Alec Guinness personal letters and diaries acquired by British Library

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/feb/07/alec-guinness-letters-british-library

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On July 12 1989, one of the greatest actors of his generation was reflecting in his diary on the death of another. If Sir Alec Guinness's thoughtswords of praise for Sir Laurence Olivier were extracted, as theatre promoters routinely do with critics' write-ups, it could read as a rave review.

The full text, revealed for the first time in the actor's personal archive just acquired by the British Library, tells a different story. In his impeccably neat tiny script, Guinness wrote of Olivier: "I greatly admired his extraordinary courage … as a comedian he was superb … technically brilliant … he was a great actor."

But he also wrote: "Like so many people whose ambition drive them to great eminence, he had a cruel and destructive streak. Side by side with his generosity, he could be unpleasant, possibly even vindictive. Consciously or not, he made attempts to destroy John G [Gielgud], [Michael] Redgrave, [Paul] Scofield and if he had been given the chance, me."

The theatre knights meet again in the library. The vaults also hold the archives of Olivier, Gielgud, and an actor of whom Guinness writes with uncomplicated affection, Ralph Richardson.

Olivier and Guinness were near contemporaries, born respectively in 1907 and 1914, and met constantly on stage and elsewhere over more than half a century.

Guinness said: "There was a touch of pretension about him, and his public speeches were fulsome and awful. I first met him in 1935, in Romeo and Juliet. We all thought he looked and behaved like the leader of a dance band. But his Romeo was as arresting and beautiful as his Mercutio was vulgar and gimmicky."

That production was famous for the fact that Olivier and Gielgud opened as Romeo and Mercutio respectively, and then swapped roles.

Guinness conceded: "Many of us were … too admiring of John to value Larry's qualities fairly." However, he then added a snide line recalling: "The sniggers that went round when he said, during a rehearsal I think, of the procession at George V's jubilee … 'I had a wonderful view of the whole corsage'."

Guinness was unforgettable in a string of classic Ealing comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters, and for his long collaboration with the director David Lean, including with the film The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, for which he won an Oscar.

He was also acclaimed as John le Carre's spy George Smiley, in the television adaptation of the novels. However to fans of a certain age his true stardom came in the 1970s, as Obi-Wan Kenobi in the original Star Wars trilogy.

Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library, said he was particularly thrilled with the acquisition, as somebody "mildly obsessed" with the Ealing comedies.

The Guinness archive, acquired from his family for £320,000, including funding from the Friends of the British Library, includes 100 volumes of diaries, and almost 1,000 letters to family and friends often illustrated with little cartoons.

One letter from 1938, when Guinness was missing his wife, the actor Merula Salaman, and wondered what she was doing, has a sketch of her praying, riding a horse, and dancing naked on a table top.

His diaries often have a slightly Pooterish tone, with careful notes about the weather, his blood pressure and his finances. In 1983 he buys sweaters as presents for his son and grandson, "Italian and handsome but fiendish prices, £170 and £125". Both diaries and letters reveal him as deeply superstitious.

Also in 1983, soon after learning of the death of Richardson, he was putting on "a very heavy grey overcoat" and felt somebody invisible help him on with it. "I felt a shiver of fright, made the sign of the cross and then laughed … I laughed I believe because I thought it was the sort of thing Ralph might have done."

In 1944, while on active service in the Navy volunteer reserve, he wrote to his wife with words heavily underlined, saying he had heard something extraordinary in the night. "An audible sinister voice said in my ear 'TOMORROW'. It didn't say anything else, but its meaning was too clear. It implied 'by tomorrow you'll be dead'."

However, he concluded cheerfully, the voice was "so wicked I felt something like hope". His ship was then wrecked in a storm. But he survived uninjured.

Another letter from 1938 records his provincial performance before a London run. The theatre director Tyrone Guthrie had cast him as Hamlet – partly because Guinness had never known his father and had got on badly with his mother.

Guinness tells his wife it is "V important!" that she buys and posts to him a book on Freud (for 8 shillings and sixpence which he promises to repay). He mentions Buxton in the missive, the place where he was performing. "I hate this place as much as I adore you. The people are too tedious – their brain cavities are the size of walnuts."

Although Guinness published extracts from his own diaries in two volumes, entitled My Name Escapes Me, and A Positively Final Appearance, his communications have never been published in full and the letters remain uncatalogued.

The British Library intends to put some of the collection on display soon, and to open the archive to scholars next year.