Alec Guinness, in his published diary "My Name Escapes Me" writes in his March 1, 1996 entry: "A query from my agent this morning wanting to know if I would be interested in playing Firs in a film of "The Cherry Orchard".... So now I await a script and must decide what I feel about it, speculating whether at eighty-two I'd be capable of acting an eighty-year-old. Actors past fifty are unlikely to have the energy to play King Lear in his dotage satisfactorily."