Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Something I remember from the performance I saw, a couple of weeks after opening night, was the final curtain call amid a rapturous ovation. Christien Anholt sought guidance from Finney on how to handle it – whether he should come back for a further bow. Finney kept eye contact with him throughout, leading him through his paces, as if to say ‘I’m here for you’.6

  Finney also took Another Time to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 1991. Molly Regan and Terry Kinney co-starred in a production that launched a new multi-million dollar theatre in Halsted Street. ‘Finney is a master actor, and anyone who finds himself in Chicago should consider spending the couple of hours of Another Time with him,’ said The Washington Post’s Lloyd Rose. Rose noted, somewhat dryly, that Finney:

  Could have been a movie star. He had the looks. He had the force. He had the sexiness. And, oh yeah, the talent. When Albert Finney played the lead in the film of Tom Jones back in 1963, it looked as if he were on his way to becoming an international star and sex symbol. Then it turned out that he wanted to act.

  This backhanded compliment – the reverse of those who said that Finney had forsaken the classics for an easy life – proved that a celebrity simply can’t win whatever path he chooses. Someone will always censure you when you are in the public arena.

  Finney’s ‘idol’, Laurence Olivier, had died in July 1989, the mentor who had handed Finney a poisoned chalice by describing him as ‘the greatest actor of his generation’. Finney attended a star-studded memorial service in Westminster Abbey on 20 October. Among the celebrities were Michael Caine, Peter O’Toole, Frank Finlay, Peggy Ashcroft, Alec Guinness, Jack Lemmon, Richard Attenborough, Jill Bennett, Gordon Jackson, Dorothy Tutin and John Gielgud. Finney read from Ecclesiastes, ‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens, a time to be born and a time to die …’

  Even at memorial services theatrical people judge each other. Lindsay Anderson wrote that Finney read the lesson ‘very badly, in a plummy, upper crust Shakespearean manner’. Anderson also disliked the whole affair, describing the train of celebrities carrying souvenirs from Olivier’s performances as a ‘po-faced procession of notables’. He thought, perhaps correctly, that Gielgud was the most eloquent performer, giving a moving rendition of Donne’s sonnet ‘Death Be Not Proud’. (Gielgud also read the same poem at Richard Burton’s memorial service.)

  Gielgud’s voice carried with it a kind of lyricism and musicality, once likened to an A-string on a violin by Robert Hardy. For all Finney’s outstanding talents as an actor – his facility for transformation, his gift to inhabit a character completely, the sheer power he summons on stage – his is not, essentially, a finely tuned classical voice in the tradition of Olivier, Gielgud or Burton. He is, rather, a brilliant modern actor but speaking verse is not his forte.

  So who was the obvious successor to Olivier? There was no obvious answer; Finney was determined to go his own way.

  21

  DIGGING DEEP

  They don’t keep asking De Niro when he’s going to play Lear, do they?

  Albert Finney.

  Finney became pudgier and redder-faced with each outing as he entered his fifties. It didn’t detract from his appeal. Nevertheless the actor who entertained BBC viewers on Sunday nights in the autumn of 1990 in Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man (directed by Elijah Moshinsky who had also directed Another Time) was a long way from Tom Jones. This was true dirty old man territory. Yet Finney, as a hysterical hotelier with penchant for rich food, good whisky and three-in-a-bed romps, was charm personified.

  Amis incited madness in his devotees. In the early nineties, fans used to wait outside his home in Regent’s Park Road, hoping for a glimpse as he hauled his great bulk down the steps. Young writers would follow him to his local pub to beg him to read their jottings. Those who did were given short shrift.

  ‘I know it would be an imposition to …’

  ‘Yes, it is!’ Amis would bellow back.

  Or, ‘I know it’s rude to interrupt you …’

  ‘So why are you doing it then?’

  But perhaps this was all part of the fun, to then slouch home knowing that the irascible literary giant had deigned to scream at them. (I had a friend who would visit a wine emporium in Regent’s Park Road, ostensibly for tastings, but really because the store lay directly opposite Amis’s home. When Amis passed away, in 1995, my friend said that trips to the premises would never be the same.)

  Amis, like many writers, tended to repeat his favourite themes. The middle-aged male protagonist would be a heavy drinker and womaniser, usually undergoing some kind of crisis. And so it was with Maurice Allington in The Green Man, a novel of sex and the supernatural to which Finney had purchased the rights twenty years earlier. But Finney was then too young to play Allington. By 1990 the time was right.

  Allington is visited by ghosts and beds the wife (Sarah Berger) of a doctor friend (Nicky Henson) who orders him to lay off the hard stuff. Yet Allington’s main preoccupation is sex. ‘When are you going to let me make love to you?’ Finney asks Berger before they take a romp in the fields.

  Nicky Henson, one of Finney’s co-stars, remembers Finney’s helpfulness during filming:

  As in my time at the National 10 years before, Albert was particularly helpful to me, and in fact he’s always been a bit of a guiding influence professionally to me. On The Green Man I was doing a very difficult scene with him, just a two-hander, and about half way through I was getting in quite a state about it. But Albert felt it. After about a third take, when I’d messed up again, Albert put a hand on my elbow. ‘Calm down; it’s OK.’ It was a sensitive thing to do and helped me a lot.1

  The Green Man proved diverting, if perhaps not ultra-compelling entertainment. Finney’s lovable old lecher was the whole show.

  Moshinsky also directed Reflected Glory,2 a curio play about sibling rivalry, again scripted by Harwood but not as successful as Another Time. Finney and Stephen Moore were bickering brothers. Finney said that an encounter with his sister reminded him of problems between siblings:

  What can happen in one’s mid-50s is one can be bugged by something they [siblings] say that makes you react as if you were six. I was reminded of this a year ago when I was spending some time with one of my sisters. What she said and how she said it made me feel like a child. It may have been totally accidental on her part. That’s the thing. It’s hard to pull the wool over their eyes because they have seen you go through all sorts of things when you are growing up.

  In 1992, during the run of Reflected Glory, Finney made his second appearance on the Wogan Show. This time Finney appeared friendlier, perhaps because he appeared alongside Coronation Street’s Barbara Knox. Wogan broached a subject which probably irked Finney and his many admirers. Had he fulfilled his promise? Interviewers, perhaps mindful of sounding pompous, often couched the question to make it sound like the view of a (nameless) third party. It goes like this: ‘The trouble with being hailed as the next Olivier is that, in the view of certain people, you have not quite …’ A wordy euphemism for: ‘When will you be carrying Cordelia at the Old Vic?’

  Finney explained his attitude to Wogan, ‘I’ve done a lot of new plays in my career. I like doing classics from time to time but if you wear tights all your life you walk funny. I like to do modern things.’ He subsequently developed a stock answer, ‘They don’t keep asking De Niro when he’s going to play Lear, do they?’

  Finney said that he was deliberately pacing himself, hence his penchant for taking time off. ‘I want to be acting when I’m 90. I don’t have to do it all this week.’ He also told Wogan – with a nod to the tough times in 1992 – that the recession had forced him to sell a racehorse or two.

  Reflected Glory opened to respectable reviews. It was the usual Harwood mix of family banter, unresolved jealousies and cheerful disharmony. None of it could be taken too seriously. And that perhaps was part of the problem; audiences paying hefty prices expected more than froth
.

  The run ended prematurely with Finney claiming that the producers, the Mark Furness Company, had not paid him, so he simply withdrew from the role. An article in the Independent which had earlier alleged that Finney had refused to go on despite a suitcase of money being delivered to his door, was later corrected. ‘Finney left the show when substantial sums due to him and other principals remained unpaid. There was no suitcase of money,’ reported the newspaper. This seems to have been the definitive version.

  Finney was usually generous. Sporadic acts of largesse were one thing; being unpaid for services rendered was different. And Finney had an eye for business. In 1990, he had written to John Osborne to inform him that he was taking legal action against Woodfall Films for royalties still owed from Tom Jones. The sum, owed jointly by Osborne and Richardson, was about £75,000. Finney’s letter explained that he was ‘writing for old time’s sake’ and ended, ‘Hope you are busy, well and heading towards the year 2000 in good heart’. Osborne, although debt-ridden by then, did not dispute the sum. Richardson, however, was appalled. ‘He’s had enough already,’ he reportedly said,3 referring to the share of profits that had made Finney so rich.

  Approached by a mutual friend to forgive the debt, Finney refused. Unsurprisingly, Osborne, the master of vituperation, had some choice words for Finney. Reportedly, he sent him a note, headed ‘with the compliments of John Osborne’, adding, ‘I only hope one of your fucking racehorse tramples you to death’.4 Finney, in a letter to Osborne’s biographer, John Heilpern, denied any bad feeling between them. In his view, it was all ‘my eye and Betty Martin’, i.e. nonsense. However, Osborne’s widow, Helen, banned Finney, along with Peter Hall, theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh and playwright Arnold Wesker from attending Osborne’s memorial service in June 1995 (Osborne had died in December 1994).

  Finney, throughout his career, always conveyed the sense of being a jobbing actor. The size of the role was usually immaterial. So was – that awful word – the ‘commercial’ appeal of a project. What mattered was that a part was meaty. Sometimes that led him to appear in seldom-seen films. The Playboys was one such, but who wouldn’t want to act alongside the beautiful and talented Robin Wright?

  The Playboys was a rich period piece, filmed in Redhills, near Cavan in Northern Ireland, and directed by Gillies MacKinnon, in which Finney played an embittered policeman unhinged by his unrequited love for Tara (Robin Wright). Wright starred as an unwed mother whose charms even drove one suitor to suicide. She excited the entire male population, especially Aidan Quinn, playing Tom Casey, a member of a troupe of travelling players who offered some broad farce that included scenes from Gone with the Wind. Veteran actor Milo O’Shea played Freddie, the leader of the players, a part that had originally been offered to Finney. Finney declined what was a peripheral role, the light relief to a sombre story. So MacKinnon offered him Sergeant Hegarty, a dour, dried-out drunkard determined to marry Wright by whom he has fathered a baby after a roll in the hay.

  When Quinn appears, a charming younger suitor who wins over Tara after some typically headstrong ‘Oirish’ recalcitrance, Hegarty cracks. Nothing, and nobody, will stop him marrying Tara. He has even fashioned a crib for the baby. ‘Don’t drive another soul to drink and despair,’ the priest warns Tara, but it’s too late. There is a touch of Lear about Hegarty. ‘Marry me or I’ll go mad,’ he tells her.

  Back on the booze, and even baby-snatching, Hegarty takes a predictable beating from Casey. And Finney again displays his ability to play a drunk ‘straight’ without bleary-eyed vagueness. Looking fierce and determined, yet with the vacant look of a demented bull, moving steadily but losing accuracy with each swing, the defeat prompts his (self)-expulsion from the town.

  Although over-the-hill for the part, perhaps even by fifteen years, Finney brings a stone-faced, rocklike quality to Hegarty. He suggests a man without self-knowledge, driven by animal-like grief. Yet that is not the whole story. It’s his baby, after all, and we feel he’s entitled to be bitter. It’s an underrated film and Finney’s policeman is a sad, wretched character. Carolyn Seymour, who had appeared with Finney in Gumshoe, thinks it was one of his finest screen performances. ‘That was him at his best, a real lesson in film acting. My heart moved.’5

  Finney’s part took just three weeks but, as usual, the locals found him a generous host. MacKinnon remembers:

  Albert Finney is a true gentleman. Before we started he took me to one side and offered some advice. I thanked him. He said ‘That’s okay. It’s your first feature film and you need all the help you can get.’ And he meant it, it was a generous gesture. Albert had the amazing ability to memorise the names of the whole crew and all the local villagers. This ability to treat everyone with respect and consideration earned him great affection. One Sunday he hired a coach and took the whole crew to the races. I slept through that event unfortunately. Our night off on the borders of Ireland usually sparked off a party which lasted until dawn. When we wrapped, Albert Finney was arrested by Shaun, the local policeman. He was arrested for impersonating a policeman and for drinking on duty. The joke ran all the way to the prison cells, where Albert finally put his foot down and demanded an unconditional release.

  MacKinnon said he owed a lot to Finney:

  Whenever he came to the set to start a scene he would always ask the continuity girl: ‘What time is it?’ By this, he meant the time in the actual story. He very quickly had a nuts-and-bolts grasp of the part. I was under a lot of pressure and often had to settle for just one or two takes and he was always very co-operative.

  It was the first time Finney had played a policeman. ‘I’m at the sort of age where I’m not going to get the girl, so it seemed an attractive possibility, really,’ he said at the time. Some locals got so used to seeing him dressed as a policeman that they mistook him for one. Finney recalled, ‘One old fella, who’d been in the pub all day, came tiptoeing past me while we were shooting, and whispered, “Is it all right if I go and talk to me mate over there?”.’ Another time, cars coming from two directions had converged and caused a jam in the village; Finney, in his sergeant’s stripes, directed traffic and eased the bottleneck. No one challenged his authority. All in all, it was a fun experience for Finney. ‘I like films about a family or community in a defined area, and you get to know that world,’ he said.

  Janet Maslin, reviewing the film for the New York Times, thought Finney brought gravitas to the part. ‘Finney, looking puffy and ravaged in the role of a policeman who has lost much of himself to drink (and whose obsessive interest in Tara somehow offers the chance of redemption) brings a furious buried intensity to Hegarty’s longing.’ John Walker called it ‘a soap opera-style narrative of thwarted love, of interest mainly for its performances’. Alexander Walker described it as ‘a heartbreak tragedy wrapped up inside an ingratiating comedy’. That it was.

  Finney told Barry Norman on Film ’92 a funny story about coverage of the filming. The local Cavan newspaper, aside from reporting on the presence of distinguished actors such as O’Shea and Finney, also commented that ‘the star of the film was Robin Wright who’s now married to Sean Penn who used to be married to Maradona [sic]’.

  In the same interview Finney said that he was unbothered by praise or damnation:

  I’m a working guy. I just want to go on working. I hope to remain promising until I stop. If you believe the good things people say, you must also believe the bad things people say. It’s best to believe none of it and go your own way and don’t ever take it as a sort of burden.

  Referring, yet again, to the Olivier mantle, Finney told Norman, ‘it’s nonsense, just one person’s response … it’s only a point of view, entirely subjective. You must never believe what people say about you, good, bad or indifferent.’

  Finney, who once, perhaps with tongue in cheek, had told Norman to mind his own business when the critic had advised him to do more films, ignored perceptions. Doubtless he would have agreed with Charlton Heston who, reacting to some gr
udging reviews when he starred in A Man for all Seasons in London in 1988, told Terry Wogan:

  I was once doing a play with Laurence Olivier and we got – and maybe deserved – very bad notices. As we shared a bottle of brandy, I said to Olivier. ‘I guess you learn to ignore the bad notices.’ Olivier took my hand and said ‘Chuck, it’s just as important to ignore the good ones.’

  Finney’s next film, Bruce Beresford’s Rich in Love, was a story that may have looked interesting on the page, yet it was unspeakably bland in the final cut. A slender story of marital desertion, adaptation and acceptance (by the team who directed and wrote Driving Miss Daisy) it teamed Finney, as wealthy retiree Warren Odom, with Jill Clayburgh as his wife, Helen. At the outset she abandons the family’s seaside home in South Carolina and disappears. After his wife’s desertion, Warren spends his days doing little household chores, moping around the garden and munching mayonnaise and crisp sandwiches.

  It comes as no surprise that Clayburgh has left him. There are few surprises in Rich in Love at all. We somehow know that Warren, after the initial shock, will pull himself together, stop whining and start living. Predictably, the attention of an attractive neighbour (Piper Laurie) makes him clean up his act. He even starts pulling the hairs of out his nostrils. Homemade cake, trips to bookshops, some nostalgic video rentals and he starts to adjust. Meanwhile, his wife turns out to be living in a nearby beach hut. ‘Being married to him was killing me. When he retired he was always there. It was all so permanent. We carried love to its conclusion,’ she explains to their daughter. Doubtless this would have chimed with Finney’s real life credo!