Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  John Russell Taylor in The Times admired Finney’s approach:

  Albert Finney, on the face of it an unlikely choice for Scrooge, proves in the event to be a very good idea; he really plays the part as an acting role, and when he is required to be a nasty old man does just that, not merely your nice, handsome, kindly star pretending to be.

  Actress Annabel Leventon has a more direct memory of Scrooge after seeing it at the Dominion in London’s Tottenham Court Road: ‘When we left the cinema, the entire audience was dancing down the street, we were all so happy.’3

  Scrooge’s director, Ronald Neame, scored an even bigger hit a couple of years later with The Poseidon Adventure. Neame enjoyed several large tipples at lunchtime and then again in the evening, long into old age. His doctors told him to cut down. As he liked to tell it, however, they all died before him. He lived to be 99. If he hadn’t drunk so much he’d probably have lived longer!

  As for Finney, he admitted only that the role prompted him to keep turning off the lights at home. But perhaps he simply had more lights to turn off, because he and Anouk had moved into a house in Brompton Square, Knightsbridge, one of London’s most glamorous addresses. Harrods was spitting distance away and so was San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place, an Italian restaurant which soon became one of their favourites. The owners, Lorenzo and Mara Berni, also became good friends. This was at a time when authentic Italian food was still regarded as a novelty. San Lorenzo became the haunt of the stars, first Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland, and then the likes of Jack Nicholson, Princess Margaret and, in the eighties, Princess Diana.

  Anouk effectively gave up her career to be with Finney. That did not come easily, especially for someone who had been acting since she was a teenager. Nevertheless she loved living in London and she became a fan of rugby, a good time to like the game, as she later said, because France won all the time.

  Anouk and Finney liked watching old movies on the television. One of Finney’s favourites was John Huston’s classic The Maltese Falcon. And Finney had already practised his Bogart accent in Two for the Road. No surprise then that he quickly accepted the part of Eddie Ginley, a Liverpool bingo caller who fantasises about becoming a Sam Spade-style sleuth in Gumshoe.

  Gumshoe was Stephen Frears’s first movie and it has that refreshing quality that you find in a debut director. The film is an enjoyable pastiche, rarely shown until its recent release on DVD. Raising money was easy, in spite of Charlie Bubbles’ commercial failure, because Finney was such a big international star. More of a problem, according to Frears, was a misunderstanding about the story itself.

  Frears explains:

  Columbia Pictures, who bought the film, thought Albert Finney was playing a private detective. You’d say – ‘no, it’s actually a film about a bingo caller who wants to be a private detective’. So it was as though all they could see was a bloke in a trench-coat, but actually what was on offer was a rather more complicated film about a bloke who wanted to be a man who wore a trench-coat. I mean, wearing a trench-coat is easy but being Humphrey Bogart is presumably harder. So there was always that gap.4

  Apart from Finney, Frears managed to assemble a great cast – Billie Whitelaw, Frank Finlay and Janice Rule. But it was Finney who was the central star and also producer – for Memorial.

  Frears said:

  Albert was the first person I came across who used to imitate Bogart. I’ve seen Belmondo do it since but Albert used to do it too. … [Albert] was a bloke from Salford. English to his fingertips. Riddled with Englishness. Hopelessly, provincially English. But of course he’d become a big star. And the big star was also the boss of the company making the film. This sometimes got us into difficult situations. For example, Chris [Menges] always wanted to shoot towards windows which means you have to balance the light. If the light drops outside you have to drop the light inside so they’re always in relation to each other. Well, that’s quite a delicate thing to do particularly in November when we were shooting. Albert would say, ‘why don’t you just get me up against the wall and shoot me?’ … he couldn’t understand why we were interested in things other than just photographing him.

  Frears, however, got on well with Finney:

  I guess if he did something that didn’t make sense to me I’d ask him why. But it just seemed to me what he was doing was good. If people are being good, what is there to talk about? What was complicated was that Albert had really been taught by Karel and Lindsay too. So, of course, it was rather complicated when I turned up, somehow connected to them. He was always rather suspicious of educated people. I think he thought I was too clever. I probably drove him mad. But he was great.

  Maureen Lipman, playing a minor part in Gumshoe, was only on set for a couple of days. Up until then her biggest film role had been in Up the Junction. She remembers finding the recently married Mr and Mrs Finney lunching together in the canteen. Lipman, then 24, not long out of drama school, joined them. She soon realised she was encroaching. Subsequently, she says she always felt like apologising whenever she spotted Finney at a party. ‘He’s a lovely man,’ Lipman recalled. ‘He’s very comfortable in his own skin. It’s very valuable that, someone who doesn’t change.’ She said you can’t underestimate the influence of figures like Finney and Courtenay on other actors:

  I came out of drama school able to talk in my own accent because of people like them. I started to watch Finney like a fan. I saw him at the Old Vic when I was a junior member in A Flea in Her Ear and Much Ado about Nothing. He’s a great physical presence. He’s a colourful actor – and he’s like Olivier in that, on occasions, he has a tendency to over colour … but Albert is the only actor I know who has used acting to benefit his life rather than the other way round.5

  Carolyn Seymour, later best known for her role in the British TV series Survivors, also had a small role in Gumshoe:

  It goes without saying that I adore the man [Finney]. I knew him quite well, not only working with him, but socially as well. He was going through the ‘Anouk’ part of his life which meant that we didn’t associate too much together after they met. I was never a girlfriend, I hasten to add, although if the situation had presented itself …! He was then, as now, a consummate actor and for me to be in a movie with him, Frank Finlay, Billie Whitelaw and Janice Rule, was absolutely awe-inspiring. The whole experience was amazing and I learnt so much. He is a special man.6

  Anouk visited the Gumshoe set regularly. Dirk Bogarde, in his memoir Snakes and Ladders, recalls Anouk’s cats being brought to the set of Justine in Tunis. According to Bogarde, she fed them on fillet steak, which angered the waiters in their hotel who had to make do with chickpeas. And Carolyn Seymour also remembers that Anouk, whose presence on-screen has, ironically, been described as ‘feline’, was also enamoured with her dogs: ‘Somehow they got smuggled into London to prevent them being quarantined – an excellent feat, I may add, requiring an enormous amount of planning.’

  Gumshoe turned out agreeably well, a now dated (with politically incorrect language) but enjoyable send-up of Bogart films. Tom Milne in The Times paid tribute:

  Given a brilliant script by Neville Smith (his first) and a brilliant cast – apart from the superb Albert Finney and the equally superb Fulton Mackay as a moth-eaten Glaswegian hood, Frears has directed the film with such self-effacing skill that it is likely to be undervalued even by those who enjoy it.

  Finney was suddenly on a roll with films. But then a great new play and one of his favourite co-stars brought him back to the Royal Court.

  11

  HELL IN SLOANE SQUARE

  I spent some considerable time trying to decide whether Richard Burton or John Neville would ultimately inherit the mantle of Olivier. I needn’t have bothered: it will be Finney.

  Sheridan Morley in 1974.

  ‘A marriage which cannot live yet refuses to die’, screamed the poster for the subsequent film adaptation of Ted Whitehead’s stage play Alpha Beta, starring Albert Finney and Rachel Roberts, first staged a
t the Royal Court in 1972. Somehow that’s an appropriate metaphor for Roberts’s marriage to Rex Harrison, a union from which the actress could never move on.

  Roberts’s suicide in 1980 was shocking. When you see her in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or This Sporting Life, or even at the end of her career in minor roles, it’s ironic to think that someone who played such forceful characters could end so pitiably. She was a highly emotional woman, a depressive and an alcoholic, prone to the mad mood swings and exhibitionism of those so afflicted. She would get on all fours and bark like a dog or strip off in front of strangers at a whim. In Richard Burton’s words, she ‘made outrage legitimate’. In her diaries she wrote that ‘everyone has not just a story but a scream’. Finney commented, like many on her death, that ‘if only he’d known she was that desperate …’1

  Strangely, Whitehead’s tale of a deadlocked, violent working-class marriage, which marked Finney’s return to the London stage after a gap of seven years, never experienced a revival until recently. Michael Billington said of Alpha Beta, ‘As a portrait of domestic entrapment, it rivals Strindberg’s The Dance of Death’.

  Whitehead’s script must have been disturbing for the time. Take Frank’s view of unrestrained male sexuality, as articulated in the first act:

  The male pokes everything he can get until one day he inadvertently pokes himself into wedlock; after that he stops poking and starts lusting. The morality is rigid because, once married, the male never actually pokes anything and it’s depraved because he lusts his life away in masculine obscenities and dirty jokes.

  Irving Wardle in The Times described the progress of Finney’s character in the marriage:

  At first a bottled up youth plagued with fears of middle-age, he steadily thickens and coarsens, going through a phase as a clubland buck, putting up a defensive barrage of songs, and finally slumped into booze-sodden middle-aged defeat.

  Again Finney, just 35, was playing older than his age. Finney’s old friend from Hawaii, Eddie Sherman, in London for a surprise visit in 1972, remembered his impression of the play: ‘Finney’s character was a slovenly, middle-class [!] British man. Of course, he was just brilliant. As we walked up the theatre aisle after the show we talked about how brilliant he was.’

  Later, the play was made into a film and Richard Eder, in the New York Times, was ecstatic, ‘Rachel Roberts and Albert Finney are so extraordinary as the husband and wife that they make Alpha Beta, cinematic or not, a startling and wonderful experience.’

  The seventies were marked by Finney doing mostly stage work. In March 1972, Finney accepted an invitation to become Associate Director of the Royal Court. The first piece he chose to stage and direct was Irish playwright Brian Friel’s Freedom of the City, a thinly disguised depiction of the Bloody Sunday massacre. The play was perceived as an anti-British polemic and a critique of the Heath government’s policy.

  Actor Stephen Rea, a friend of Friel’s, described the play:

  Previously his [Friel’s] work had been personal rather than directly political. His first hit play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! had dealt with private anguish in the context of emigration. But Freedom of the City had such urgency that the Court’s director, Albert Finney, demanded that the Court alter its schedule to stage it as soon as possible. The play was received in a frost of ignorance.2

  Friel preferred to let his work speak for itself, but in one interview, a decade after it was staged, he admitted he might have got a bit carried away:

  One of the problems with the play was that the experience of Bloody Sunday wasn’t adequately distilled in me. I wrote it out of some kind of heat and some kind of immediate passion that I would have wanted to quiet a bit before I did it.

  Friel subsequently scored a major hit with his play Dancing at Lughnasa, which was made into a film starring Meryl Streep.

  While Finney was directing Freedom of the City by day, by night he was starring in a play by another distinguished Irish playwright, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. The one-act, one-man play was written for – and is forever associated with – Patrick Magee, the character actor known for horror movies and, especially, his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. Magee’s voice – metallic, grinding and harsh – had a sinister quality to it, ideally suited to Krapp. Eccentric players were usually the best interpreters of Beckett’s masterpiece, notably Max Wall (in a 1975 production directed by Magee) and Harold Pinter in 2006.

  Beckett, who seemed to be an uninvited guest at some of Finney’s rehearsals, felt that Finney was miscast. His biographer James Knowlson, recorded the playwright’s dim view of the proceedings, ‘He never believed in Albert Finney as Krapp. And Finney became acutely conscious that he was not satisfying Beckett.’

  Yet Irving Wardle in The Times praised Finney’s original approach:

  What it possesses, besides abundant physical skill, is a steely contrast between the senile figure, hawking and rasping among his treasured lumber, and the recorded voice of Krapp at the midnight of his youth. The sense of erotic desolation comes into merciless focus through this perspective (to Krapp, his spools are his children) and, as before with this masterpiece, the effect is overwhelming.

  Finney had not been in a movie since Scrooge. And, as he later said, nobody really recognised him in it anyway. Now Finney was about to undergo another huge physical transformation. It was a particularly punishing schedule. By day, he was Hercule Poirot, Belgian super sleuth, at Elstree; by night, he was Phil, a hedonistic architect, in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous, a part especially written for Finney.

  The double undertaking was a rebuff to those who ever thought Finney lazy. He was in virtually every scene in Murder on the Orient Express. Perhaps only Anthony Hopkins worked so hard when he played Frank Doel in 84 Charing Cross Road by day and Lambert Le Roux in Pravda by night.

  Producers Richard Goodwin and John Bradbourne signed up Sidney Lumet, who had a reputation as a superb actors’ director. Lumet, who had made such classics as Twelve Angry Men, The Hill and The Pawnbroker, was a safe pair of hands who could bring the film in on time within its six-week schedule. ‘We had an extremely good script by Paul Dehn and needed a resourceful director to deal with what could easily have become rather flaccid material,’ said Goodwin. ‘We thought of the film as quite small in scale and felt we could do it inexpensively but still with a good cast.’

  It was Lumet who first suggested Finney. This required some makeover. Finney was tall(ish), ginger-haired, very British-looking and only 36. How could he be transformed into a short, stout, middle-aged Belgian? Well, he had become Scrooge, so why not Poirot?

  The strain on Finney was overwhelming. The demands of the play, portraying such a loquacious sage during the day, and submitting to hours of make-up every morning, would tire anyone. A solution was found. Finney was woken at 5 a.m., lifted gently out of bed and transported in a limousine, still sleeping, to the studios. Then the make-up team worked on him for a couple of hours. He was given a false nose, padded cheeks and a meticulously trimmed, waxed, liquorice-like period moustache. The jet black hair was a work of art all on its own, attained with a mixture of Cherry Blossom boot polish and Vaseline, set every morning, and requiring half an hour under the dryer – et voilà!

  Equally important was Finney’s gait and posture. He adopted a stooped stance, walking stiffly with his head down, almost buried in his chest. Presumably this was to accentuate the impression that he had a double chin. When he addresses the ‘suspects’, he appears to look up at them, rather like a child responding to a teacher. His head is cocked to one side, as if he’s suffering from a permanent stiff neck, accompanied by abrupt, birdlike jerking movements. Finney sometimes looks awkward in his disguise.

  David Suchet, the television Poirot of the nineties, agreed. He thought Finney was ‘masterful’ but then reflected, ‘I remember thinking privately that Finney’s performance in the 1974 film had struck me as rather tense and stiff – he hardly ever seemed
to move his neck – while his accent had been very gruff, almost angry.’3 Bernard Hepton, who saw the film many years after he had parted company with Finney, thought that Finney’s portrayal was ‘outrageous’ and that he was simply ‘overacting’. Hepton even wondered if his old protégé was ‘taking the piss’ out of the character by going so over the top.

  It is interesting to compare Finney to Peter Ustinov several years later in Death on the Nile. Ustinov was more natural and less forced, aided by a physique closer to Poirot’s. Yet this should not detract from Finney’s performance. It is studied, mannered, perhaps too obviously a feat of transformation, acting rather than being, but it’s a tour de force nonetheless. Finney’s Poirot is more zestful than Ustinov’s. And Christie herself thought it the most authentic on-screen depiction, although she was disappointed with Finney’s moustache.

  Finney enjoyed getting to know the cast:

  There were a lot of people I’d never met before and, being a movie buff, I liked talking to them about their films. We all started saying how we should perhaps do one of those films every year, like a glamorous repertory company. When they did actually ask me a couple of years later if I’d play Poirot again, I wasn’t so sure. They said they were going to the Nile this time; it had been quite hot enough for me at Elstree.4

  Nearly all the action, other than the murder itself, revolved around Poirot with the others responding to his interrogation. Sean Connery was heard to grumble that ‘the rest of us are only glorified extras’. And Lauren Bacall, during filming, spoke of the difficulty of such distinguished actors having to keep quiet. ‘It was so frustrating. Everything revolves around Albie who talks all the time. We just react. The other day when he left early for his matinee, we all went absolutely bananas and couldn’t stop speaking. It was complete chaos.’