Kind Hearts and Coronets is a British black comedy film of 1949 starring Dennis Price, Joan Greenwood, Valerie Hobson, and Alec Guinness, who famously plays eight distinct characters. The plot is loosely based on the novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (1907) by Roy Horniman, with the screenplay written by Robert Hamer and John Dighton and the film directed by Hamer. The title refers to a line in Tennyson's poem Lady Clara Vere de Vere: "Kind hearts are more than coronets, and simple faith than Norman blood."