Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Both tackled Shakespeare on stage at the National to middling reviews. Hopkins’s Macbeth was a fraught production which saw the Welshman storming out of the Old Vic and off to Hollywood. His Lear in 1986, which I saw at the National, was a bit of a one-pitch screamer. Critics compared him to a bantamweight boxer. He reminded me more of one of those talented fighters, punch drunk and past his prime, still belting away but to no great effect. Not that he was too old to play Lear – he was only 48 – but Hopkins simply appeared exhausted, performing, as he was, King Lear in tandem with Antony and Cleopatra. Around this time he gave sensitive performances in 84 Charing Cross Road and The Bounty. This was just before he started ‘expecting an old friend for dinner’, eating human liver with Chianti and all that Hannibal madness.

  Hopkins, when they met at the National during Love for Love, was full of admiration for Finney:

  There was a pretty heavy cast in Love for Love – Olivier, Geraldine McEwan and so on – and you must remember that he hardly knew the part, so he was having to mug along. As he walked on, the audience went berserk and Finney just stood there, milking the applause. I’d never seen such bravura. Olivier went quite red and even turned a somersault on stage to see if he could steal a scene. They were having a drink afterwards and Olivier said to the assembled, through tight lips, ‘Albert’s doing so well!’ Finney replied quickly, ‘cos, I’m a bloody big star.’ He was so friendly and accessible; just the sort of four-square, full-frontal actor I admire.

  Finney’s statement that he was a ‘bloody big star’ should be taken as tongue-in-cheek, for, in almost every way, Finney and Hopkins are diametrically opposite. Finney wanted to be an actor, not a star. He said that, if stardom came, it was merely incidental. On balance, Finney always preferred the stage to screen. He only stopped theatre work when he sensed he was losing his stamina. Hopkins has always expressed dissatisfaction with the stage. Even when he was winning plaudits for fine stage work in Pravda or M. Butterfly, he never seemed happy. Filming suited him better. ‘You do it, it’s in the can and you move on to something else,’ he’d say.

  Many years later, when Hopkins had moved to California, he would reflect on the dreariness of doing a midweek matinee at the Old Vic – the rain lashing down, audiences coughing as they took off their duffel coats. In his mind the London theatre seemed mired in eternal winter. Hopkins also had another reason for disliking the stage. He ached to be a big star. And here a psychologist would doubtless find the roots of ambition in childhood. Hopkins, an extremely solitary only child, was a school dunce and poor at sports. He was, by his own account, hopeless at everything until he turned to acting. At home it was no better. He once said that his father was ‘a man of little patience who was always putting me down’.10

  Hopkins craved attention and adulation. He always said he wanted to be ‘loved’ by vast numbers of people. He was insecure, neurotic, always chomping at the bit, screaming at directors if he felt that they were treading on his toes. Predictably, perhaps, his drinking spiralled out of control. It all ended in a tequila-fuelled escapade in California. He woke up in a strange place with no recollection of how he got there. Next, he called Alcoholics Anonymous.

  Finney was very different. He had a warm background. He was popular at school and a talented sportsman. He did not become an actor to be loved but simply because he enjoyed it. And Finney never moved to Hollywood, preferring to base himself in Chelsea. My point is this – Hopkins was, in many ways, the more typical representative of that screwed-up species known as the late twentieth-century screen actor: angry, ambitious, tortured, neurotic, self-obsessed and insecure. More actors are like Hopkins than Finney. Hopkins envied Finney’s poise and aplomb and remembered asking Michael Gambon if he’d ever seen such confidence in a young actor. ‘Never,’ replied Gambon.

  The two actors have contrasting styles. Hopkins’s performances are (mostly) marked by quiet understatement – his gentle, lilting voice is perhaps more lyrical than Finney’s – with little brushstrokes filling out the character. Finney has always been more liberal with his colours. I am not concluding who was better, merely making a comparison.

  Significantly, however, Hopkins always believed in Finney’s greatness. Later, he said, ‘I think the first British actor who really worked well in cinema was Albert Finney. He was a back-street Marlon Brando. He brought a great wittiness and power to the screen. The best actor we’ve had.’11 More than thirty years later, the two great actors met again and Hopkins recalled that he (Hopkins) became quite emotional.

  Finney’s final turn at the National came in A Flea in Her Ear, Feydeau’s turn-of-the-century comedy about two almost identical-looking Frenchmen, one an upper-class lawyer, the other a drunken porter in a brothel. Finney did a riotous double act in a revival staged by French actor and film director Jacques Charon.12 Finney had to perform many quick changes backstage.

  John Mortimer had translated it and he, Finney and Olivier pored over every line to ensure that the laughs punctuated the play at appropriate moments. It all worked splendidly. The National’s first French farce was such a hit that when it opened at the Old Vic in February 1966 queues formed round the block. Soon the only tickets left were for matinees. Everyone, it seemed, tried to get tickets to A Flea in Her Ear, including another of Finney’s famous friends, Vidal Sassoon, who claimed to have seen Finney in Luther three times. He went to see it with the actress Adrienne Corri:

  The play was a riot. The curtain came down and Adrienne said, ‘let’s go backstage and congratulate Albie’.

  As Adrienne and I walked into the dressing room, Albert kissed her, turned to me and said, ‘Hello, Vid, meet Larry.’ I looked up. It was Laurence Olivier. The Laurence Olivier. He looked me over and said, ‘Did he call you Vid? What’s your real name?’

  ‘Vidal Sassoon.’

  A sigh came from Olivier. ‘Ohhh, so you’re that barber.’13

  Fergus Cashin pronounced A Flea in Her Ear ‘the funniest thing that has ever happened in the theatre’. Michael Billington believed that ‘Finney’s masterstroke – in a real sign of acting intelligence – was never to exaggerate the difference between the two men so that the confusion of one for the other became totally plausible.’ The Times merely thought that Finney’s turn ‘was one good comic performance among others’.

  In June 1966, Robert Lang took over the dual roles in A Flea in Her Ear. By now Finney’s new girlfriend was Edina Ronay, the voluptuous daughter of food critic Egon Ronay, who had appeared as a young girl in The Pure Hell of St Trinians. In the mid-sixties, she was Michael Caine’s companion. But Caine ditched her after Alfie, released in 1966, made him into a huge international star. She went to live with her parents but a week later she bumped into Finney at the opening of an art exhibition. ‘Albie was just the right kind of man to be with – warm, friendly, a wonderful companion. I stayed with him a year,’ Edina recalled.

  The relationship, like all the others, did not last long. The strolling player was off again. Finney was about to make his first film in three years. He had to spend the summer in the Mediterranean with Audrey Hepburn. Somebody had to do it. It was to be a glorious summer of love.

  8

  AUDREY

  She was rather like a blooming flower and then when her husband arrived, the flower closed up and shrivelled.

  Albert Finney on Audrey Hepburn.

  Such was the tearful description of Albert Finney, not normally someone given to so sentimentalise, for his co-star in Two for the Road. More books have been written about Audrey Hepburn since her tragically premature death in 1993 than almost any other female star. There is something untouchable about her. No other actress of her generation had her combination of grace, elegance, dignity, warmth and sensibility.

  Take the competition. Elizabeth Taylor, legendary superstar, was a bit of prima donna – ‘I don’t pretend to be an ordinary housewife’ – flirtatious, spoiled, impulsive, brash and hot-tempered. Bardot was the sex kitten, voluptuous, sensual and passio
nate, obsessed with her causes and occasionally driven to destructiveness through them. Deneuve: haughty, icy and slightly aloof. Loren: proud, strong-willed and tigerish. All in their own way were tough, brassy women.

  Hepburn, by contrast, was elegant, gentle-voiced and doe-eyed. Above all, Hepburn was a lady – nobody like her. ‘Class,’ Billy Wilder once marvelled. ‘Someone who went to school, can spell, and possibly play the piano … You’re really in the presence of somebody when you see that girl.’

  You couldn’t lose if you paired Hepburn with a handsome on-screen partner: Cary Grant in Charade, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady or George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And at the time, 1966, where better to examine a strained twelve-year marriage? The South of France, naturally – the sophisticates’ playground.

  Two for the Road is not, I think, fundamentally a problem picture. It may be presented as such, but it’s with a wink to the audience. We know the couple’s marital problems are not meant to be taken too seriously. And with such an attractive couple, bickering by the bougainvillea, the bitterness is not real. It’s Courvoisier or Grand Marnier suffering, offering few accurate reflections on relationships, let alone married life. But it proved perfect fare for cinema-going couples in 1967, a year of innocence just before the terrible year of 1968.

  Just as another film from this period, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, was described as the problem picture that isn’t (because the black would-be groom is so eminently attractive), so Two for the Road is not marriage guidance stuff. Joanna is so adorable and Mark would be stupid to ditch her. Like many films by Stanley Donen, it’s ultra-glossy, smartly packaged, glitzy and, ultimately, insubstantial. But that doesn’t make it any the less enjoyable.

  Screenwriter Frederic Raphael and his wife had always taken summer holidays in the South of France since they were childhood sweethearts. It was Raphael who first suggested the story of a couple’s twelve-year marriage, viewed through various time bands, but played out under the summer holiday sun. Donen liked the idea. After all, what was there not to like?

  Paul Newman was the original choice to play Mark Wallace, but he declined. Tony Curtis was then considered and rued losing it, ‘I was pretty sure that Audrey liked me but later I heard that when my name came up that Audrey’s husband, Mel Ferrer, who made those decisions for her, didn’t want me in the picture.’1

  The part was then offered to Finney whose screen persona couldn’t be further from Hepburn’s. Whereas Hepburn was shy, demure, sweet-natured and vulnerable, Finney conveyed a strong, surly masculinity. Perhaps the contrast was necessary to avoid the picture becoming over-schmaltzy.

  Finney was only 30 in Two for the Road, but he looks more mature; Audrey was 37 but their being born only a few days apart, Audrey on 4 May, Finney on 9 May, seemed a good omen. Finney was aware that Hepburn was his most famous co-star to date and this was a big international picture. Yet he was determined not to be dazzled; he cultivated an almost blasé, jokey attitude from the start. Finney phoned Donen to warn him that he would be staging a little show for their first meeting in a restaurant.

  The Finney who walked in, arm-in-arm with a male companion, was the mincing homosexual from Black Comedy. He acted effeminately for a full half an hour, fussing and faffing around over the dining table, his jacket draped over his shoulders, rearranging the cutlery and serviettes. He prefaced every comment with ‘we’ while holding on to his male friend, ‘We really liked your last picture …’

  Hepburn didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t reconcile the actor before her with the robust factory worker of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, or the skirt-chasing rascal of Tom Jones. Not that she had seen either film. Hollywood stars can be surprisingly cut off from other actors’ work. But she knew of Finney’s reputation. She kept quiet, however, and went along with it. Eventually, Finney could sustain the act no more and broke up. Hepburn then collapsed into helpless laughter when she realised the charade. From then on, he and Audrey bonded. She was won over by her co-star’s flirtatiousness and, above all, his down-to-earth attitude.

  The production took over the Hôtel du Golf at Beauvallon, near St-Tropez. While other actors retreated to their camper vans, Finney and Hepburn were happily swimming and rolling about in the sand. Donen was delighted; it would make it easier for them to do love scenes. And happy stars make for a great set. ‘The Audrey I saw during the making of this film I didn’t even know. She was so free, so happy. I never saw her like that. So young … I guess it was Albie,’ said Donen. Actor Robert Wolders agreed. ‘Audrey cared for Albie a great deal,’ he said. ‘He represented a whole new freedom and closeness for her. It was the beginning of a new period in her life.’

  Indeed. So much so that writer Irwin Shaw, who visited the set, said:

  They behaved like a brother and sister in their teens. When Mel dropped in to watch, Audrey and Albert got rather formal and a little awkward as if they now had to behave like grown-ups … she and Albie had this wonderful thing together, like a pair of kids with a perfect understanding and a shorthand of jokes and references that closed out everything else.

  Finney later told of his feelings towards Audrey:

  Audrey and I met in a seductive ambience in the Mediterranean. We got on immediately. After the first day’s rehearsals I could tell that the relationship would work out wonderfully. Either the chemistry is there or it isn’t. … that happened with Audrey. During a scene with her my mind knew I was acting but my heart didn’t, and my body certainly didn’t. Performing with Audrey was quite disturbing, actually … with a woman as sexy as Audrey you sometimes get to the edge where make-believe and reality are blurred – all that staring into each other’s eyes. I won’t discuss it more because of the degree of intimacy involved. The time spent with Audrey is one of the closest I’ve had.

  A love scene, filmed in a closed set in a hotel, was quite nerve-racking for Hepburn who had a complex about her thinness. According to Alexander Walker, ‘all this had to be performed by Audrey naked except for a pair of briefs and a sheet partially covering her own and Finney’s bare torsos. Chris Challis behind the camera talked her through it, assuring her that it was sexy and proper.’

  Finney helped her to feel confident, complimenting her on her beauty and being especially tender with her in a scene that unnerved Hepburn, in which he had to throw her into a pool. They apparently romped together on the deserted beach nearby before the dunking. Finney and Audrey were indeed ‘close’, as the saying goes. Did something happen? Photographer Terry O’Neill was on set with them. ‘I believe they were having an affair,’ he said, ‘although I never saw any evidence. I never saw any hanky-panky’. But he ventured that he had ‘never seen her so happy on a film set’, adding that Finney clearly adored her:

  Everyone who met her fell in love with her. You couldn’t help it. The girl you saw on-screen? She was that person. She was the most down-to-earth movie star I’ve ever met. I couldn’t take a bad photograph of her.2

  Another person associated with the film, commented, ‘If he and Audrey did make love, they were discreet about it, but no one doubted the warmth between them.’

  Finney never elaborated. But one or two (glaring) clues exist along the way. Paul Colby remembers talking to Finney at his nightclub in New York’s Greenwich Village:

  I told him that one of my favourite movies was Two for the Road with him and Audrey Hepburn. In the film, while trying to work out marital problems, they drive all over Europe in a white Mercedes 230sl. I said, ‘Albert, I was so impressed with your performance and the car that I went out and bought one. I got my car from Two for the Road.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Finney with a wry smile, ‘you may have gotten the car but did you get Audrey Hepburn?’3

  But by far the most reliable source is Robert Sallin who worked with Finney a couple of years later on The Picasso Summer. He revealed that Finney told him, almost teary-eyed, of his affair with Audrey. Sallin said that Finney related he was spellbound by her ‘lovel
iness’. He also recalls Finney telling him – and, yes, I know I’m repeating it but I like it so much that I shall – that ‘she was rather like a blooming flower and then when her husband arrived, the flower closed up and shrivelled.’

  Audrey was more effusive about Finney than any of her co-stars since William Holden:

  I love Albie. I really do. He’s so terribly, terribly funny. He makes me laugh like no one else can. And you can talk to him, really talk. He’s serious too, completely so about acting, and that’s wonderful. Albie’s just plain wonderful, that’s all there is to it.

  According to Hepburn’s biographer Donald Spoto, Mel Ferrer warned Audrey that if she didn’t end her relationship with Finney, he would sue for divorce. Fearing that she would lose custody of their son, Sean, in a court hearing, Audrey stopped seeing Finney.

  What appeared on film, ungallant though it may be to say it to its legions of admirers, was marginally less wonderful, although always an enjoyable nostalgic ‘ride’ on the telly on a wet winter Sunday afternoon in Britain. Mark is rather surly and Finney, just as he does later in Charlie Bubbles, seems determined not to give us any real screen charm in the Cary Grant (or even Tony Curtis) mould. Finney looks quite truculent, giving us little clue to the off-screen fun. It’s difficult to figure out why. He seems to be reminding the audience of his Britishness at every turn. Perhaps the actor in him thought that to be seen to be having a good time, to capitulate too wholeheartedly to this frolicking in the sun, was beneath him.

  Maybe Finney deliberately decided to project a slight cynicism and hardness against Hepburn’s softness. But it makes the film a bit sour. What, one wonders, did Joanna see in this oaf? Just occasionally, Finney lightens up. Yet he can’t help looking a bit bored. The movie offers us idyllic locations but nothing particularly profound about the human condition. Once you accept it on that level, it’s a nice escapist entertainment. The dialogue provided pithy comments on marriage: