Blessings in Disguise

"Alec Guinness wrote three lots of diaries, and then there is the autobiography, which is diary in disguise. I don’t draw much of a distinction between them. Often in the diaries he will remember something from 20 years ago – it’s not quite faking, but it’s a way of including all your life. I rather like Alec Guinness as a diarist. He is sheltered and quiet, quite slippery in a way. You can’t quite put a finger on him. Yes I was wondering what I meant as I was saying it. Because he’s so quiet and observant, you’re never quite sure where he stands in relation to other people. Sometimes you’re also not quite sure if he’s telling the truth. That’s one of the problems of diaries. Just because it’s written down by the person, it doesn’t necessarily mean it happened in that way. But he is very cultured and intelligent, and this makes very good reading. Guinness was also very keen on spiritualism, and thought he had psychic flashes that foretold the future. He claimed to have predicted James Dean’s death in a car crash, to Dean himself, within a week of it occurring. One wonders if that is not all invented. If he did invent it, I suspect he believed his own invention. It sounds implausible, I know. He said it on a number of chat shows, in his diaries and in the autobiography. Of course that doesn’t make it true, but the only other person able to vouch for it would be James Dean, who’s not in a position to do so. But sometimes it seems such an extraordinary story that I think it probably is true. It might have just been an accurate psychological observation. You see a young man who already has a reputation for being wild. He might appear hyper or drugged up. On meeting, he shows you this car he has never driven before – still in its wrapping, as far as I can remember – which he says is the fastest in the world. Maybe it doesn’t take a genius to say: Don’t get into that car. So if you were a psychologist you could explain in that way what Guinness saw as a psychic flash. I never really met him, but I was once in a lift with him and he seemed perfectly nice. He was famously quiet and unobserved. People didn’t recognise him in the street, because he would just go quietly along. He comes across as a very attractive character, somebody you would get along with."