One of the rare occasions in which audiences can feel the earth moving under their feet … it marks the theatrical arrival of a young dramatist capable of the hardest task in his trade: treating an intensely painful taboo subject with absolute truthfulness and yet without alienating the public. Peter Nichols and a dazzling cast have significantly shifted our boundaries of taste.
Bri, as originally played by Joe Melia in Glasgow, and then in London, was a disturbed, beaten down, slightly seedy figure. The Daily Telegraph, in its obituary of the actor, who died in 2012, noted, ‘with its poignant mix of irony and music hall asides, the play always teetered on the brink of bad taste, but Melia’s timing, warmth and theatrical wit as he danced down to the footlights just about pulled it off.’
Finney, by contrast, had a tendency to bring the thunder with him on stage, perhaps not the kind of actor best suited to conveying habitual self-doubt, but he certainly boosted its appeal by bringing it to Broadway. From the beginning, however, Finney insisted he would only play Bri for eleven weeks, opening at New York’s Brooke Atkinson Theatre on 1 February. He then handed over to Donal Donnelly. Clive Barnes, reviewing the play for the New York Times, said it was ‘not a comfortable evening but very much worthwhile’. Finney received a Tony nomination.
A subsequent movie was made of the play, filmed in 1970 but not released until 1972, starring Alan Bates in the title role.8 Perhaps Bates’s air of befuddled eccentricity was a better fit. So was Eddie Izzard who played Bri in a more recent revival. Critic Harold Clurman made a similar point at the time, ‘If you should be obliged to see the play after Albert Finney has left it, don’t let that worry you. Finney is a splendid actor but I would guess that his part could be rendered just as effective, if not more so, by a less formidable player.’9
Finney was perhaps also simply too handsome to play Bri. And in photos around this time he looks at his best, a fine figure of a man with an impressive physique and a face that somehow appealed to men and women. Both Two for the Road and Charlie Bubbles, although Finney might not like it, had traded on his sex appeal. Finney and Audrey were the sixties couple. And Charlie, world-weary and disillusioned though he might have been, was still attractive to women.
The young Amy Irving remembered having a huge crush on Finney after seeing him on stage in Joe Egg:
My favourite teenage fantasy is when Albert Finney came to my house and had me on the floor, on the piano, everywhere. I used to have a thing for Albert Finney. After he was in Joe Egg, I followed him from the dressing room, stage door to the restaurant, just kind of crying, wanting him. And he wouldn’t sign my programme.10
Perhaps Finney was too distracted at the time. Jean Marsh had accompanied him to New York in early 1968 to work on Joe Egg. But by the time Finney had started work on his next film, The Picasso Summer, the oddest movie he was ever involved in, they had broken up. Marsh recalls their time together fondly: ‘He was adorable, very sweet.’
The Picasso Summer, which has Finney and Yvette Mimieux crossing Europe to meet the famous painter, could be seen as kind of (botched) sequel to Two for the Road. In both movies Finney plays an architect. The film, a real oddity, had a complicated genesis. Word reached Hollywood that Pablo Picasso wanted to contribute towards the animation sequences on the film. This was the bait that got everyone on board. Ray Bradbury was then commissioned to write a script about a young couple, disillusioned with life in San Francisco, who leave home and meet Picasso in the South of France. That is, after some luscious scenery, breathtaking locations and encounters with bulls.
Serge Bourguignon, a French director who had enjoyed some success with a film called Sundays and Cybele, started shooting in California and France. Bourguignon, however, behaved highly eccentrically. Not only did he disapprove of the script, but he apparently preferred to direct on horseback. When the producers saw the final cut, they were appalled. And, indeed, it seems that everyone agreed. It was an unmitigated disaster.
Meanwhile, Finney, licking his wounds after his split from Jean Marsh, had retreated to Corfu once filming with Bourguignon had ended. He was staying with a fisherman’s family when one of the movie’s producers, Roy Silver, flew to the island to convince him to return to the Riviera for more scenes. They decided to re-shoot the movie with Robert Sallin, a talented maker of commercials. Sallin was something of a child prodigy; he’d been producing programmes for NBC Radio from the age of 15. He had previously directed the opening ten-plus minute film sequence of the first Bill Cosby-NBC Special.
Finney, enticed by the prospect of an extra $25,000 a week, agreed to return for three weeks’ further filming in the South of France. Sallin, who had ambitions to become a full-time film director, was on $5,000 dollars. And who wouldn’t want to spend an additional few weeks in locations such as St-Tropez, Menton and St-Paul-de-Vence? It wasn’t such a hard sell.
Yet an air of imminent catastrophe hung over the whole enterprise, and Sallin was nervous at the prospect of working with such a big star:
It was intimidating but there was nothing to be intimidated about because he couldn’t have been more amenable and professional in every way. We had a lot of laughs together. He had an extraordinary mastery of his craft. He was just wonderful. I remember reflecting at the time on how wonderful it was to work with Brits because they have centuries of tradition in their craft. If I’d asked him to climb a vertical wall, he would have done it. In St Paul de Vence there was one scene where Yvette was saying something and I was shooting over her shoulder to catch Albert’s reaction. I asked him to pull his reactions back just a little. And it was like working with the most delicate scalpel. It was as though if I’d said, ‘can you pull back just 22 per cent?’ he could have done so.11
But Finney and Sallin still had a problem – how to construct a film out of such a thin plot. Sallin felt that the story meandered to no particular conclusion. ‘The whole premise was so weak that it wasn’t really worth watching,’ he said.
On the eve of shooting (on the Sallin version) he remembered a long chat with Finney in the actor’s trailer about the storyline. Sallin had been studying the script and had some definite ideas. Finney, it turned out, had a rather different take on the film. But Sallin, much to his surprise, found Finney willing to listen. Finney and Sallin did the best they could to make the film coherent. The deal was that if The Picasso Summer had a theatrical release, Finney would pocket an extra $100,000. It never did, however, reach cinema screens, and perhaps that was just as well.
Sallin, like everyone who worked with Finney, was bowled over by his accessibility and charm: ‘He was very much a “what you see is what you get” kind of person. He had no side to him at all.’ Finney reminded Sallin a bit of Burton, but ‘Albert had greater warmth and humour and an all-round lighter touch than Burton.’ He was a little surprised that Finney never achieved more in his career but thinks that he made his own choices and lived on his own terms. Sallin would occasionally meet Finney again in London. They had the same tailor, Douglas Hayward.12 But, apart from a dinner many years ago in Sun Valley, Idaho, where the Sallins kept a second home, they have never met since.
For Sandra Sallin, her overwhelming memory was of Finney’s sex appeal and intelligence: ‘Albert is just as bright and handsome as he appears. Quite the hunk. I mean really a hunk.’ Robert Sallin remembers that on the last day of shooting, in the exquisite location of St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, they all had a farewell dinner. Sandra was so sad to say goodbye to Finney that she started crying. Not that Finney had any romantic involvement with Sandra or his co-star Yvette Mimieux, however ‘delightful’, in Sallin’s words, she was. By the end of the film Finney only had eyes for one lady – Anouk Aimée. Enter the second Mrs Finney.
10
ANOUK
When we left the cinema, the entire audience was dancing down the street, we were all so happy.
Annabel Leventon on Scrooge.
Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman is one of those romantic films that moisten the eye
s of art house cinema-goers, especially fans of French new wave cinema. It has evocative Deauville locations, two lovers exchanging meaningful glances as they skid through the wintry countryside, a catchy Francis Lai score and effortless, inexplicable flitting between colour and black-and-white, the latter an ingredient that makes people assume it just has to be something special.
The movie won two Oscars in 1967, best foreign language film, and, unusually for a non-Hollywood film, best original screenplay. Lelouch’s direction and Anouk Aimée’s acting also received Oscar nominations. At the Cannes Film Festival it took top prize and also won the Golden Globe as best foreign-language film.
Aimée, with her air of high-class, darkly sensuous sexuality, radiated charm and warmth but also melancholy. She was easy enough to fall in love with on film. And Finney did so for real. He first spotted her when he was having lunch with Robert and Sandra Sallin in the South of France. She was taking a break from filming the title role in Justine alongside Dirk Bogarde. As Finney later told it:
She was staying at the Colombe d’Or, down in St-Paul-de-Vence with her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, on a holiday. And I was there with some people for lunch. And I kind of caught her eye, and I said, ‘I’ll be back’. And I came back for dinner, and we just went on from there.
Robert Sallin remembered that Finney went over after lunch and introduced himself. Soon, according to Sallin, she started to show up regularly. And Finney’s attention was shifting – in Sallin’s words, ‘he wanted to go and play with Anouk.’ Hence it was no surprise that Finney was determined that the three-week stint of filming would end as stipulated. He even told Sallin that he ‘wanted to teach these boys [the producers] a lesson’. Sallin replied that Finney’s withdrawal would make him ‘almost a feature director’, referring to the unfinished film. According to Sallin:
I don’t know anything about his relationship with the producers, or what might cause his displeasure with them. I can only speculate that Albert’s real reason for leaving had to do primarily with his burgeoning romance with Anouk.
Sallin has a particularly vivid memory of a dinner in the hills above old Nice at a restaurant called Le Petit Ferme de Saint Michel. Robert and Sandra Sallin were there as well as Yvette Mimieux and Anouk. By then it was clear: Finney and Anouk were in love.
Anouk Aimée was four years older than Finney. Both her parents were actors; her mother was Geneviève Sorya, her father, Henry Dreyfus (there may be some connection to Captain Alfred Dreyfus, but this has never been proven). A talented child, Aimée studied acting and ballet in Paris, London and Marseilles; her training in dance at the famous Bauer-Therond School prepared her for future roles as a performer in such films as Lola and The Model Shop.
Aside from A Man and a Woman, she was best known for Federico Fellini’s acclaimed ‘romp in Rome’, 1960 comedy drama La Dolce Vita. Yet she had made her film debut in 1946 when Finney was just 10. By the late sixties she was catching the eye of Hollywood directors like Sidney Lumet who cast her as a high-class whore in The Appointment alongside Omar Sharif, with whom she had a fling. When she met Finney she was married for the third time, to actor Pierre Barouh, whom she had met on the set of A Man and a Woman.
By the time Aimée was filming Justine, she seemed to be in one of her periodic depressions. Bogarde, who had known her since she was 15, told Eve Arnold of his co-star’s loneliness, ‘She is never so happy as when she is miserable between love affairs. Somehow, when one thinks of Anouk, it is inevitably a tiny figure alone huddled up and sobbing in the back seat of a Rolls.’ Bogarde also described her as ‘wan and sad for most of the time, since she had suddenly realised, too late, that her decision to accept Justine had most probably been, for one reason or another, a serious error of judgement on her part and was now feeling abandoned’.
Finney and Anouk at first claimed they were just good friends, but that didn’t convince. The press got the whiff of something more serious when Finney took her to meet his family in Gore Crescent. Then they holidayed together in Corfu in spring 1969. They made an elegant couple, Anouk often dressed in fur coat and boots, Finney in Savile Row suits and carrying Louis Vuitton bags.
One friend believed that the match between Finney and Aimée was ‘a classic fusion of codependency’. Finney, a heavy drinker, was looking for stability and the right lady to keep him grounded. Anouk ‘was an insecure, gorgeous creature who also needed to be loved … both were looking for love without loving themselves’. In other words, two people looking to be fixed by each other. The same friend said that it was clear that it would be a difficult union to sustain. ‘Albert was a fun-loving, popular guy, and was considered a major catch. He was devastatingly attractive and utterly delightful. And Anouk was the dream woman of the time: French, beautiful and mysterious.’
Few of Finney’s liaisons had proved long lasting. Up to this point he had had difficulty sustaining any relationship beyond a year. It seemed that Finney couldn’t really commit to anyone – not only a strolling player but also a roving lover. Maybe Finney had never really ‘lost himself’ in another person, the kind of love that went beyond lust or infatuation. He relished company and he adored women, but until now his romances had been fun-filled flings. Perhaps the idea of choosing a lifelong companion unsettled him. But, as men enter their thirties, roving loses its appeal, and so it was that Finney, the hard-drinking philanderer, looked for someone to fix his wayward streak.
They eventually married at Kensington Registry Office on 7 August 1970. Michael Medwin was best man. Anouk wore a simple shift dress, classic of the era, Finney a dark suit with cream-coloured shirt and tie. Somehow his red hair, unusually long and wavy, made him look younger than in Charlie Bubbles, filmed three years earlier.
Perhaps Finney was glad to be his real young self again, because before he married Anouk he had appeared as the old miser in Ronald Neame’s musical version of Scrooge. (Neame had also directed the 17-year-old Anouk Aimée in an exotic 1950 thriller called The Golden Salamander.) Finney was third in line for the part. Richard Harris, who had enjoyed spectacular success with Camelot and the hit single MacArthur Park, was the original choice. (Harris always denied he could sing, once telling chat show host Michael Aspel that ‘if I sang for you now, you wouldn’t rush out and buy a record’. To which Aspel, ever the quick wit, replied, ‘I would rush out!’) Harris suddenly became unavailable when he took over as director of Bloomfield, in which he also starred.
Rex Harrison was the next choice – and had the off-screen prickliness to make Scrooge credible – but the veteran actor became exhausted and was stricken with pneumonia while appearing in the West End.1 Suddenly Leslie Bricusse, one of the producers, had a film without a star just as it was about to roll. Bricusse instinctively wanted Finney. He already knew Finney from his stint in Luther on Broadway when he and Anthony Newley were in Stop the World. Bricusse recounts how he wooed his man:
It is hardly flattering for any actor to learn that he is not the first, nor indeed the second choice for a role, but a practical actor – and God knows Mr Finney is that – understands the fickle unpredictability of the lunatic lottery called the film industry. Getting the right role is what matters, not how you get it. I called Albert and explained the project, the situation and the urgency. He invited me for dinner the same evening. Anouk cooked a meal as delectable as herself, and the three of us sat and ate and talked way past midnight until I had run out of killer persuasive chitchat. I left Albie with the script and score of Scrooge and went home to pray. Happily, God, Albert, Charles Dickens and the department of fate were all listening. Less than 24 hours later, Albie was having his first costume fitting.2
Finney, on the set of Scrooge, told a visiting journalist for Line-Up Film Night:
I got into it rather quickly and was extremely attracted to the thought of playing the character. When I read the script I liked it very much and the juices started to work inside. I hadn’t read a script that had had that effect on me for some time.
Asked about his singing voice, Finney said that the old man ‘doesn’t have much resonance in his voice and he doesn’t have great quantities of breath. So I wanted the singing to be very much in character except at the end of the film when he’s changed by his experiences. Then a little more resonance comes back in.’
Finney was probably a better choice than either Harrison – essentially a light comedian – or Harris, who might have played it too broad. But the make-up department had a long haul transforming a handsome 34-year-old (he was twenty-eight years younger than Harrison and six years younger than Harris) into a bent, balding old codger, someone whose appearance matched his reputation as ‘the most miserable skinflint who ever walked on earth’. The final result has Finney resembling Wilfrid Brambell in Steptoe and Son. And his Scrooge is a truly nasty bit of work, resenting any provision for the poor and even declaring that he’s glad the workhouses are still operating. ‘If you were in my will, I’d disinherit you,’ he tells Cratchit (David Collings). Somehow Finney makes you believe he means it.
Kenneth More, Alec Guinness and Edith Evans provided strong support. The songs, however, were not especially memorable, eclipsed as they were by Oliver! the previous year. Nevertheless, the film was a smash. Scrooge opened at Radio City Hall in New York the following November, breaking all box office records. Bricusse accepted a Golden Globe on Finney’s behalf.
Strolling Player Page 12