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Hollywood Studios Used to Own Their Actors and Actresses

Khalid Elhassan January 3, 2022 37 min

Clark Gable in 'Gone With the Wind'. Cultura Estadao

Alec Guinness, center of center row, third from right and left, with his landing craft and crew. Star Wars

18. Obi-Wan Kenobe in the British Royal Navy

In 1941, twenty-seven-year-old Alec Guinness enlisted in the Royal Navy Reserves. By 1942, he had been commissioned a naval officer. He was ordered to Boston in 1943 to take charge of his first command, a freshly built landing craft. He sailed his ship and new crew across the Atlantic to North Africa, where they began to train for the Allied invasion of Sicily. On July 9^th, 1943, Guinness took 200 men to land on Passaro, Sicily. However, there was a communications breakdown, and he was not told that the scheduled invasion had been delayed. So Guinness’ landing craft arrived on the beach on its lonesome and disembarked its troops an hour early.

Later, Guinness landed troops on the island of Elba, ferried agents and supplies to the Yugoslav partisan, and participated in the Normandy landings. During the war, he was granted a leave of absence to appear onstage in the play Flare Path, about the RAF’s Bomber Command. Guinness’ wartime experiences had a profound impact on him, and for a while after the war, he seriously thought that he should become a priest. Fortunately for millions of viewers worldwide, he decided to continue his career on stage and film and went back to acting after he was demobilized.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.