Alec Guinness, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, so despised working on Star Wars (1977) that he encouraged George Lucas, the film's director, to have his character (Obi-Wan Kenobi) killed off early. "And he agreed with me," Guinness later recalled. "What I didn't tell him was that I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."
During the production of The Empire Strikes Back, the wily actor found a way to avoid speaking some of his dialogue. "If he didn't want to deliver one of his philosophical speeches," Star Wars historian Dale Pollack once revealed, "he'd say to Lucas, 'Why doesn't the little green thing [Yoda] do this one?'"
[Guinness unceremoniously pitched all of his Star Wars-related fan mail. "I shrivel up every time someone mentions Star Wars to me," he once remarked. His verdict of the films? "Frightful rubbish."]
Sources
Dale Pollack, Skylarking; Uncle John`s Absolutely Absorbing Bathroom Reader, p. 146; Daily Telegraph, obit
