Actor: Alec Guinness

Alec Guinness played eight members of the same family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, including a woman, which remains the most virtuosic comic performance in British film.

He won Best Actor for The Bridge on the River Kwai, and the Ealing comedies, The Lavender Hill Mob and The Man in the White Suit, established him as the finest British comic actor of the period.

He was Obi-Wan Kenobi and negotiated a percentage of the gross, which made him extremely wealthy and which he found faintly humiliating. He wrote dismissively about the dialogue and about fans in his diaries.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on television gave him George Smiley and the definitive version of the character.