George Smiley

George Smiley
Alec Guinness as Smiley on the DVD cover for Smiley's People
First appearance	Call for the Dead
Last appearance	The Secret Pilgrim
Created by	John le Carré
Portrayed by	Rupert Davies (1965) James Mason (1966) Alec Guinness (1979, 1982) Denholm Elliott (1991) Gary Oldman (2011)
Information
Gender	Male
Occupation	Intelligence officer
Affiliation	The Circus
Spouse(s)	Lady Ann Sercomb
Nationality	British

George Smiley is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is a career intelligence officer with "The Circus", the British overseas intelligence agency. He is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War and The Secret Pilgrim.

Although Smiley has no concrete biography beyond that offered briefly at the beginning of Call for the Dead, le Carré does leave clues in his novels.

Smiley was probably born around 1906 (or 1915 on the revised chronology) to middle class parents in the South of England, and attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction (in the 1982 BBC television adaptation of Smiley's People, he refers to himself as a fellow of Lincoln College), studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature. In July 1928, while considering post-graduate study in that field, he was recruited into the Circus by his tutor Jebedee.

He underwent training and probation in Central Europe and South America, and spent the period from 1935 until approximately 1938 in Germany recruiting networks under cover as a lecturer. In 1939, with the commencement of World War II, he saw active service not only in Germany, but also in Switzerland and Sweden. Smiley's wartime superiors described him as having "the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin".