Alec Guinness: The Actor Who Went to the Zoo to Build His Characters | Parkinson on BBC

By The Michael Parkinson Channel

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Alec Guinness has always gone to the zoo when he gets stuck. He found the Lavender Hill Mob character in the rodent house. He spent several visits getting to know an Unsociable Vulture in Canada, who turned out to be quite sociable once you got to know him. In Cairo, while on tour playing Hamlet, he discovered a shoebill who would only move when you weren't watching. In this conversation with Michael Parkinson, Guinness talks about building characters from the ground up, always starting with the walk, about following strangers through London streets as a student with sixpence a week and imitating their gait until he understood something about them. He also talks about a parrot who learned the opening line of a Hamlet soliloquy and died before finishing it. And then there is the walk across the parade ground in Bridge on the River Kwai. He only recognised it when he saw himself on screen. It was identical to footage he had shot of his son recovering from polio years earlier and entire

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