Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Overnight, Finney became a star. The producer quickly put his name above the title outside the theatre. One Saturday, shortly after Finney’s double success, his parents travelled down to London from Salford to see the play. It had to be a matinee because his father – who we will remember was also called Albert – needed to be home by evening to wrap accounts in the betting shop. Finney recalled the visit:

  I met them at the station and we took a cab to the stage door, where they left their bits and pieces, then we went off for a spot of lunch. We went up the side of the Cambridge Theatre, crossed Seven Dials, and when we got across the road I said, ‘Look’. And there it was, ‘Albert Finney in Billy Liar’. I said, ‘Right, come on, let’s go and get some lunch’, and my mother and I strolled on, but my father just stood there, looking up. I went back and said, ‘Come on Dad, I haven’t got much time.’ But he just stayed there, gazing. ‘I never thought I’d ever see my name in lights,’ he said.1

  Keith Waterhouse also became famous and the play’s success triggered a long and fruitful collaboration with Willis Hall. Together they wrote a dozen West End plays, as well as many film scripts. But Finney, as the star of the show, naturally drew the applause. Waterhouse, writing in 2009, recalled:

  Soon there was a regular procession of visiting celebrities through Albert Finney’s dressing room. Princess Margaret came. So did Noël Coward who, as he records in his diaries, loathed the play and everything about it – exquisitely polite at the time, he later penned a famously bad-tempered attack on the whole ‘kitchen-sink’ theatre.2

  Yet not all ‘the old guard’ were dismissive. Gielgud wrote in his diaries, ‘I saw him [Finney] last week in a funny play called Billy Liar in which he is superb’.

  Meanwhile, it looked like Finney was getting locked into an even bigger and far more lucrative part. In October 1960, the press reported that he seemed a shoo-in for the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. According to producer Sam Spiegel, Finney had been given an exhaustive, and successful, screen test. ‘Contracts are now being discussed,’ said Spiegel at a press conference at Columbia Pictures, ‘with Cary Grant to play General Allenby; with Kirk Douglas to play the part of an American newsman; with Horst Buchholz as Sheik Ali and with Jack Hawkins as Colonel Newcombe’.3

  Director David Lean, assistant director Gerry O’Hara, editor Ann Coates and Spiegel had all attended Finney’s screen test in Borehamwood, shot over four days. Pictures show Finney with dyed brown hair and a full headdress. Coates, reportedly, was ecstatic. Lean’s on-the-spot verdict was not recorded. But his subsequent reaction, according to his biographer, Kevin Brownlow, was that Finney:

  was rather too young for it … but the tests weren’t half bad. When we saw them on-screen Sam Spiegel said ‘what do you feel about him? Will you take him on?’ I said – ‘Sam, to tell you the truth, I think I can just about drag him through it but I can’t say more than that’.

  Perhaps on that occasion or a short time afterwards, at a meeting in Shepperton, Spiegel offered Finney, then 24, a £10,000 fee for the film and a contract worth £125,000 over the next five years. Yet the encounter, from Finney’s point of view, was unsettling. He claimed that Spiegel had sat opposite him, blowing smoke in his face throughout their conversation. His official reason for declining, and probably the key obstacle, was being tied down to a five-year contract. ‘Plenty of people have been ruined by Hollywood. I want to be an actor, not a marketable property like a detergent.’

  When it became clear that Finney had officially declined the part, Lean visited him:

  I went to Albert and asked him why he was doing this. Why waste four days?

  He said, ‘I think this may make me into a star and I don’t want to become a star.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’m frightened of what it will do to me as a person.’

  The Finney tests are preserved at the National Film Archive. They reveal Finney well into character, with a solemn, serious delivery, certainly with the presence of O’Toole but perhaps without, yet, the older actor’s hypnotically charismatic quality.

  Finney’s real reason for declining the part was not the film itself as such but what would have ensued – commitment. He hated it. He later elaborated in an interview in 1960, his comments revealing great insight in someone so young:

  I do feel strongly about actors being committed too much. I think it’s very bad. I’m young. I’m only 24 and I feel that if I’m signed up for five years for big international pictures and if one is a success in the first then one becomes an investment. And then in your next picture, and it’s a bit like being a racehorse, the people that own you, they make sure you’re sellable and they can confine your acting in order to reproduce what they thought was successful in the first film.

  In 1996, outside London’s L’Escargot restaurant, the camera caught an exchange between Finney and his interviewer Melvyn Bragg in which Finney said, ‘There was something cold about Mr Lean’s approach to performance.’ Perhaps they simply didn’t hit it off.

  Finney became a big star anyway as soon as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was released, and especially on the release of Tom Jones. But Finney, to his credit, had resisted the big pay cheque. This was something that earned him respect in the business. Gielgud, for example, said he ‘greatly admired’ Finney for spurning the offer.

  Finney could decline a contract, that was his decision. But public recognition, in light of his superb performances, was another thing entirely. That he could not control, and his growing fame made life hard for those around him. Finney was still seeing Zoe Caldwell. On New Year’s Day 1961, however, during the run of Billy Liar, Lindsay Anderson went round to their flat to be told by Zoe that she and Finney were splitting up. Anderson’s diary tells us it was her decision: ‘It does seem a shame … now that the room is so nice, and they seem so domesticated and comfortable – but this time, it appears, it’s Zoe who has decided that she can’t be sufficiently herself in the shadow of Albert.’

  Finney was still reluctant to put down roots. ‘I don’t find the idea of running a flat, or organising or of collecting things. I don’t find this very attractive. I don’t want to feel that the place I live in is mine for life.’ Anderson visited Finney to discuss the role of Frank Machin in This Sporting Life. Finney eventually declined it, feeling that the part was too similar to Arthur Seaton. That provoked an irrevocable rupture with Anderson. The director became cool and, later, critical of Finney. But Finney was determined not to be typecast; he wanted to surprise his audience:

  Although I don’t yet know what my next film will be, I do know that I want the character I play to be someone very different from Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night. I don’t want to cash in on what Arthur’s done for me, whether audiences have hated him or loved him … I hate that kind of idolising of a performance because it seems to stand for certain things, so I want those people who’re going to idolise me for the wrong reasons to get a surprise … I suppose, in a way, I could go on playing Arthur Seatons for ten years – I’d go mad!

  Finney had now worked with Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, both key figures in the new wave. Now it was the turn of director Tony Richardson and playwright John Osborne, the explosive, permanently hard-boiled writer whose play Luther had won plaudits from theatre critics everywhere. (Finney would also fall out with Osborne but that was years away.)

  Luther charts the life of sixteenth-century German Protestant reformer Martin Luther, starting with his acceptance into the Augustinian order of monks. It then traces his opposition to the Church’s moral code through to the Protestant reformation and Luther’s eventual rejection of the Pope’s authority.

  Finney left the run of Billy Liar in June 1961, leaving the role of Billy to another rising star, Tom Courtenay.4 5Finney took Luther first to Paris – at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt – then, after some regional openings, on to the Royal Court, the Edinburgh Festival and the Phoenix Theatre in the West End.

  The first performance i
n Britain was at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham, on 26 June 1961. Some theatregoers had travelled all way up from London for the opening. Such was the anticipation surrounding Osborne’s new play that Time magazine had even reviewed the script. The final ovation was rapturous. Tony Richardson, who had feared that the audience might expect a variation of Finney’s Arthur Seaton, believed that Finney played Luther with a passion unrivalled before or since.

  Finney’s Luther evolved as he toured different venues, becoming more feted by the time he reached London. ‘Osborne brings the empirical man to life, and gives the actor the opportunity to intensify that life on the stage, an opportunity which Finney seizes masterfully,’ said one critic. At the Phoenix a reviewer said, ‘Finney’s performance takes on added authority in a larger theatre than the Royal Court; his delivery of the first sermon being outstanding in its hammering-in of the play’s main theme’.

  Ever the perfectionist, Finney, for a scene where Luther had to throw a convincing epileptic fit, consulted a neurologist about symptoms. Kenneth Tynan was full of praise:

  No finer Luther could be imagined than the clod, the lump, the infinitely vulnerable everyman presented by Albert Finney, who looks, in his moments of pallor and lip-gnawing doubt, like a reincarnation of the young Irving, fattened up for any cannibal feast.

  Eric Shorter in the Daily Telegraph wrote of Finney ‘clutching at both his stomach and his conscience’.

  Osborne, in the second volume of his autobiography, recorded his excitement at seeing his play at the Royal Court, ‘My head buzzed with the physical demonstration of my rehabilitated imagination’.6 Richardson described it as one of those theatrical moments when everything just came together beautifully:

  Luther was one of those extraordinary moments of hard-hat type theatre where the crew – John and I, Jocelyn as designer, Jock as Gregorian chant-master, Albert and George in the cast, and other old friends like Peter Bull and John Moffatt – were united in drilling and hammering the blocks of theatrical masonry together.7

  Finney once explained to Melvyn Bragg (who told Finney that Luther seemed like an extended monologue) his way of tackling long speeches, ‘With big speeches the question is: what is the driving force behind it? Don’t act the punctuation. When it’s performed, it’s aided by inflexion.’

  Michael Parkinson remembers Finney’s parents coming to see him, just as they had done when he starred in Billy Liar, when Luther opened in Manchester:

  On opening night he took a 10-minute standing ovation and we witnessed the burgeoning of a great new talent. The day after Albert Finney’s triumph I interviewed his mother. I asked her what emotions she felt as her son received the rapture of that first-night audience. She said, ‘I was very proud of our Albert. On the other hand, I kept looking at him on stage and thinking, “Oh, Albert, lad, I don’t like your haircut”.’8

  Finney’s run in Luther in London ended at the Phoenix on 31 March 1962 after 239 performances because of his commitment to start filming Tom Jones for Woodfall films.

  By now Finney was greatly in demand – not only for roles but for interviews. Everyone wanted to find out more about this young Salford lad. Finney had a colourful private life, yet there was a certain contradiction. You could call him a private extrovert. In interviews he was seldom evasive, yet he seldom granted them. That’s why Finney’s exchanges with John Freeman were so illuminating. He would reveal more of himself than he had ever done. Sadly, more than fifty years on, it’s the only episode unavailable for commercial viewing. Fortunately, the BBC rescreened the encounter in 1988. Let battle begin …

  6

  TOMFOOLERY

  He wanted something where he could rage and tear things in tatters, emote and be a big tragic actor.

  Tony Richardson on Albert Finney’s attitude to Tom Jones.

  John Freeman’s Face to Face is seen as a landmark series. The former Labour Cabinet minister was known for his tough interrogation. His interview with Gilbert Harding, in which the prickly What’s My Line? panellist was reduced to tears, was seen as a momentous television event. Freeman’s badgering of Tony Hancock, although unremarkable by today’s standards, also raised eyebrows.

  Finney was still only 25 when he submitted to the Freeman treatment. He had appeared in an acclaimed film and two hit plays and been hailed as ‘the next Olivier’. Finney’s contemporaries, those who became international stars during this period, had not made it so young. O’Toole became world-famous past 30, likewise Harris and Connery. Michael Caine was 32 before Alfie secured him name-above-the-title fame. Finney was still very young. And so there was a danger that Freeman would uncover a certain immaturity in Finney. How many of today’s ‘celebrities’ could explain their craft coolly and competently at such an age?

  Finney’s aversion to interviews grew with time. By the seventies or eighties, there was no way that he would ever agree to subject himself to the kind of interrogation meted out by Freeman. He later said he believed in preserving an air of mystery. He thought that this helped him to convince the audience of the character he was playing. He likes to do the work and go home. It was therefore surprising that he agreed to follow in the steps of Martin Luther King, John Huston and Edith Sitwell. Of all Freeman’s interviewees, only Adam Faith, just 20, had been younger.

  Freeman’s style was calm but forensic. Something about the format and presentation seemed to put the subject in the dock. Freeman’s face was never shown. All you saw was the back of his head. The camera homed in on the interviewee, capturing every grimace (in Hancock’s case) or tear (or perspiration) in Harding’s; it could detect evasiveness, anxiety, recalcitrance or discomfort. Neurotic personalities became withdrawn and guarded. That Finney agreed to it was, with hindsight, amazing. It was his most comprehensive television interview to date.

  It turns out, Freeman’s interview with Finney was seen as one of his weakest.1 Perhaps he liked Finney too much to probe deeply. By Freeman’s standards it was a tepid affair. No talk of death or psychological trauma. Yet much of the credit must go to Finney who managed to steer it away from the usual actor’s angst. Finney, clad in a roller-neck sweater and smoking a lot, spoke affectionately of his parents. He ‘admitted’ his background was far from uncomfortable and portrayed himself as a happy-go-lucky youth, enjoying school plays and sport. With this picture of wholesome extroversion and domestic security, Freeman couldn’t go for the jugular. Freeman flattered his subject by saying he’d heard that Finney’s mother was ‘a remarkable woman’. ‘Oh thank you very much,’ said Finney, who soon lapsed into the habit of calling his interviewer ‘John’.

  Freeman did draw some telling revelations. Finney blamed himself for the failure of his marriage (but) then added – ‘I don’t feel anything’s a mistake, John, if you come through the other side of it.’ He also said that, if he had a crisis in his life, he would handle it himself. Finney is relaxed throughout, although occasionally he wriggles in the chair, squirms his neck and purses his lips. The accent is purely Received Pronunciation – compare, for example, his interview with Clive Goodwin just four years later when he allows some Mancunian vowels to shine through – and the performance perhaps a little too studied.

  Yet Finney is remarkably grounded for someone so young. He is, he says, wary of being surrounded only by ‘servile waiters’ (most modern ‘celebrities’ would wonder – what’s wrong with that?) but Finney’s bullshit detector always kept him from going off the rails.

  The most illuminating moment comes when Freeman tackles him on the actor’s eternal dilemma. Any performer needs publicity. Yet, when they hit it big, they tend to shun it. Or, put another way, a young unknown actor is flattered when he’s recognised, but when he’s accosted in the street it becomes a nuisance. Finney does not relish the spotlight. Freeman possibly senses this private side of Finney. ‘Do you regard your job as done when the curtain comes down? Or do you subscribe to the old-fashioned view that the actor is a servant of the people?’ asks Freeman.

  ‘
I think that the actor only owes the audience good work in the theatre. I don’t feel an actor’s private life has anything to do with it whatsoever,’ replies Finney, articulating the word ‘private’ like a quintessential luvvie.

  ‘But do you think that’s completely consistent with the business you have to get into, whether you like it or not, of selling your personality – that on the one hand you enjoy the limelight but, on the other, you back out of it as fast as possible as soon as you’re off the stage? Is there a temperamental inconsistency there?’ follows up Freeman.

  ‘No, because I’m an actor,’ says Finney.

  Acting was Finney’s trade. He considered it done when the show ended. Finney always referred to acting as ‘working’. ‘I’m working on the stage,’ he’d say. (It was around this time, during a performance of Luther, that Finney halted a performance to berate a noisy theatregoer. ‘I’m up here working, so if you won’t shut up, go home. And if you won’t, I’m going home.’)2

  Face to Face was a success for Finney. It was not, however, an entirely unselfconscious performance. He came across as someone who was (perhaps understandably) concerned about image. He didn’t want the public, who so far only knew him from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Billy Liar, to view him as a kind of north country hooligan. If there was a false note in the interview it was his assertion that he was ‘a slow maturer’ – pull the other one! The Times saluted Finney’s self-possession in the duel with Freeman but commented, ‘his manner was constantly alternating between urbane pontification befitting his present circumstances and his inheritance of rasping bluntness’.