Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Sadly for Huston, who tried hard to promote the film at Cannes the following year, the film did not win the awards he hoped for. Many felt it was the old warhorse’s last stab at glory. Finney, however, secured another Oscar nomination, his fourth in the leading actor category. The other nominees were Jeff Bridges in Starman, Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields and Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham (the eventual winner) in Amadeus. Speaking in February 1985, just before the Academy Awards, Finney said the only performance he had seen was Waterston’s. ‘I thought he was very good and I think that it’s encouraging that a serious film such as that is doing so well, a serious film that didn’t cost 50 or 60 million dollars’.

  Finney was never concerned with awards and was a selective filmgoer (among his favourites were the Godfather films and ET), saying only that he liked to see smaller, independent productions breaking through. ‘One of the big differences today – one of the attitudes I don’t like – is that it has to be all or nothing. Nobody will take a chance on a relatively small little movie with a small budget. There’s an insistence on having the big winner every time.’

  As for his own movies, rather like grown-up children Finney always said that they made their own way in the world with a pat on the back and best wishes. David Warner once recalled Finney telling him, once they’re in the can, you can only move on and hope for the best: ‘One main hit, that’s all you can hope for’.

  By the time Huston was at Cannes, Finney had wooed critics in London by directing and starring in a stage production that was neither a play nor a transcript of a trial but somehow a combination of both. As ever, Finney was determined to break new ground. The Biko Inquest would shame the South African government.

  18

  BARING BIKO

  I like to observe people rather than be observed.

  Albert Finney.

  Finney’s reputation was running high, fresh on critical plaudits for The Dresser and Under the Volcano, when Andrew Eaton, chief press officer at Hammersmith’s Riverside Theatre, took a call from a Sunday newspaper. A journalist was enquiring whether it was true that Finney was starring as Steve Biko in the new production entitled The Biko Inquest.1

  Before we laugh too much, we must remember that Finney was once, back in the sixties, offered the part of Gandhi by Richard Attenborough.2 When Barry Norman once put to him that he couldn’t quite picture Finney as Gandhi, Finney replied, wryly, ‘I couldn’t see myself either, irrespective of how many years I spent at a health farm.’ Anthony Hopkins felt similarly. When he was offered the part, his father apparently said, ‘so it’s going to be a comedy, is it?’ Parents can bring you down to earth. There was, of course, no chance of Finney playing Biko because the production in question focused on events surrounding the inquiry into Biko’s tragic death in custody in South Africa 1977.

  Critics were rightly impressed by The Biko Inquest. They poured out of the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith on opening night, heads bowed in deep contemplation, fascinated, yet appalled. What had they just seen? The word ‘play’ hardly applied here. Some of Britain’s finest actors, including Finney, had staged an abridged reconstruction based on actual transcripts of the inquest into Biko’s death. Biko, incarcerated under the notorious Section Six of the Terrorism Act, had been kept naked and chained in his cell and died three weeks later, the forty-sixth detainee to die in police custody. Although testimony in the two-week hearing was condensed into just two hours, a version ‘written’, or rather edited, by Jon Blair and Norman Fenton, every word heard at Riverside had been uttered at the inquest itself.

  The Biko Inquest was the first venture of the newly formed United British Artists (UBA), a partnership of Finney, Glenda Jackson, Richard Johnson, Peter Shaw, John Hurt, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith and producer Peter Wood, and backed by Lou Grade’s Embassy Communications. The model was clearly the American film company United Artists, founded in 1919 by Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and D.W. Griffiths. UBA was formed with the aim of mounting West End stage shows and then adapting them for video, cable and television with the awareness that barriers between media were fast dissolving. It was the first time that exclusively British performers had banded together in this way.

  Ever since UBA’s creation in early 1983, a series of board meetings had been convened to discuss what to produce next. When Finney spoke to the press, clad in a neat transatlantic blue suit, looking rather like a CEO addressing his company, he said that UBA had unanimously agreed to produce The Biko Inquest and that Richard Johnson, its chairman and chief executive, had chosen him to direct and play the lead in it. ‘I delightedly agreed to accept the dual engagement,’ he said.

  Finney played Sydney Kentridge, the barrister for the Biko family. He decided to play the proceedings straight, without attempting accents. Famous names were in support. John Standing was the prosecuting attorney, Van Rensburg; Nigel Davenport, he of the scowling countenance, was ideal to play the brutal chief of police, Colonel Goosen (Goosen even accused black suspects of inflicting brain injuries on themselves!). Michael Aldridge was especially good as Dr Tuckern, chief district surgeon, the embodiment of evasion and cunning – giving a false, sly smile to the judge to disguise his discomfort as Kentridge destroys his reputation.

  The South African authorities were involved in a spectacular cover-up, their behaviour all the more abhorrent for their casual dismissal of Biko’s horrific injuries. The play had a trickle of black humour. Davenport triggers laughter when he maintains that ‘no assault charges have ever been brought against my assaulting team’. Kentridge’s onslaught is forensic and relentless: ‘Why don’t you note it when you keep a man in chains?’, ‘What methods of “persuasion” did you use?’, ‘Why did you order that he be kept naked?’ He was also a master of sarcasm: ‘Surely he [Biko] had a pleasant and comfortable night?’, ‘Is there anyone else you would like to smear before I ask the next question?’

  The official version, that Biko’s death resulted from a self-inflicted injury and not a punishment beating, is shown to be absurd. The evasiveness of the witnesses, the deliberate concealment of barbarity, is clear. This makes the judge’s verdict, which absolved the security services of any wrongdoing, all the more shocking. And we must stress again that all this actually happened. Blair and Fenton’s script contains no fiction – every word uttered on stage was heard at the inquest.

  Finney analysed Kentridge’s intention in the face of obvious establishment lies, ‘I think he felt that over the period of thirteen days that after a few days it would be difficult to get a result and concentrated on how Biko was treated by the security branch and the studied lack of curiosity into his welfare’. Finney, sporting a red tie and handkerchief, scrutinising witnesses over half-moon spectacles, made you believe he was, if not Kentridge (who was physically dissimilar to Finney) then at least an incisive investigating lawyer. Indeed, the proceedings at the Riverside were so compelling that the real Kentridge, in the audience on the first night, kept wanting to intercede. ‘I remember sitting behind him and every time the magistrate called for Mr Kentridge, I could see him virtually springing to his feet, then realising that it was, in fact, Albert who was being called,’ said Jon Blair.3

  Bernard Levin, also in the first-night audience, corroborated this story in The Times. He thought Finney was superb:

  A portrayal that hardly ever touches anger, let alone stridency or melodrama; even the forensic use of sarcasm, in which Kentridge is a master when defending South Africa’s victims, is touched so lightly as to be almost indiscernible. And yet, Kentridge, the latest in that long line of lawyers from Cicero to Clarence Darrow, who have served truth against its enemies, comes to full life on the stage, indicting wickedness in words of fire that burn the more savagely for being so carefully doused.

  Irving Wardle, also in The Times, praised the entire cast:

  Davenport’s police colonel, John Standing’s attorney general, Michael Aldridge’s district surgeon and the rest are dignified serva
nts of the state, conscious of being put in an unusual position, but utterly convinced of the rectitude of their case and blithely unaware of putting their foot in it.

  The Biko Inquest made the South African regime, already unpopular, even more of a pariah. Yet Blair thought it had a more universal message. ‘The play is just as much about how people are treated by security systems everywhere’, a statement that resonates even more in 2017. As for Finney’s performance, Blair encapsulates it in a word – ‘Brilliant!’

  For Finney it was a rare foray into a ‘message’ play. Yet he was not a political animal, ‘I don’t believe I could convince anybody that I completely believe anything,’ he once said.4 The Biko Inquest was subsequently filmed and shown on Channel 4. Jon Blair thought it a faithful rendition of the stage version (and it is the screen version on which I base my opinion of the production).

  After The Biko Inquest, Finney had another successful stage outing in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, John Arden’s ballad play, with songs and dances galore, set in the 1880s during a pit strike in a northern town. Finney played Musgrave and also directed. The production also included Max Wall whom Finney had bumped into during the run of The Biko Inquest at the Riverside. He offered him the role of the bargee. Wall resisted, pointing out that he had just recovered from sciatica, but Finney insisted.

  Irving Wardle liked the production. ‘Finney, more than anyone, holds the fable on course with energy and smouldering resolve. It’s a great moment when this ramrod figure finally unbends into the creaking dance of carnage on the market place, under a skeleton festooned granite obelisk,’ he wrote in The Times.

  Michael Ratcliffe in The Observer said that the production had opened before it was ready but paid tribute to ‘a spectacular role for Finney once his directorial responsibilities are shed’. Finney, in sideburns and ruddy-cheeked, looking like a younger version of the Uncle Silas character he was to portray fifteen years later, was generally praised for his acting. Michael Billington, while not uncritical of the production, said it was ‘held together by Finney’s doughty performance’.

  After a hectic schedule by Finney’s standards, five movies and two stage productions, directing as well as starring, it was time for an extended break. Finney went skiing in Idaho but spent most of the time at racing venues. By 1985, Finney owned nine horses in America alone, as well as two brood mares in Ireland. Finney was a regular visitor to Ocala, northern Florida, to inspect his prize 3-year-old stallion, Yaw, who was being trained and stabled at Wooden Horse Stud Farm in Reddick. In Ocala he would stay with his good friends Mickey and Karen Taylor, owners of Seattle Slew (1974–2002) one of only eleven racehorses ever to win the Triple Crown, at Wooden Horse Stud Farm. By 1986, Finney owned nine foals by him. He came nearest to glory with Synastry, which was reckoned to have a chance in the Kentucky Derby until a knee gave way.

  Local journalists found Finney modest and unassuming. When he gave interviews, he was always accommodating, yet he seldom granted them. ‘I usually don’t do interviews or anything unless it’s related to some project I’m working on,’ he told the Ocala Star-Banner:

  Between films I don’t get involved in all that. I don’t see myself as a marketable person, a commercial product. I see myself as simply an actor – sometimes I’m not even sure about that! I don’t get recognised that much because the characters I’ve done tend to look very different from me – either in make-up or disguised somehow. I like being anonymous, though. I like to observe people rather than be observed.

  For all Finney’s bonhomie and good humour, we sense that he was the watcher in the woods when off-duty. As he neared 50, he was about to score his biggest stage hit in years courtesy of a groundbreaking play, one that would see him hailed for capturing ‘the baleful watchfulness of a cat-like outsider’.

  19

  ORPHANS

  All you needed was a little encouragement.

  Albert Finney as Harold in Orphans.

  It was the final scene of Finney’s performance as Harold at London’s Hampstead Theatre, then a 173-seater hall1 that looked like a more suitable setting for a school play than a venue for one of Britain’s greatest actors. Finney, all shot-up and dying, was slumped on a sofa while Kevin Anderson, playing Phillip, nestled at his feet. Suddenly the tears rolled down my face; then I heard a gentle sobbing from some other theatregoers. That’s when I knew – this was a true HIT!

  Finney’s old buddy Michael Medwin had first alerted Finney to a new play at New York’s Manhattan Theatre Club. Lyle Kessler’s Orphans was being staged by Steppenwolf, an innovative theatrical company set up in 1976 in Chicago. Its productions were marked by great verve and energy, often to thunderous musical accompaniment and acrobatics. Founding members included John Malkovich, Joan Allen and Gary Sinise.

  Orphans was a simple play with great profundities. Or was it a complicated play masquerading as a simple one? That was one of the questions that preoccupied audiences and critics. Finney was entranced by it and set about negotiating a transfer to London. Orphans was duly brought to this small off-West End theatre in Swiss Cottage. Michael Attenborough was then artistic director at Hampstead Theatre. ‘It wasn’t unknown for commercial producers to bring a play to such a small theatre. It was a convenient thing from their point of view,’ he said.2

  Before that, Finney had also visited Steppenwolf in Chicago where, true to form, he soon proved a hit with everyone from the actors to the backstage crew. He even helped out at the box office, taking reservations and answering phones. It was this ‘regular guy’ persona, his sheer down-to-earthness, attested to in too many stories for it to be insincere, which always made Finney so popular. Ellen Ross, a volunteer fundraiser for Steppenwolf, who won the accolade of sitting next to him at a special dinner in Chicago, recalled that Finney spoke a lot about the ladies – mentioning, jokingly, that he liked to look over his son Simon’s girlfriends – and, especially, horses. She asked to keep his place card at the dinner as a souvenir. She still prizes it.

  Kessler’s play centred on two orphaned brothers living in a derelict house in Philadelphia. Phillip, an agoraphobic, is dominated by his bullying, violent, thieving older sibling, Treat. One day, Treat mugs and kidnaps a Chicago businessman, Harold, who turns out to be a wealthy mobster on the run. Finney played Harold, Jeff Fahey played Treat and Kevin Anderson played Phillip (Anderson had done the original Chicago and New York production of the play and won many awards), Gary Sinise directed. (Sinise later became famous for playing the lead in the TV series CSI: New York for many years.)

  Rather as in Joseph Losey’s film The Servant, the balance of power shifts, not gradually but rather rapidly in this case. Harold turns the tables first on Phillip and then Treat, becoming their mentor, master and a kind of surrogate father. The play’s key theme is the transformation of Phillip, a shambling, cringing wreck living under his brother’s fist, into a more assertive hoodlum under Harold’s guidance.

  London theatre, just like any business, is subject to the vagaries of the economic climate as well as the availability of box office names. The mid-eighties was boom time. In 1985, Anthony Hopkins had won over the critics at the National as the reptilian newspaper magnate Lambert Le Roux in Pravda, a performance which John Gielgud hailed as one of the best he had ever seen. The following year Hopkins gained more moderate reviews, but ones many actors would still aspire to, in King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra.

  Around the same time Finney’s buddy Martin Sheen was starring in a wonderful and informative play, The Normal Heart, at the Royal Court, one that brought discussion of AIDS out into the open. Charlton Heston played to full crowds in The Caine Mutiny Court Martial. Lauren Bacall was offering old-style star quality in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. Derek Jacobi triumphed in Breaking the Code as Alan Turing (while Benedict Cumberbatch was still in short trousers!). Peter O’Toole was enjoying a renaissance of a sort (still restoring his reputation from his 1980 debacle in Macbeth) in George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple
Cart. Finney’s old mucker, Colin Blakely, was in Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Disapproval, a rollicking play within a play. Later that year, 1986, Jack Lemmon would win good reviews in Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Haymarket, albeit straining to be heard at the back of the theatre.

  These productions were popular with critics and theatregoers but – and this is perhaps the acid test, is it not? – with the possible exception of A Chorus of Disapproval, I’d be hard pressed to remember key lines or scenes from the productions. A mega-hit play is tangible from the beginning. It’s partly a combination of a good script, fine actors and sharp direction. Yet even these elements combined do not guarantee a winner. The rest is that intangible electricity, a kind of energy that suffuses the theatre, a fusion between cast and audience in which spectators come to feel part of the proceedings. It’s as though the audience is being led on to the stage by a caressing, invisible hand.

  Such was the feeling at the Hampstead Theatre in March 1986. And, to the credit of the other actors, it was not just Finney. From the moment Fahey walked on, hectoring and tormenting his younger brother, Orphans felt special. Orphans marked the first time I had seen Finney so close up, and I was sitting at the front. What struck me was Finney’s sheer size, his broad shoulders and barrel chest, the large leonine head, pink cheeks and challenging, mischievous eyes. Finney was looking quite plump by 1986 (and perhaps his tight gangster’s suit accentuated it) but it did not diminish his power. He has one of those forceful faces, likened to ‘a sensitive potato’ by one of those critics who have the luxury of penning such unforgettable descriptions. Also ‘a friendly face’, as Phillip says in Orphans. Finney’s voice was warm and penetrating but not forced. Anderson and Fahey were extremely good, but Finney was the person one noticed.