Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  I did a matinee under the influence and vowed I’d never do it again. I felt so appalled and scared. I was kind of going through a difficult time and I thought ‘to hell with it’. I had a sword-fight sequence and I didn’t know what I was doing and it got a little dangerous. After that I thought – ‘I’m not in control and I may hurt somebody’. After that scene I got in the shower and did my best to sober up.7

  While appearing in Othello, Finney began seeing Australian actress Zoe Caldwell, three years his senior. Caldwell, in her memoir, tells of staying up all night with Finney to help him with his lines when he had to replace Olivier in Coriolanus. Curiously, she then admits to an affair but does not name Finney. ‘I did, however, break one of my rules during that season. I had an explosive affair with an actor in the company, causing a lot of havoc and pain for which I apologise,’ she wrote.

  Finney walked out on his wife and young son that summer. For a while he stayed at Robert Hardy’s house. It was an acrimonious time (Julia Goodman remembers that Wenham was still complaining about Finney’s behaviour when they co-starred in an episode of Inspector Morse in 1992).

  The attention showered on Stratford’s starrier performers only made Finney feel worse. Vanessa Redgrave, much to her subsequent embarrassment, was hailed as a great actress from birth. Harry Andrews had a kind of rock-like presence on stage. (When I saw Finney thirty years later in JJ Farr there was something about his granite portrayal that reminded me of Andrews.) Even performers like Robert Hardy and Ian Holm had more experience than Finney.

  Hardy shared a dressing room with Finney. The older actor said that Finney, for all his problems, reminded him of Burton, ‘He made one think of the bullfight critic in Ibáñez’s Blood and Sand who talks excitedly about the man having a quantity of salt. There was a great deal of salt in the air with Finney.’

  Yet Finney found it difficult to make his acting come alive. Even in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the reviews for the supporting players were not great. ‘Hard as they and their partners, Albert Finney and Edward de Souza, work to be funny, we are left with the impression that a more graceful dance of misunderstanding would suit the scenes a great deal better,’ said The Times.

  When he dined with Hepton that summer, Finney confided that he was even wondering if he was in the right job. Hepton said:

  He’d been cushioned for two years and allowed to develop week by week. At Stratford he got quite the opposite feeling. Albert said that when he first went to Stratford he sensed that directors didn’t seem to give a damn for what he did. It was somehow a great slap in the face for him.

  Tony Richardson also recalled Finney’s frustration, ‘He was just reaching the height of his powers, and he didn’t have the right parts. Finney was like a young stallion chomping at the bit, wanting that big, enormous role, because he could really act his head off.’

  Everything seemed to be going wrong for Finney at Stratford. Eileen Atkins, in the audience for King Lear, recalls that Finney had botched his choice of dress:

  Everybody else, because they couldn’t afford it, was in felt costumes. But because Albert Finney was Albert Finney, they gave him real leather. When I sat in the audience, his costume looked lousy and all the felt ones looked great. The felt ones looked like leather, and his looked like plastic.8

  In the autumn, Finney started to play First Roman Citizen in Coriolanus, which starred the 52-year-old Olivier, then at the height of his powers. As well as triumphing in Hamlet, Henry V and Richard III and as Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Olivier had recently starred as Archie Rice in The Entertainer, John Osborne’s new play at the Royal Court.

  Coriolanus, the brave soldier who has to woo the masses despite his disdain for them, was a great part. And Olivier was determined to exploit every possibility. Sir Laurence had played Coriolanus before, in 1938, in a production directed by Lewis Casson in which he had performed a spectacular death fall. Twenty-one years later, Olivier was attempting the same athleticism. His son, Tarquin, recalled the derring-do in a biography of his father:

  Coriolanus stood back stage on a platform 12 feet high, bleeding from many stab wounds and determined in one final dying lunge to drive his sword through Aufidius. To reach him, he had to leap upwards and far out across to stand a chance. So he seemed to literally fly up towards the dress circle; we thought he was going to land in our laps, to be grabbed by strong men grabbing his ankles, gripping him and letting him swing down. But that on its own would have ended with his rump towards us. So he had to spin round in mid-air, with the retainers changing hands on his ankles, so that when dangling upside down it would be his face we saw, arms swinging in utter defeat. It was difficult, dangerous, and a crowning reminder of the physical risks of his career.9

  Milton Shulman remarked that ‘knighthood and middle-age have by no means reduced Olivier’s acrobatic daring.’

  Finney, as First Citizen, equipped himself well, according to critic Michael Wells:

  Finney, a big, brawny, barrel chested man, played the First Citizen with natural authority combined with a mutinously hang-dog look, a man with a chip on his shoulder who attracted sympathy all the same. Like other actors of his generation he retained a local accent even when playing classical parts.

  Finney was still in a trough. Yet watching and acting alongside Olivier was worth all the years at RADA or Birmingham Rep. Elijah Moshinsky, later to direct Finney in several productions, recalled Finney’s subsequent comments:

  He always said that he learnt everything about acting from understudying Olivier as Coriolanus. He said that no matter where you went with your voice, you could never be higher or louder than Olivier and you could never be as soft and sweet. He felt in his presence that the range of things – the spectrum of acting – was before you.10

  Finney noted Olivier’s extraordinary vocal range, one moment soothing, the next rousing. ‘What was interesting is how a great actor can take the peaks and valleys of a character as written and push them even further apart. He makes the climaxes higher and he makes the depths lower than you can feel is possible in the text,’ said Finney.

  Finney was also getting a lesson in screen acting from Olivier. Finney had a small part as Archie Rice’s soldier son in The Entertainer, which Olivier was filming by day in Morecambe. Finney appears briefly at the beginning. His part, as a happy-go-lucky beer-drinking lad about to be dispatched to Suez, never to return, took just a couple of days to shoot. It was a heroic feat on Olivier’s part to do Coriolanus and Archie Rice simultaneously.

  Perhaps this time Olivier had overstretched himself. Some sources say it was his acrobatics during Coriolanus that twisted a cartilage in his knee. Others believe that the whole thing was a ruse to give Finney his big chance. But Zoe Caldwell’s version seems definitive. She remembered she was watching Laughton in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Finney, white-faced, stricken with a cold, approached her. ‘‘‘Larry’s done his knee in, tap-dancing as Archie, he’s off tomorrow’s matinee and I have to play. Will you help me learn the lines?” Although it may seem strange that an understudy wouldn’t know the lines, we must remember that Olivier was notorious for never missing a performance.’

  According to Caldwell, Finney went without sleep as he got to grips with the part:

  I first put Albert’s head over a steaming bowl of eucalyptus. And covered him with a towel to get rid of his cold and clear his brain. We stayed up all night and morning, learning lines until he had to go to the theatre for costume fittings and rehearsal.

  Such was Olivier’s fame that The Times, on 9 October, reported on his injury and replacement by Finney. He was not the only one indisposed; Edith Evans was back after a car accident two weeks before.

  Especially in those days, when the British theatre was dominated by the great triumvirate of Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson, a trip to see Olivier was a huge event. So when people flocked to the theatre, the auditorium buzzing with expectancy, to hear of the great actor’s absence was a colossal disappointment. For F
inney it was a classic make or break episode. Actress Sue Johnston, then just 16, was in the audience that afternoon. (Forty years later she appeared with Finney in My Uncle Silas.) She remembered:

  I went with the school to a matinee at Stratford to see Olivier in Coriolanus. But he’d broken his leg so they announced, to groans from the audience, that the understudy would be playing the role. Well, it was Albert and after two scenes we were mesmerised. I told Albert this and he remembered the occasion, saying ‘I had to listen to those groans on the tannoy before going on.’11

  Actress Pamela Coleman, also in the audience, tells a similar story about learning that Olivier was indisposed: ‘We all groaned. Then out came Albert Finney and we all fell in love with him.’

  Finney went on, knowing he had nothing to lose. A more diffident performer might have flunked it. But he gave himself a little pep talk beforehand:

  When I went on for Sir Laurence all the difficulties I was going through just left me because, first of all, they expect you to come on with flannels and a book. And I came on and I had the costume on and so they immediately think I’m talented because I’ve got into the clothes and they can’t see the book and I got through it without drying. When you go on as an understudy the card you’ve got in your hand is that they think you might not get through it at all. And if you can get through it with any degree of nous at all, they think you’re very good and I felt – I’m getting there … I don’t think it was a very good Coriolanus and also when you hear Sir Laurence’s tones ringing in your ears for the number of performances it’s very difficult not to be similar because you’re working on his blueprint.

  Observers didn’t share Finney’s self-deprecation. Olivier congratulated him effusively.12 Poet and playwright Louis MacNeice described it as ‘a good production with an understudy standing in very well for Olivier.’13 Zoe Caldwell thought that ‘the boyish ring in Albert Finney’s make-up, now troubled by adult growing pains, made him a successful Coriolanus.’

  Finney suddenly felt liberated. ‘I was in a very bad state as regards acting and it was marvellous to play Coriolanus. Somehow just having to go on freed me but that was because the rest of the season was rather black.’

  Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s most moving plays. In particular, the scene in which his mother (played by Edith Evans) confronts her battle-hardened son and pleads with him not to burn Rome is heart-rending. Finney later said he had no need to feign tears; they just ran down freely. Olivier’s ‘baby of an understudy’, as the great man called him, had truly broken through. Finney’s period at Stratford had been difficult, but he felt he had learnt a lot:

  A classical training is very important. I was at Stratford for nine months doing Shakespeare. I was very uncomfortable. I found that for the first time I didn’t really enjoy acting. But the whole way one responds to a Shakespearean text, to the costumes and the size and conception, is quite different from the way one responds to a modern or a Restoration play.

  Now all he needed was a great movie role to make him a household name. Angry Young Man beckoned.

  4

  ARTHUR

  That’s someone we all know.

  Melvyn Bragg on Arthur Seaton.

  Joe Lampton, Frank Machin, Billy Fisher and, especially, Arthur Seaton – these were the new breed of anti-heroes who revolutionised British cinema and sent Noël Coward stocking up on Yardley’s shaving soap in a bunker below the Royal Court. The early sixties were to mark a decisive break from the strangulated English, Brylcreemed hair and ‘steady number one’ barking tones of Kenneth More or Jack Hawkins. Films were being made about working-class people, examining their feelings and lives without condescension or poking fun.

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning holds up better than all the other films of this period. It’s worth surveying the competition – especially movies about young men. Tony Richardson’s film of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was somehow too obviously a film of a play. Richard Burton’s Jimmy Porter was too old and perhaps too grand, a diminished hero rather than an embattled ordinary man. And, as so often with Osborne, one always suspected that he was more destroyer than reformer.

  Room at the Top was also among the first of the new wave but now looks hopelessly dated. The open derision of the working class, the ridiculous way that Lampton is forced to stick up for himself, now makes it risible. ‘Let me tell you I am working class and proud of it,’ says Lampton at one point. Laurence Harvey’s turn as a northerner was simply unconvincing.

  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was better, but too obviously a ‘them and us’ story designed to tap sympathy for delinquents. Courtenay’s Colin Smith didn’t have much wherewithal to fight the system, other than ‘throwing’ the cross-country race at the finale.

  Better still was This Sporting Life, a strong star vehicle for Richard Harris and well directed by Lindsay Anderson. Frank Machin, however, is a coarse beast and a man of primitive instincts. He’s just, in his landlady’s words, ‘a great ape’. Billy Liar, as played by Tom Courtenay in the film (and on stage, following Finney’s stint) was a fantasist and no threat to anyone.

  Finney’s Arthur Seaton is different because he’s bright. He’s not articulate in the sense that polite society would ever accept him, yet he’s sharp-witted and outspoken. He can hold his own in an argument and, in his own rebellious way, he’s a tuned-in guy. Perhaps some of Finney’s innate intelligence permeates the character. Seaton has more natural nous than Porter, Machin or Lampton. He knows when to keep quiet or when to vent his spleen. If he were in the army, he’d be good at dodging bullets. His canny appraisal of those around him, though cruel and crude, is usually right.

  Those who claim that Seaton is a class warrior should think again. He’s trapped by routine and drudgery. He knows that menial work and a drab existence are his lot. The system won’t change, he was born into it and will die in it. He’ll remain a factory worker until retirement, perhaps rising to foreman if he can keep his trap shut. He can play around a bit but he’ll end up marrying a girl from down the street. They’ll end up in one of those back-to-back terraced houses, just like everyone else.

  It’s not his class background that he resents so much as predictability. And it would be, if Seaton were working on a construction site or in a supermarket, post office or hotel. Seaton, as played by Finney, is a natural rebel. He’s accused of being a communist – ‘a red’, and the sympathies of writer Alan Sillitoe lay with the Left at this time. But Seaton, perhaps, rather like Finney, is not a political animal. He just wants a good time, ‘All the rest is propaganda’. In other words, cut out the ideological bullshit and show me some fun.

  Of course, there was an element of socialism in the new wave. The message is bold and clear. Look at the wasted opportunities of young men trapped in menial work who could have done better. But we shouldn’t forget that it cuts both ways. Years later, people spoke of these jobs as giving people security. The downside of that was that you knew your place in ‘the order of things’.

  Peter O’Toole was originally set to play Seaton. But Finney was a better choice than the slightly patrician-looking O’Toole. Finney could belong on a factory floor. His background meant that he knew Arthur very well. He might have even had a menial future, just like Seaton, if fate hadn’t intervened.

  Finney recalled how he came to be cast:

  Karel Reisz came to see me while I was in Stratford. I was in tights at the time. He told me about the project and gave me the book and the script. And I did a bit of filming on The Entertainer and that was a kind of living screen test for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning because it was the same company, Woodfall Films,1 making the two.

  Finney quickly learnt how to use a lathe:

  I really had to concentrate on the machinery otherwise it could have blown up. I went into the Raleigh bicycle factory [in Nottingham’s Radford area] and I was taught how to use one. I was shaping the spindle that goes through the hub cap. So perhaps there are people
riding around on bikes that I built who came off them because I didn’t do it very well. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to concentrate on that reality; it takes the weight off the acting.2

  Karel Reisz directed as realistically as possible. The camera moves around, not dictating events but rather capturing them. Filmed in the autumn of 1959, with some interiors shot at Twickenham Studios, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning has the air of a docudrama, decades before those all-pervasive fly-on-the-wall programmes.

  Finney later coined the term ‘naturalistic minimalism’ to describe his acting style. ‘You hope the camera will come in and catch what you’re doing.’ That did not mean that it would have been better to film in a real factory and let the characters speak for themselves. You needed actors to bring the complex emotions alive. Yet in the sense that the camera captures ordinary people’s thoughts, without it all seeming staged, it’s before its time.

  Finney looks handsome but brittle. The other actors also look gritty and older than their age. Finney’s voice is deep, harsh and grinding. Insults fly from his lips ten-a-minute – his fat neighbour is an ‘old bag’, her husband is ‘rat face’. A drunk who throws a brick at a funeral parlour is ‘a spineless bastard’ for not running off. Arthur describes his parents as ‘dead from the neck up’. All the women, whether it’s Brenda (Rachel Roberts), the wife of the co-worker with whom he dallies, or the girl he ends up with, Doreen (Shirley Anne Field), are ‘ducks’.

  Arthur resists all attempts to define him. ‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not.’ He hates the thought that his whole life is planned out for him. ‘You see people settle down and before you know what, they’ve hit the bucket.’ ‘You’ve got to be as cunning as them bastards,’ he says, referring to his bosses. He doesn’t even soften when Brenda tells him she’s pregnant. ‘I’ll go and see Aunt Ada. She’s had fourteen kids of her own and that’s not counting the ones she got rid of,’ he tells her.