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Success seldom comes any ­bigger than Star Wars but ­the screen legend who made a ­fortune from the film HATED it, writes Keir Mudie in the Sunday People.

Last week the cast of Star Wars: Episode VII was announced.

Today we can reveal that acting great Sir Alec Guinness, who played hero Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi, loathed the films.

They earned him more than £56million in royalties, a best supporting actor Oscar nomination and global stardom.

Yet he wrote off the original 1977 film as fairytale “rubbish” with “lamentable dialogue” and was bemused by a dwarf in the cast.

The actor, star of classics such as Lawrence of Arabia, Oliver Twist and Bridge on the River Kwai, slagged off the epic saga until his death from liver cancer in 2000, aged 86.

His true feelings about the blockbuster adventures emerge in Alec Guinness: The Authorised Biography by Piers Paul Read.

A 1975 letter in the book revealed his reluctance to take part in Star Wars: A New Hope. He wrote to a friend he was about to start filming some fairytale “rubbish”.

Sir Alec was popular on set but struggled to take the project seriously and was motivated by the chance to earn enough so he could work on a play called Yahoo.

In a 1976 letter he said: “Can’t say I’m enjoying the film… rubbish dialogue reaches me every other day on wadges of pink paper – and none of it makes my character clear or even bearable.

“I just think, thankfully, of the lovely bread, which will help me keep going until next April even if Yahoo collapses in a week.”

And he spoke of the strange experiences he was having on faraway sets he was not used to.

Sir Alec wrote to an American friend: “I must off to studio and work with a dwarf (very sweet – and he has to wash in a bidet) and your fellow countrymen Mark Hamill and Tennyson (that can’t be right) Ford.

“Ellison (? – No!) – well, a rangy, languid young man who is probably intelligent and amusing. But Oh, God, God, they make me feel ninety – and treat me as if I was 106. – Oh, Harrison Ford – ever heard of him?”

And there were other problems. Sir Alec described the dialogue as “mumbo jumbo.” He said he “shrivelled up” every time Star Wars was mentioned to him.

Despite his frustrations, he gave it some faint praise in his diary the first time he watched it.

He wrote: “It’s a pretty staggering film as spectacle and technically brilliant. Exciting, very noisy and warm-hearted. The battle scenes at the end go on for five minutes too long, I feel, and some of the dialogue is excruciating and much of it is lost in noise, but it remains a vivid experience.”

Obi-Wan appears to be killed by Darth Vader but turns up in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

Sir Alec’s actor son Matthew, 73, still benefits from the royalties deal his dad struck. In his 1997 memoir A Positively Final Appearance, Sir Alec told of meeting a young Star Wars fan who said he had watched it 100 times.

To the disgust of the boy’s mum, the grand actor said: “Well, do you think you could promise never to see Star Wars again?”

The lad burst into tears.