"Fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps."

That's what Alec Guinness thought of the "Star Wars" script -- quoted in this NYT review of a new biography of the actor.

Another tidbit: he turned down "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and said "Do you think my varicose veins would show through the fishnet stockings?"

Much more seriously:

As the letters and diaries make abundantly clear, Guinness, although he enjoyed the friendship of glamorous women, was attracted throughout his life to young men, whom he often hired as dressers or assistants.

Mr. Guinness fought his impulses, first by marrying the very appealing Merula Salaman, a promising actress who abandoned her career under pressure from her husband, and later by embracing the Roman Catholic Church. He lived a secretive, closeted life, tormented by illicit desires and guilt at what he called, in one diary entry, "the sordidness of much of my past." It was not only onstage that profound emotions stirred under a cool, unruffled surface. The theater, he once wrote, saved him from "a very bad suicidal tendency."

So sad!