Alec Guiness, who died on August 5 at age 86, was perhaps the most perfect example of a character actor in our century. In his first speaking role on stage, in a melodrama called “Queer Cargo,” the 20-year-old novice played a Chinese coolie in the first act, a French pirate in Act 2, and a British sailor in Act 3. It set the tone of a shape-shifting sixty-year career that would bring him a Knighthood, two Oscars, a Tony, and an unexpected fortune as the recipient of 2.25% of the grosses of “Star Wars.” While critics and audiences gasped at the virtuosity that enabled him to play a swaggering, bully-boy Scottish soldier (“Tunes of Glory”) as convincingly as he played all eight members (male and female) of an aristocratic family (“Kind Hearts and Coronets”), the modest Guinness explained his versatility with characteristic diffidence. “One hates,” he said, “to let oneself get into a rut.”

Following closely on the heels of the death of his first mentor, John Gielgud, a great chapter in acting history has closed. Along with Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, these stars set the gold standard of the British theatrical tradition. If Guinness was the most elusive (and youngest) of this quartet, his work in movies may have left the deepest imprint. Where his older colleagues project out, imprinting their distinct personalities upon the viewer, the more reticent, stand-offish Guinness forces us to come to him, his minimalist aesthetic perfectly suited to the camera’s intimate eye. He could play big, to be sure–check out his exuberant rebel-artist Gulley Jimson in “The Horse’s Mouth,” or his hilariously sinister big-toothed assassin in the Ealing comedy classic “The Ladykillers.” But perhaps the quintessential Guinness roles were the seemingly ordinary, anonymous men with a glint of obsession in their eyes, like the heroes of the early Ealing Studio comedies–the secret bigamist in “The Captain’s Paradise,” the idealistic inventor in “The Man in the White Suit,” the meek bank clerk who masterminds a heist in “The Lavender Hill Mob”–or the brilliant, quietly suffering Smiley in TV’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy.” Guinness removed the rhetorical flourish from British acting: he made it life size.

Guinness’s film career reached a new level in 1957 with his Oscar winning role as the deluded disciplinarian Colonel Nicholson in “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” But with a couple of exceptions, most of the movies he made after 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia” through the mid-70s are undistinguished. His best work was done on the stage: as T.E. Lawrence in Terence Rattigan’s “Ross,” as Dylan Thomas in “Dylan,” reprising his famous role in T.S. Eliot’s “The Cocktail Party.”

He never expected that playing the part of Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars” would make him a screen icon to a whole new generation. Though Guinness had great praise for George Lucas, the subsequent “Star Wars” frenzy made him despair. “I shrivel each time it is mentioned,” he wrote in his 1999 memoir “A Positively Last Appearance. “Twenty years ago, when it was first shown, it had a freshness, also a sense of moral good and fun. But it has led to a worldwide taste for a fantasy world of secondhand, childish banalities.”

In his first memoir, “Blessings in Disguise,” Sir Alec revealed that he was an illegitimate child. “I was born to confusion and totally immersed in it for several years, owning three different names until the age of fourteen and living in about thirty different hotels, lodgings and flats, each of which was hailed as ‘home’ until such time as my mother and I flitted, leaving behind, like a paper-chase, a wake of unpaid bills.” Guinness would have found it pointless to speculate on a connection between his nomadic childhood and his ever-changing, quicksilver career. A private, enigmatic man, no one knew what made him tick. “He was a dark horse,” said Olivier, “and a deep one.” But the very fact that you couldn’t pin down his identity guaranteed his longevity. He never left us sated, for who can tire of an actor who is never the same? Alec Guinness gave us everything, and we could never get enough of him.