Alec Guinness - A Secret Man (BBC2): Sir Alec Guinness told a friend he accepted the role of Jedi knight Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars because it gave him the chance to wear a pleated skirt and cloak.

He was one of the few cast members who championed George Lucas's space movie. While others ridiculed the film, Guinness was a great on-set supporter, according to producer Gary Kurtz.

The actor was less generous to fans. There's at least one recorded instance of him reducing a young Star Wars fan to tears with his comments.

Any letters relating to the film went straight into the bin, with him complaining the public thought he was a Jedi knight not a knight of British Empire.

Well, not all the letters - he actually replied to the one I sent him, requesting an interview when Star Wars was re-issued in the 1990s. I received a postcard explaining that he never talked about the film, but thanking me for my interest.

This "no comment" was hardly unexpected as Guinness gave few interviews, although this thoroughly-researched and revealing Arena documentary included clips from the TV interviews he did grant.

As the title suggested, he was a secretive man. "I don't want to be docketed and put in a pigeonhole," he once said. Even the diaries he published didn't reveal the real Guinness. For 40 years he kept another set of diaries, recording everything he did day-by-day.

The programme got as close as anyone to unmasking the actor. Director Alan Strachan summed him up as a "fundamentally unhappy man" who "didn't invite intimacy". John Howard Davies, who played Oliver Twist opposite Guinness's Fagin in the 1948 film, found him "singularly unapproachable".

It didn't need a psychiatrist to tell you the root of his troubles arose from the fact that his mother would never tell him who his father was. The arrival of a dreaded and hated stepfather when he was five added to his problems.

Guinness himself married an actress, Merula, but seemingly forced her to give up her career. She devoted herself to painting and drawing, illustrating children's books. He was stern and strict with his own son Matthew, who was thanked for his help on the documentary in the credits but didn't appear to tell us about his father.

Guinness converted to Catholicism, went to confession every few weeks and took breaks in a Trappist monastery.

The documentary couldn't avoid discussing the possibility he was bi-sexual. There was, we were told, "a lot of uninformed talk about his sexuality".

If he confided in anyone that person was probably Michael Redgrave, himself bisexual. His son, Corin Redgrave, told how the two men spent evenings together in what appeared to be confessional sessions.

Guinness's diaries don't hold the answer. Biographer Piers Paul Read said it was impossible to tell if he had casual homosexual encounters or just flirted with such liaisons without participating.

Actress Eileen Atkins said it was well-known that in a theatre company he'd form friendships with straight actors, perhaps to stop him being tempted.

It is a secret he took with him to the grave, when he died in 2000.

Published: ??/??/2003