Smart Alec

Lincoln Centers tribute

Will the real Alec Guinness please stand up? The consummate actor, whom Kenneth Tynan once called "the master of anonymity," will appear as himself on April 27, when the Film Society of Lincoln Center honors him with a black-tie tribute at Avery Fisher Hall and a co-star-studded dinner at Tavern on the Green. Appearing knightly as a member of Britain's acting royalty, Sir Alec, seventy-three, will also be featured in clips from his illustrious half-century film career. He played an entire clan of upper-class eccentrics in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the bunkered ftihrer in Hitler: The Last Ten Days, a suburban smuggler in The Lavender Hill Mob, a dotty pandit in a dhoti in A Passage to India, a chain-rattling ghost in Scrooge, the effete but ineffectual King Charles 1 in Cromwell, the intergalactic sage, Obi-Wan Kenobi, in the Star Wars trilogy, the goateed Prime Minister Disraeli in The Mudlark, Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia, and the tortured senior ranking officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (for which he won an Oscar). Expected to join Guinness is his peer of stage and screen, Sir John Gielgud, plus such extra attractions as Peter O'Toole, Julie Christie, Anthony Quinn, Sophia Loren, Albert Finney, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Marie Hamill.

May the force be with him, always.

Angela Janklow