and rehabilitate existing housing. Analysts expect the government backing to entice more private developers to the area, a few of whom have already been "rediscovering" Hollywood. More than a dozen restoration projects are under way or have been recently completed. The famed Roosevelt Hotel, site of the first Academy Awards presentations, recently underwent a 35 LOS ANGELES Ah, Hollywood, the "Entertainment Capital of the World." It's the home of furs and Ferraris, glitter and glamor, the place where movie stars can be spotted in palm-fringed cafes and where limosines are as prevalent as Rocky sequels. The only trouble is it isn't, nor has it been for a long time.

These days, major studios are just as likely to be found in Burbank or Universal City. The limos prowl Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and the stars, if they can be found at all, exist mainly as fading bronze icons embedded in the sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard's Walk of Fame. Today, however, Tinseltown may be on the verge of a comeback. Private developers are beginning to move back in, a preservation drive is gathering momentum, and Los Angeles city council has targeted the town for one of the biggest community redevelopment projects in city history. "Tremendous things are happening," says Marian Gibbons, an indefatigable Hollywood booster who is.