Sir Alec Guinness hated Star Wars so much he talked George Lucas into killing the Obi-Wan Kenobi character, he revealed in a recent interview.
Guinness, one of the grand figures of British film with more than 60 cinematic appearances to his credit, told the new chatter magazine Talk that he convinced series creator Lucas that Kenobi would be a more effective mystical mentor if he appeared to Luke as a ghost. Lucas liked the idea, rewriting the first film to include the Jedi Knight's death in combat with former protégé Darth Vader.
However, Guinness said he had less purely artistic goals at heart.
"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," he told Talk interviewer Fintan O'Toole.
As a result, Kenobi's role was dramatically pared down in 'The Empire Strikes Back' and 'The Return of the Jedi', fortuitously minimizing Guinness' involvement with the blockbuster series.
The actor was likewise dubious about the films' fans, whose devotion he found "obsessive" at times. He said he is personally "mystified" by the Star Wars phenomenon.
Guinness' dissatisfaction with being the embodiment of Jedi virtues is reminiscent of sentiments expressed more recently by Ewan McGregor, who played the role of Kenobi as a younger man in 'The Phantom Menace'.
In an April interview with the BBC, McGregor called the process of making the Star Wars film "the epitome of tedium" and "a frowning exercise," but balanced his apparent boredom by noting that "there's nothing cooler than being a Jedi knight."
Despite early rumors to the contrary, McGregor is confirmed as being involved in the next two Star Wars films, and Lucas has said he will play a much larger part in the next installment, due to hit theaters in 2001.
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