Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  The movie itself has a claustrophobic feel, set as it is on a train stalled by a snowstorm (compare it, for example, to Death on the Nile in which audiences were taken not only down river but also to the pyramids and even Abu Simbel). The cast is a dream: Connery, Bacall (especially impressive), John Gielgud, Rachel Roberts, Richard Widmark, Ingrid Bergman (mysteriously winning an Oscar for her portrayal of a mousy missionary), Anthony Perkins and Colin Blakely, hilariously billed as ‘Colin Blankey’ in the credits. Also in the film, making her second appearance alongside Finney, was Jacqueline Bisset as Countess Andrenyi. (Finney, many years later, once confided to a dinner companion that he had ‘rather fancied’ the beauty who was then at the height of her fame.)

  ‘It’s all great insanity and glorious fun. I wanted a name cast to make the movie glamorous. It’s going to be done with gaiety and humour and the best of fakery,’ said Lumet during production in early 1974, noting that most of the $3 million budget went on stars’ salaries.5 And commenting later, he seemed pleased with the result:

  Although there was quite a lot of chit chat and kidding going on, everyone let him [Finney] have his concentration and, for his part, he generally sat to one side, slightly closed off, thinking of his next scene coming up. From my point of view he had the extraordinary ability to give you absolutely everything you wanted and immediately.

  David Robinson in The Times gave it a (halfhearted) endorsement, ‘No more or less than the book itself, it is a perfectly pleasant entertainment, a couple of hours of nostalgic escape, if you’re prepared to go easily with it’.

  And ‘go with it’ the punters did. The film earned more than $20 million in the United States alone. Finney was nominated for best actor at the Oscars but didn’t attend. The other nominees were Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, Dustin Hoffman in Lenny, Al Pacino in The Godfather Part 2 and Art Carney who, although the outsider, won for Harry and Tonto.

  For Finney, who rarely filmed in the seventies, the only problem was that his name became indelibly associated with the part of Poirot. ‘People really do think I am 300 pounds with a French accent,’ he once said.

  After a gruelling day of filming at Elstree, Finney would rush off to the Globe Theatre to act in Peter Nichols’s Chez Nous. Nichols drew inspiration for the play from time spent at his own family’s home in France. Two couples holiday in the Dordogne, Dick and Liz (Denholm Elliott and Pat Heywood) and Phil and Diana (Finney and Geraldine McEwan). It emerges that Dick and Liz’s youngest child is actually a grandchild, fathered by none other than Finney’s character, Phil, when the daughter was just 14. A difficult storyline but one actually billed as a domestic comedy because Dick has bought the French hideaway thanks to the phenomenal success of his bestseller, The Nubile Baby, which extols the merits of free love. Cue a deluge of … What went wrong with our parenting? What will people think? Yet nobody actually considers the (offstage) teenage girl affected.

  Michael Billington thought the denouement was particularly powerful and showed Finney’s depth:

  He presses his palms flat against his skull, as if to beat down the awful truth, the colour drains from his big, cratered face, tears prick his eyes. It was like watching a man age twenty years in three seconds. When Finney lets his defences drop he can actually be extraordinarily moving on stage.

  Sheridan Morley interviewed Finney a few days before Chez Nous opened. Finney told Morley:

  I’d like to do more of Nichols’s plays if only he’d write some. He’s got a vibrant theatrical sense, a sense of presentation, which I find a little rare elsewhere. This play is quieter, less frenetic, I think, than Joe Egg but there’s still that sense of rhythm. It’s a beat or two tighter and quicker than most.6

  Pressed about the future, Finney was uncertain but hinted he was ready for big roles:

  I still can’t decide whether I’m supposed to be a director/manager or a rogue and vagabond player. I got intense, creative pleasure out of directing Charlie Bubbles, and I enjoy my involvement with Memorial and the Royal Court but then again I tell myself that these next fifteen years, from now until I’m around 50, are the most important for an actor, and that if I’m ever going to buckle down it has to be now. But my main aim is still what it’s always been – to be, even if sometimes perversely, in control of my own destiny, and I’ve needed at least this amount of time to find out what I think I should be doing with my life.

  Finney was preparing to take on some of the major classical roles. But before he did he still had one or two engagements for the Royal Court. In summer 1973, he played O’Halloran, one of a pair of Irish labourers, in David Storey’s Cromwell, directed by Anthony Page. It was a rare foray into historical drama from a playwright associated more with modern realism (Storey wrote the screenplay for This Sporting Life). Despite the title, Cromwell never appears at all, nor is he ever named by any of the characters. He is merely a presence, a background figure set against a story depicting the futility of conflict in the seventeenth century.

  The play was not well received and closed after just thirty-nine performances. Finney’s old director Lindsay Anderson thought Finney was out of kilter:

  The actors are good, though occasionally incomprehensible as a result of an over-naturalistic approach. Albert is the exception: I think he gives a very bad performance, selfish, with mistaken ambitions towards giving a ‘great’ performance, artificial and grimacing, vocally affected, and, most disastrously, with no relationship at all to his buddy and sidekick, who is thereby rendered pale and insignificant. I think Brian [Cox] does extremely well, in that impossible part. There is a truthfulness to his acting which is quite absent from Albert’s.7

  Hell hath no fury like a gay director scorned? Anderson would be a repeat critic of Finney.

  Finney also directed but did not appear in a production of Loot, Joe Orton’s brilliant, award-winning dark farce. Finney cast James Aubrey as Dennis after he spotted him in an episode of Z Cars. Aubrey, who died in 2010, aged just 62, was subsequently best known for his portrayal of Susan Penhaligon’s violent husband in Andrea Newman’s kinky saga Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Other parts went to Jill Bennett, Philip Stone and David Troughton. Aubrey paid tribute to Finney’s skill as a director, in particular his belief that, no matter how farcical the proceedings, everything had to be played completely straight:

  Basically, anything we did was our own creation but with his own absolute confidence in our performances and talent backing us up. If he got a little cross, it was an actor getting cross with another actor. Yes, he had the odd snap at me. I thought I knew Orton better than he did, and he’d occasionally say, in a slightly sarcastic way, ‘oh yeah, you knew him, did you?’ He never became authoritarian about it, never, ‘this is the way I want it and who’s directing this anyway?’8

  Finney’s stint at the Royal Court was ending. Meanwhile, the National Theatre was beginning its gradual, and perpetually delayed, relocation to new premises on the South Bank, the mass of concrete that Finney came, much later, to dislike so much. The National’s move coincided with a time when Finney felt ready to tackle a succession of classic roles. In the 1974 interview with Finney, Sheridan Morley had concluded thus:

  When Finney was starting his career at the Birmingham Rep, and I was finishing off my teens by lurking around London theatres, 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.

  But did Finney really want it badly enough?

  12

  CLASSICS IN CONCRETE

  … the right sort of generosity …

  Laurence Olivier on Albert Finney.

  Laurence Olivier was looking for a successor as director of the National Theatre. Many candidates were mooted. Richard Attenborough (later to triumph with Gandhi) was one – a safe pair of hands, close to Olivier, but essentially more devoted to screen work than stage. Richard Burton was another possibility, but unlikely; his drinking and tempes
tuous on–off relationship with Elizabeth Taylor made him an outsider. Also, Burton had not even been a UK resident, for tax reasons, for many years. Burton, who was on record as saying that one of the real reasons for being an actor was to make money, would have had a substantial pay cut.

  Finney was the more obvious choice. In Olivier’s words, he was ‘a person of the right sort of age, with the right sort of following, the right sort of promise, the right sort of generosity and natural trust with his colleagues’. Finney certainly commanded the respect for such a position. But he had always gone his own way. Everything in his career, from his refusal to play Lawrence and his rejection of the Spiegel contract, indicated wariness of long-term commitment. He would have been good at talent spotting, mentoring and encouraging younger actors and choosing productions. But, rather like Burton, the day-to-day board meetings, and simply the lack of freedom this would have imposed on him, deterred him.1

  Olivier later wrote, ‘I tried to interest Albert in the idea but his own acting prowess was so marketable that he could naturally see little point in vastly increasing his responsibilities and decimating his income.’ Finney’s own observation of the toll exacted on Olivier deterred him. He remembered seeing Olivier at the Old Vic one night, still blacked up for Othello, and exhausted. He’d had a board meeting earlier, then played Othello, and still had another meeting to get through.

  In the end, Peter Hall took over in November 1973. Almost immediately Hall and Finney held meetings, not for Finney to assume any role as an actor manager, but to plan Finney’s assault on some big classical roles, notably Hamlet and Tamburlaine.2 Hall would direct both productions, although Michael Blakemore had been mentioned as a possible director of Hamlet at one point. Hamlet would open at the Old Vic and later transfer to the Lyttelton Theatre when the new building opened.

  Hall was more enthusiastic about Tamburlaine than he was about Hamlet. But Finney felt the time was right. According to Blakemore, ‘his father at the time was far from well and Albert felt that this had given him a particular insight into the part’.3

  Finney knew his Hamlet would be examined forensically. Doubtless the sharpening of pencils in Fleet Street could be heard in Waterloo Road and, subsequently, in the concrete jungle of the South Bank. Immediately the critics engaged in comparisons, trading memories of former princes, sometimes in a bid to show off their credentials but also in a bid to quash a contender like Finney.

  One brilliant contemporary, Nicol Williamson, was giving Finney stiff competition in the classics. His 1969 Hamlet, directed by Tony Richardson at the Roundhouse, was acclaimed as one of the greatest of his generation. Williamson was even invited to perform it in front of Richard Nixon at the White House. Nowadays, you often read on the internet that Williamson ‘bested Finney in the classics’. Maybe, but Finney proved more durable in film and theatre. (When Williamson died in 2011, his obituary in The Times noted that Williamson viewed two close contemporaries, Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen, disparagingly. Apparently he described them as ‘technicians’.)4 However, there’s no record of Williamson, or indeed Finney, referencing any mutual rivalry. Jill Townsend, Williamson’s wife for most of the seventies, said she never recalled Williamson making any derogatory comments about Finney.5

  Finney, at 39, was perhaps a few years past his prime for Hamlet, as Peter Hall mentioned in his diaries. Exactly forty years later, another 39-year-old, Benedict Cumberbatch, would play Hamlet in a sell-out run. Yet somehow Cumberbatch has a boyish air about him; Finney, on the other hand, looked mature for his age.

  Hall decided on an unabridged text, resisting pressures to cut it to keep costs down. Angela Lansbury, although only seven years older than Finney, would play Gertrude and Denis Quilley was Claudius. (Peter Hall had approached Kenneth More but the actor declined, later reflecting that ‘there were so many great Shakespearean actors who could have done it better’.)

  Finney, sporting a high level of fitness after workouts at the Grosvenor House Hotel (but still smoking and drinking Guinness),6 portrayed Hamlet as burly, hard-bitten and athletic. And, according to many observers, including Ian McKellen, Finney played it with a northern accent. (McKellen, unlike Finney, had, while at Cambridge, deliberately ditched his Lancashire accent.)

  On 3 December 1975, ironically when Finney was rehearsing the scene from Hamlet where he witnesses his father’s ghost, he was told his father had died. Hall wrote in his diaries that Finney was ‘very upset, but extremely brave’. The first preview fell the day after his father’s passing. Finney apparently told Hall that he knew if he let his emotion run away with him, he would lose control. ‘He therefore had to check it forcibly,’ Hall relates. Hall also said that Finney told him a story about his relationship with his father:

  Sometime back he suddenly realised that he had never told his father what he meant to him – how he respected him. His father was in a nursing home, ill, so Albert sat down and wrote him an eight-page letter trying to put into words his feelings. There was no answer. After a time he rang up and asked if he’d received the letter. ‘Oh yes,’ said his father, ‘there’s a reply in the post for you.’ It read ‘Dear Albert, thank you very much for your letter. Love Dad.’

  Finney remembered his father fondly, describing him as ‘very droll and very dry’. Neither man, it seemed, went in for ostentatious displays of affection but they had always had a good relationship. Finney went home for the funeral. In his absence, the National ran another play in its repertoire.

  Domestically, it was not much better. Stanley Kubrick was filming his visually stunning but monumentally long epic Barry Lyndon. Anouk met the star of the film, Ryan O’Neal, at a party during shooting. O’Neal, devastatingly handsome, brash and supremely famous, and Anouk were instantly attracted. It was a quick conquest, one echoed several years later when Lee Majors entrusted O’Neal, his best friend, to look after Farrah Fawcett during his absence (according to some observers, O’Neal and Fawcett kissed each other so fiercely that their lips started to bleed).

  Marriages between two big stars are never easy. Gene Wilder, who got Finney to speak just one line in his film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, became friendly with Finney and Anouk in the period just before they broke up. He tells the story:

  I had never met Albert Finney but he did me the great favour of acting a tiny part in one scene. He sat as a member of the film audience that was watching a slapstick Italian opera. Albert had one line to say: ‘Is this wonderfully brave or just rotten?’ After his scene was over we made plans to see each other again. During that summer I became good friends with Albert and his wife, Anouk Aimée. They were very loving with each other, but Albert is a big talker and Anouk had to fight with him for equal time.7

  The way Anouk tells it, at the beginning she was happy to be a stay-at-home wife. Then she changed her mind as the marriage failed. As she told The Times in 1982:

  I really didn’t ever plan to act again after we married. I’d been at it a long time, there was no script around that I particularly wanted to make, and I genuinely thought that maybe I should take up painting or writing instead. I even bought an easel, on which the canvas turned slowly from white to yellow as it lay untouched in a corner of the house. While the marriage was good, I saw no point in being an actress; when it began to fail, I went back to work.

  A mutual friend believes that Anouk’s insecurities ultimately doomed them and that she and Finney were never truly comfortable together:

  I don’t think he was prepared for her jealousy and possessiveness, which considering his place in the acting world at that time was hard to take. And she couldn’t relax with his popularity. She was more ‘provincial’ than he expected and very private.

  Finney, never seemingly distressed by a relationship ending, viewed the break-up philosophically:

  It was time for Anouk to move on, and she did so with my blessing. I do believe that when you’re together out of habit, I have the right to say, ‘It’s been grand, but …
’ and so does my partner, if she feels pulled towards another man – or woman, for that matter.

  Later that year, 1975, Finney moved out of the Brompton Square home and into the Dorchester. He was back into one room again, albeit one with impeccable room service. Perhaps Finney would have bumped into the hotel’s regular guest, Richard Burton, who was marking his 50th birthday in London at the time. They certainly met at the Evening Standard British Film Awards on 12 November, when Burton handed Finney the best actor award for Murder on the Orient Express. Burton, according to his diary entry, praised Finney, ‘whom I’ve never seen’ – but whether he meant never met face to face or never seen on-screen is unclear – as ‘uniquely remarkable’.

  The next day, Burton records, he saw Finney ‘for the first time’ in Murder on the Orient Express. He described it as ‘very amusing’. Whichever way you read this, it’s rather odd. If Burton meant he had never seen Finney on film, it sounds unbelievable from someone in his position. Was he really so cut off from filmmaking that he had never seen a performance from an actor as great as Finney? If Burton had never met Finney in person this is also surprising, but perhaps more understandable given the younger actor’s path away from mainstream Hollywood. Finney, it should be noted, had also never (formally) met Tom Courtenay before they filmed The Dresser or Judi Dench before Skyfall in 2011. By 1980, however, Burton was telling an interviewer that ‘Albert Finney is the greatest actor in the world. Then Peter O’Toole.’

  Finney was now footloose again. Carol White, in her autobiography, recalled that Finney, an ‘old friend’, started to see her again as she prepared to film The Squeeze in 1976:

  Albert was appearing in a season of Shakespeare at the National Theatre and the words he learnt during the day, he rehearsed in his sleep at night. It was strange to wake up and hear him performing a monologue, but he did it so well I started to enjoy it.8