Alec Guinness gets to die eight times, playing a line of successors to a dukedom, in the Ealing black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. Louis Mazzini (Dennis Price) is the bastard son of the Duke D'Ascoyne's daughter and a penniless opera singer who died at his birth. Louis vows to kill all ten people who stand between him and the duke's title. Aside from a few cases of natural causes and suicides, Louis works through the list, eliminating rivals (all played by Guinness). Along the way he romances Sibella (Joan Greenwood), a childhood friend who ends up marrying a dullard, and Edith (Valerie Hobson), the beautiful widow of one of his victims with whom he plans to share his title. But just when Louis is ready to assume the D'Ascoyne mantle, the police arrive at his stately home to arrest him for a murder -- not the people he actually killed, but Sibella's husband, who has committed suicide.