Man of 1,000 faces, none his own

Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography
By Piers Paul Read
Simon & Schuster, 632 pp., illustrated, $35

Born out of wedlock on April 2, 1914, he was given the la-di-da name of Alec Guinness de Cuffe by his impossible mother. Later as Alec Guinness he was ''the man of a thousand faces" and ''the man with no face." He was a great Hamlet and not-so-great Romeo, he was Our Man in Havana, a member of the Lavender Hill Mob, eight members of the d'Ascoyne family in ''Kind Hearts and Coronets," Colonel Nicholson in ''The Bridge on the River Kwai," and Major Jock Sinclair in ''Tunes of Glory." He was Adolf Hitler, Father Brown, George Smiley, and something like 120 other characters. And though he appeared on stage and screen for over 60 years, today he is best known as Obi-Wan Kenobi -- a part he loathed.

Guinness's own memoir, ''Blessings in Disguise," is the work of a deeply literate man, an inspired entertainer and wit, an elegant, buoyant stylist, and, as it happens, a master of concealment. His aliveness to the odiousness of vainglory, his self-deprecatory humor and gratitude to others, install a persona that, like his other great roles, is a powerfully controlled performance. It, and his two published volumes of diaries, deflect alternative interpretations, whether mischievous or admiring -- not least because their grace makes the work of dissection seem clunky. That, alas, is the case with the present authorized biography, 632 pages of doggedness toiling along solemnly, duty in every step -- though a duty that is curiously split.

Piers Paul Read, a friend of Guinness's, was asked by the actor's widow to write this book, which is, in part, an assiduous record of the signal events and experiences in Guinness's life and career. There is the drunken, mendacious, cadging mother -- the great scourge of his life; the putative, though not positive, father paying for his support and education; the cruel stepfather; acting lessons with a stage legend who believed him to be one of the real Guinnesses; his debt to John Gielgud as a patron; courtship and marriage; wartime in the Royal Navy; and a recounting of his subsequent stage, movie, and TV career. All this is embedded in a stifling quantity of routine business on the lines of guest lists and restaurant expenses. Here we feel the authorized biographer's weary duty to comprehensiveness and his reluctance or inability to apply a shaping hand.

But the call of another duty is also felt in these pages, that of the unmasker of sexual predilection and seeker of clandestine sexual activity. Guinness's previous biographer, Garry O'Connor, went to town on the subject, dedicating himself to proving that the actor was actively homosexual. But, for all the overreaching syllogism and innuendo he employed, he was unable to produce what might be considered the goods. Now Read has felt obliged to excavate the same territory, with much the same outcome and a similar portion of bootless conjecture, insinuation, and extravagant surmise. Read notes Guinness's many gay friends, his tolerance of homosexuality in others, his happy time in the Navy, his not learning how to drive (so he could spend time with handsome young chauffeurs) and so on -- and on and on. Lacking real evidence, Read confers upon Guinness the experiences and sensibilities of others, even of fictional characters. In one stunningly presumptuous and clumsy act of conflation he turns a description of Thomas Mann's Gustav von Aschenbach of ''Death in Venice" into a brow-furrowing analysis of Guinness himself, the tortured rationale for which is that the actor turned down the part, though, according to Read, it was his ''greatest missed opportunity."

Though Guinness was contentedly married to one wife and the father of a son, it does, indeed, seem clear that he was also attracted to attractive men. Given that, there is at least the possibility that he acted upon it, though there is not one shred of legitimate evidence. But, really, who cares? Read's flailing away at the issue becomes positively ludicrous and accentuates his failure to take charge of the book.

Where Read is uniquely good and perceptive is in his treatment of Guinness's cruel tongue, his bullying -- there is no other word for it -- of his wife and son, his castigation of himself for his sins and inadequacies, his battle against existential bleakness, and his Catholicism. The last is of immense importance in the actor's life. Read (correctly, I'm sure) notes that Guinness's embrace of Catholicism in its English version had a snobbish element. (''After a few months in the arch-diocese of Archbishop Spellman," he wrote from New York, ''I have a lot of sympathy with anti-Catholicism.") But his faith was primarily his hedge against despair. To quote what, according to Read, was his favorite passage from G. K. Chesterton, ''The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time." Surely it is that contrariness that lay at the heart of Guinness's genius.

Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge.