Cynics may say that Finney was taking an interest in others to help his characterisations. (Just as, for example, Woody Allen seldom says anything funny but waits for someone else to make an amusing comment. Then he takes out a notebook and jots it down.)5 Yet Finney tended to play characters in extreme situations – alcoholics, burnt-out classical actors, gangsters and real-life figures – for whom his encounters with ‘ordinary people’ would offer him little material. More likely, Finney has the healthy ego of a confident performer. But he realises that celebrity is not to be taken too seriously.
Rolling Stone also noted Finney’s reluctance to talk about himself – or a similar lack of introspection. He always had plenty to say but it was seldom personal. And here lies a certain contradiction. Finney is in many respects very ‘un-actory’ – were there such a word. He does not spend much time talking about the craft of acting and his profession is not – pardon the awful phrase – an all-consuming passion. He takes his work seriously but will not be found discussing his approach to a certain part. He just lives it. Away from the stage or camera, he doesn’t discuss acting much, yet his conversation brims with theatrical anecdotes, stories not about himself but about the glory days of Olivier, Richardson, Wolfit or Lawson. It’s a way of engaging his audience without having to be too personal. As he says:
I’ve always found it very, very hard to get up in front of people and talk as me. Cause what am I supposed to be? What do I represent when I get up as me? In this part of the 20th century, we’re all supposed to be clear about what we are, the manifestations of me, the finding of me. But I think there are probably many me’s. And what I’m probably about is acknowledging that … There’s no deceit intended.
Rolling Stone noted Finney’s perpetual friendliness and charm. The magazine noted that he pretended to recognise a waitress at Fortnum & Mason in London’s Piccadilly, where he was having afternoon tea, who claimed to have served him before. Later, he admitted that he couldn’t quite remember the lady in question. But it didn’t matter, everyone received his winning smile.
Pat Pearce, cleaner at the Bristol Hippodrome, billed by the Daily Mail as ‘Mrs Mop to the Stars’, recalled Finney’s friendliness. ‘My all-time favourite [star] was Albert Finney. He was so sincere. After we’d been photographed I thanked him for posing with me, and he said, “You must not thank me, it is for me to thank you.” I thought that was so lovely.’6
Finney might not have talked about himself, at least not in any great depth. The trouble was that, rather like Richard Burton, he was such a forceful personality that he tended to dominate any room he entered. So filmmakers naturally thought of him when it came to casting larger-than-life characters. Fortunately, Finney could be generous (considering actors usually dream of nabbing a showy part for themselves) when he thought a script better suited to someone else. Author Robert Sellers tells how the part of Alan Swann, the Errol Flynn-like character in My Favourite Year, was offered to Finney:
Mel Brooks’s co-producer on the film, Michael Gruskoff, first sent the script to Finney. He got an unusual reply back. Albert read it and said ‘you’ve got the wrong guy, Michael. Peter would be better for this part than me.’ Finney even made sure that a copy of the script made its way to O’Toole.7
Richard Benjamin, the film’s director, remembered going to California, where Finney was still involved in Shoot the Moon, to persuade him to do it. They spent a day on a houseboat. Finney, he said, was ‘charming’ and ‘delightful’ but Benjamin said it was clear instantly that Finney didn’t want to do it.
Finney was wise to decline the role of Swann. In the end he accepted a much better part, one that all actors dream of. The background to The Dresser was inauspicious. Playwright Harwood recounts its inception:
I wrote The Dresser as a play of course, and the day I was to deliver it to my agent I went to the Garrick Club, of which I’m a member.
And as I was going in, John Gielgud was coming out, and he said, ‘Oh, what have you been up to?’
I said, ‘Well John, I’ve just written a new play about an English actor manager, and his dresser.’
And Gielgud said, ‘Aah, backstage plays never do well.’
I went into lunch absolutely crushed. So when I delivered it to my agent, Judy Daish, I said, ‘This won’t do anything, John Gielgud says backstage plays never do.’
She read it and said, ‘I don’t know.’
I said, ‘Judy, John Gielgud knows more than you.’
It was done in Manchester and I think from the first night to now as we sit here I don’t think a night has passed when it hasn’t been performed somewhere in the world. Which is lovely.8
The Dresser was a stage hit in London and New York. Tom Courtenay played Norman, the fussy, prim, whisky-soaked gay dresser who tries to prevent an old actor having a breakdown. Norman somehow manages to get Sir, played by Freddie Jones and Paul Rogers on stage, through a final production of King Lear. Or is it Norman who’s really collapsing?
Peter Yates was persuaded to direct a film version for profit ‘points’ rather than an up-front fee. He was also determined that Courtenay, who had played Norman 500 times on stage, would get the part on film. Yates said:
I’d been looking to do a story about the theatre for some time but all the ones I found only treated the subject of the theatre in a very peripheral way. When I saw The Dresser I immediately thought it would make a wonderful film because of it being so strongly rooted in the traditions of the theatre.9
Finney and Courtenay, who proved a magical teaming, were also persuaded to take points. Curiously, although they had ‘emerged’, as the saying goes in theatrical circles, at around the same time (the early sixties) not only had they never worked together but Finney’s recollection is that they had not met. By 1983, Courtenay had triumphed in Billy Liar, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Yet their careers had taken them on separate paths.
Courtenay and Finney quickly became buddies. In a contemporary interview Finney named three close showbiz friends: Michael Medwin, Julian Holloway and Tom Courtenay. It’s now difficult to think of any other actors who could have breathed such life into these two egomaniacs. Although Anthony Hopkins and Ian McKellen gave sensitive performances in a recent television adaptation, actors tend to be more interesting when playing old than being old.10
Courtenay was touched by Finney’s lack of grandeur:
Albert is not impressed with being a star, probably because he is still so involved with the theatre. It would have been easy for him to pull rank on me during the filming and demand a limousine and all the rest. But he has no pretensions. He rode home with me each night, discussing how to improve our scenes.11
Finney was Sir, an actor manager well past his prime, clearly modelled on Donald Wolfit for whom Harwood had once been a dresser. The play, set in the Second World War, depicts Sir’s disintegration during a German bombardment, an attack which he seems to take personally as if Hitler were trying to disrupt his performances. Other roles in the company were taken by Edward Fox and Michael Gough. Zena Walker played his long-suffering wife.
Finney, 47 when the cameras rolled, was made up to look much older with a lined face and wisps of hair covering a largely bald pate. Even Finney’s deep oak-like voice, deliciously rich and fruity, suggested an older man, perhaps helped by decades of Marlboros and fine wine. Yet Finney decided not to make Sir too decrepit. He told Michael Billington that he wanted to suggest that his character still had ‘flashes of greatness’. To that end Harwood, rather ingeniously, inserted the key scene where Sir and his troupe are late and he stops the train. Finney – we will recall – was said to have based the scene on his old RADA teacher Ernest Milton whom he remembered trying to halt a departing tram.
Finney’s Sir was an amalgam of various theatrical greats who spoke with extended vowels and the deliberate, delicate declaiming of the period. Not just Wolfit but also Wilfred Lawson and Ralph Richardson spring to mi
nd. If the delivery sounds rather like a more thunderous version of Brian Sewell, with its peculiar emphases and intonations, then this was intentional.
In some of his performances we don’t lose sight of Finney the actor. By this I mean that he is merely called upon to play ‘a personality’ as leading men are required to do. Tom Jones was the prime example. Here, however, Finney totally transforms into Sir. As he sits in front of bombed-out buildings and consoles displaced families with free tickets to the theatre – ‘I trust you will find comfort there’ – Finney looks as shell-shocked as the people he seeks to reassure. Even the phrase ‘I may do something vio … lent’ is delivered as if he’s in a daze, gripped by a mental disorder so great that even commonplace words sounds stilted.
Finney’s portrayal is a brilliant depiction of deteriorating powers and broken nerves. At times Sir looks quite ready for the asylum. ‘My name is on the door,’ he says in a peculiarly melancholy way as he enters his dressing room. When he sees his reflection and etches lines on his face to play Lear, he seems transfixed. ‘There was a time when I painted in all the lines. Now I merely deepen what is already there.’ And when Sir tells Norman, ‘you’re put through it night after night’, it’s not with the exhaustion of the factory worker but rather someone terrified of public exposure.
Finney conveys Sir’s growing stage fright and the sense of imminent collapse, the horror in his eyes as Norman tries to get him onstage. Harwood’s script is also funny in places – Sir blacking up for Othello, rather than preparing for Lear, and taking curtain calls with exaggerated false modesty. It’s a withering portrait not only of decay but of self-importance, of the kind that is impervious to reason. It’s Finney’s greatest performance on film.12 It’s difficult to think of any other international star with the presence, command and majesty to pull it off. Possibly O’Toole, but he might have made it too broad.
Courtenay’s performance is mostly brilliant too, the ideal complement to Finney’s Sir. Yet his fluttering prissiness is occasionally an overplayed hand, especially on film where the camera detects excess. In the final scene, when Sir has died and Norman is left bewailing not only his death but his exclusion from his master’s autobiography, his reaction is over theatrical. Ironically, Courtenay once commented in a recent interview that he thought there was a scene where, if Finney had played Sir on stage, he might have done it differently. One can return the compliment.
The bickering and backstabbing depicted in the movie were not part of the actual filmmaking; everyone got on superbly. Eileen Atkins, cast as Madge, recalled:
Here we were, a lot of theatre actors who suddenly struck it lucky and were in a film … they [Finney and Courtenay] have a wonderful sparring relationship in the story, gently sending each other up. They’re both lovely people. I know Albert – who introduced me to vodka – a bit better than Tom, whom I didn’t know before we started. He looks so serious. I thought he wouldn’t stand a chance against Albert because he seemed so bland.13
The Dresser undeniably had two great performances, yet two triumphs in the same film can cancel each other out come award time. Finney and Courtenay were both nominated for the best actor Oscar but Robert Duvall won for Tender Mercies.
Critics rightly hailed the film and the performances but most, again rightly, gave Finney the edge. Richard Schickel, in Time, called Finney ‘a revelation’. David Robinson in The Times agreed:
The marvel of the film is Albert Finney’s performance. It is the kind of fruity role that might tempt an actor to get by with the easy superficial effect but Finney intimates unfathomable depths. This old man really appears to have a past, a soul, secrets. By turns his mind and intellect surface into the light, wily and autocratic, and then recede again beyond pursuit – and all the coming and goings are visible in his eyes. The gestures are large and theatrical but the nuances infinite.
Roger Ebert wrote, ‘Sir is played by Albert Finney who manages to look far older than his 47 years and yet to create a physical bravura that’s ideal for the role.’ Ebert went on to call it ‘the best sort of drama, fascinating us on the surface with colour and humour and esoteric detail, and then revealing the truth underneath.’ Ebert nailed it, and The Dresser is my favourite Finney film, not least because it shows his Lear that never was.
Yates summed up Finney’s appeal:
Finney maintains his sharpness and enthusiasm by taking on challenging roles and treating his job as a craft. The Dresser required him to put forth great effort to meet the challenge. I see so many actors become bored and finally angry at themselves, because they do things for money that they don’t care about. Albert won’t do that.14
Orson Welles let it be known that he had been hoping to film The Dresser.15 He thought that Michael Caine would have been good as Norman. He also said that Ralph Richardson would have made an excellent Sir. But it was Richardson’s bad luck, or Finney’s good luck, that Richardson was 80 by the time The Dresser started filming, and, sadly, Sir Ralph died shortly afterwards.
The Dresser also marked the beginning of the end of Finney’s relationship with Diana Quick. Finney always liked to flirt. Petronella Wyatt, in an interview with the Daily Mail in 2013, recalled an encounter with Finney in about 1983:
He was a keen racegoer and at the time we met, my father [Woodrow Wyatt] was chairman of the Tote. Finney often lunched in our private room at various race courses. I was 15, but looked older, when he turned to me over the Chablis and began to pay me extravagant compliments.
‘You look like the young Liza Minnelli. She was a very sexy woman,’ he told me on one occasion, then, possibly inadvertently, placed his hand on my thigh.
‘May I take you out during your school half-term?’ he asked.
‘Yes, please,’ I gushed.
My fury knew no bounds when I told my mother about the invitation and she forbade any such meeting on the grounds that Finney had a regular girlfriend, the actress Diana Quick.16
But by 1983 Diana was no longer with Finney (and it’s possible that Petronella Wyatt’s account came after their break-up). Finney’s new girlfriend was Cathryn Harrison, the granddaughter of Rex Harrison, who played stage assistant Irene in the film. Quick’s next long-time partner was Bill Nighy, who hit the big time with his portrayal of a fading rock star in Love Actually.
Finney should have been on a roll after The Dresser. It was strange then that he agreed to play Pope John Paul. The lacklustre script can’t have been the deal clincher – standing up to Communism, keeping spiritual values when religion is effectively banned, and rising to become the first Polish Pope should have made a compelling story. Yet there was little to hold the attention in Herbert Wise’s plodding and murky-looking biopic which occupied Finney during the spring of 1983. The film has little dramatic cohesion, instead a surfeit of close-ups of sombre-looking characters and earnest deliberations.
Pope John Paul was filmed in Graz, Austria. Michael Crompton played the young Karol Wojtyla. He remembered Finney’s advice at the first read-through in London: ‘Albert had agreed to read with all of us. I was incredibly nervous, but Albert told me to “relax and just speak it, the camera will do the rest.” Anyway I got the part, probably because I looked more like Albert than the others.’
Crompton recalled Finney quickly learning the name of every crew member and treating new cast members to dinner. Towards the end of the meal Finney would suddenly disappear, only to return with the news that the restaurant owner had decided to cover the cost because he liked his guests so much. This was just an Albertian ruse. Finney, alias the Pope, was being his usual generous self.
Finney captured the cadences of speech, presence and wisdom of the Pope,17 and he’s well supported by a team of old pros – Malcolm Tierney, Nigel Hawthorne and Alfred Burke. Yet somehow it all comes across as laborious. It also strains credibility to see Finney playing the Pope from such a young age. Even moments when the Pope and his supporters stand up to the authorities lack punch. ‘How can I talk to someone who doesn
’t recognise we [the Church] exist?’ Finney asks a minister in the Polish government when they try to resolve a dispute over a holy site. More baleful stares.
Finney was always more Churchillian than papal, a sensualist not an ascetic. Thankfully, Finney’s next film, which would reunite him with John Huston, was to prove far more ambitious and test him to the limit. Lee Marvin, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the drunken gunslinger in Cat Ballou, used to joke that he’d had a lifetime of experience. Could Finney, the consummate connoisseur of fine wines, fall to the challenge of playing a shambolic drunk? It was time for his second act with Huston.
17
SOUSED IN MEXICO
I kinda loved John. He was like a second father to me in many ways, which I know may sound odd considering I was 45 when I first worked with him, but when you had to say goodbye there was always this feeling of loss, that terrible sadness that you’d be deprived of his company.
Albert Finney.
I once entered the home of author Malcolm Lowry1 in the idyllic-looking town of Ripe, East Sussex, where he was living at the time of his death in 1957. Lowry, destroyed by drink and depression, had retreated there on doctor’s orders. The cottage, with its low ceilings and exquisite vantage point, took the word ‘quaint’ to the extreme, but when you entered the master bedroom, you had a tangible sensation of its tormented resident.
Lowry’s great novel Under the Volcano had fascinated, and frustrated, filmmakers for years. It has been acclaimed so often as a masterpiece that it may deter people from reading it. (And much of the praise probably comes from people who think Lowry was the famous painter!)2 Many believed that this story of self-destruction, essentially a portrayal of ever advancing drunkenness, defied filming.
Lowry inhabited his own drink-sodden hell. A chronic, incurable dipsomaniac, he suffered from what he claimed was a kind of ‘free-floating anxiety neurosis’ which he variously blamed on sadistic nannies, locker room ridicule at school and an authoritarian upbringing. He was a man who wrote about what he knew, so it’s no surprise that alcoholism should be Volcano’s theme.
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