Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  The main cast arrived in Dublin and I arranged a dinner with Michael, Albert and Tara in their hotel for that evening. I’d spent the day putting together detailed notes on all their characters. This was my first theatrical feature film and I was nervous as hell, so I wanted to be as fully prepared as possible. I shut myself away in my Dublin apartment, cut off all television and radio contact, and got to work. The hotel was a short walk from where I was staying, so I left for the dinner in good time – or so I’d thought. When I arrived I could see from a distance Albert, Michael and Tara sitting at a table in the corner. I could also see that they were eating. I was confused, and a little disappointed – why would they meet early and then order their meal without me? As I approached I heard Albert say, ‘ah … here he is’. ‘Am I late?’ I said, knowing (or believing) that I was not. ‘Only an hour’ said Michael, ‘but no matter, come and join us’. I looked at them utterly confused. ‘But we said 7 p.m.’ I said, ‘and it’s just five to seven now’. ‘Five to eight’ said Tara. ‘The clocks went forward last night’. ‘The clocks …’ I looked at them in disbelief, reddening with embarrassment. I’d been shut away for the day and had absolutely no idea that the clocks had changed.

  After the initial awkwardness, filming went well. Gambon told Krishnamma beforehand that he could say anything he wanted to Finney who always welcomed suggestions. And so indeed it proved, according to the director:

  Attitudes often trickle down from the top and spread – and so it was with Albert being at the top of the acting tree. His warm reception to me as a fledgling director, quiet understanding and respect of my method and unobtrusive approach was evident in the way that he behaved on set and, scene by scene, building his character. He was as generous to me as I could have expected and set the tone for all others to follow.

  Krishnamma remembers Finney’s wide-eyed appreciation of little things:

  Finney is a sensitive, shy, unassuming man in real life. He has a great curiosity and fascination for all new experiences – something that was much on display during the shooting. I remember how he took to his little ticket machine that had to be draped around his neck while he rode the bus and recited Oscar Wilde. He was enchanted by its simple functions, his eyes widening as he turned the handle and issued the tickets. I was so touched by his childlike fascination for the machine that I bought it from the museum and gave it to him as a present at the end of shooting.

  For Gambon, the Irish accent was second nature; he soon slipped back into the Dublin brogue of his childhood. Krishnamma recalls that for Finney the process was more intense:

  We employed a voice coach for him to work with along with other actors such as Rufus Sewell and Tara Fitzgerald. It’s a big task to take on board a ‘foreign’ accent as well as deliver a memorable performance – because to do the latter you have to work, at times, unconsciously, so being conscious of the accent can be a barrier. This is one reason, I suspect, why actors such as Daniel Day-Lewis fully immerse themselves in their roles – speaking in the accent of their characters at all times during pre-production and shooting – so that the accent becomes second nature. Albert’s ‘method’ is different. He wears the evidence of the character like familiar clothes, but never fully ‘becomes’ the person he is playing. So, beat-by-beat, the technical requirements of the character (such as accent) are likely to be more conscious to him. From my point of view, the performance must come first – and if at times the accent meanders (which, to native Dublin ears, it perhaps does) that is less important. Much more alarming would be if Albert’s performance meandered – and that it most definitely does not.

  A Man of No Importance received international distribution, albeit only a limited run. But in the end it made a modest profit. Expectations that it would break through and become a kind of succès d’estime were perhaps unrealistic. Screen International even suggested on its front page that Finney may get an Oscar nod. Yet it didn’t happen. Such a film needed publicity. This, Krishnamma records, was always a contentious issue for Finney:

  Albert has in his contracts the option not to do publicity if he so chooses. To this day, he remains stubbornly resistant, but the pressure on me from the distributors to convince him otherwise became too great, and so I took the unusual step of calling him myself to ask if he would change his mind. He gave me short shrift on the phone and followed this up with a blunt and to the point letter. He made it clear that I should not do the dirty work of others – that it was their job to publicise the film and not ours. In many ways, he was right – but in the harsh reality of a market where such ‘art-house’ films struggle to be seen, every little helps. Generous as always, Albert, of course, forgave me and understood – but I do regret being used in this way and have never repeated that mistake since.

  Krishnamma said that Finney was easily the most popular man on the set:

  The women on the crew of A Man of No Importance, led by a brilliant female first assistant director, had a vote for the sexiest man on the unit. I was hugely disappointed to discover I came second, but rather flattered when I learnt that I’d only been beaten by Albert himself!

  Finney was always loved by actors and crew alike – no tantrums, no side and having a healthy interest in the people around him. Yet he could withdraw if he had to play an emotional scene. ‘Please advise people on the set that I won’t be particularly social today. I need to be in my own private thoughts,’ he would sometimes tell a director. ‘You may have a pause in the shooting but you must guard your emotions carefully,’ he once told Melvyn Bragg.

  On the whole, reviews were quite flattering for A Man of No Importance, especially for Finney’s performance. Caryn James reflected in the NewYork Times:

  At certain points throughout the film, though, Alfie is clobbered by reality. When he goes to Adele’s rooming house and hears moaning coming from behind her door, only a naif like Alfie would think she was ill. And, when he opens the door, only an actor as profoundly talented as Albert Finney could register all the emotions behind his horrified face.

  And Michael Wilmington in the Chicago Tribune caught the full scale of Finney’s transformation:

  Albert Finney pulls off a moving virtuoso acting feat. This charismatic, ultra-masculine actor, with his cool eyes and his rasping voice (as harsh and rich as a slab of beef), transforms himself into his seeming opposite, a gentle, effeminate, ageing Irish bus conductor.

  John Walker, however, was unimpressed, calling it ‘a pointless and virtually witless exercise that resembles a timidly gay reworking of a third rate Ealing comedy. It is heavy handed whimsy weighed down by some broad acting.’

  Most people disagreed with Walker. I would rather sit through several viewings of A Man of No Importance than most Hollywood blockbusters. The film was subsequently made into a Broadway musical and Krishnamma said he was flattered that a movie he had directed was ‘elevated to such theatrical heights’.

  After the film’s release an American journalist asked if Finney would put a rainbow flag on his car’s bumper. ‘I said I don’t “do” bumper stickers, but if I did, I’d be pleased to use that one. After all, everyone’s included in the rainbow, aren’t they?’ he replied.

  The mid-nineties was a good period for Finney. Actors come into their own once they hit their late 50s. And that was especially true for Finney. He had lost the handsome ‘beefcake’ look that made women swoon. But he was now a versatile character star capable of conveying everything from toughness to vulnerability. Apart from a smoker’s pouch under the eyes, he had aged well, far better than the likes of O’Toole or Harris. He was still handsome, almost leonine, with his full head of ginger hair and pinkish face. But it was the rugged good looks of a labourer or seaman. There was a touch of salt and spit about him. It was small wonder that he was still in demand for earthy character roles or that associates, once they had worked with Finney, felt that any other actor was second best.

  The Run of the Country, adapted by Shane Connaughton from his novel and directed by P
eter Yates, could be seen as a sort of follow-up to Finney’s The Playboys. Not only is Run of the Country set in the same place as The Playboys but Connaughton also wrote the screenplay for both films.

  Finney stars as a bored widower policeman in a small County Cavan village battling to save his relationship with his teenage son, Danny (Matt Keeslar), who blames him for his mother’s death after a domestic quarrel. Though a Catholic, Danny falls for a well-heeled Protestant girl, Annagh Lee (Victoria Smurfit), who lives north of the border. The relationship ends painfully after she miscarries and father and son are eventually reconciled. The film is best described as a coming-of-age tale.

  ‘Mr Finney fixes his crusty, demanding, sometimes mawkishly emotional character right on the line between lovable and impossible,’ said Stephen Holden in the NewYork Times. Roger Ebert said he thought Yates had not really decided whether he was making a tragedy or a comedy:

  As written by Shane Connaughton and played by Finney, he seems made out of two different versions of the same character. At times, he comes across as a hard-drinking bully, mean-spirited and closed-minded. At other times, he relaxes into the role of a sunny philosopher. We never know where we stand with him, and I’m not sure that’s the film’s intention.

  Peter Travers in Rolling Stone thought that ‘the formidable Finney, one of the finest actors on the planet, is wasted in a role that calls for him to bluster and break down at predictable intervals’. Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune film critic, noted, ‘Finney’s outstanding trait as an actor is the solidity he gives his parts – his growly voice and bulldog chin pulling the audience one way, his yearning eyes pulling them another’.

  As Finney neared 60, there was no sign of him slowing down. He was still much in demand. Yet Finney’s own statements – his bon vivant act and self-deprecating humour – sometimes deceived people into thinking he was lazier than he was. Filmmaker Robert Gardner recalled a meeting with Finney in early 1995, at the behest of producer Michael Fitzgerald, who was thinking of filming John Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians. Gardner was casting the central character of an unnamed magistrate of a small colonial town that borders an empire.

  Gardner recorded that he thought Finney would be unsuitable:

  My feeling about Albert Finney was that he was not, contrary to Michael Fitzgerald’s view, all that interested. I felt he was wary of an inexperienced director and, possibly, of a production more or less in the wild, away from comforts he seems to require as he rapidly goes to seed. Albert is by now pretty soft, and more than a little boozy. As seen in his recent performances, he is even more flamboyant. So it would have been problematic had he wanted the part. I’m not sure he could have been contained in the way he would have to have been to be a reasonable magistrate.2

  Yet Finney was about to enter a golden period, courtesy of a droll deathbed drama from Dennis Potter. That year, 1995, saw him spend twenty weeks in Colombia filming a Joseph Conrad novel.3 Eat your heart out, Mr Gardner.

  23

  HAVING A FEELD DAY

  It’s important to live as you want to. Which I have, you know.

  Albert Finney.

  Dennis Potter’s terminal illness in the spring of 1994 not only highlighted his work but brought one of television’s most memorable and moving interviews. The 59-year-old writer, suffering chronic pain from pancreatic cancer and sipping a cocktail of morphine and champagne, reviewed his work and spoke frankly about his diagnosis to Melvyn Bragg.

  Whatever view you took of Potter’s private (well, perhaps not so private!) views – his disdain for creeping commercialism in film and society, his hatred of Rupert Murdoch (he took pleasure in calling his tumour ‘Rupert’ and said he’d like to ‘kill the bugger’) – there was no denying the stoicism, painstaking self-appraisal and quiet dignity with which he faced his end. Then there was Potter’s reference to the ‘whitest, frothiest, blossimest blossom’, a phrase which stuck as representing the clarity with which the condemned man surveys the world.

  Potter’s illness, tragic though it was, also gave the playwright a reservoir of goodwill, as he must have been only too aware. Potter told Bragg that he was working on two separate stories. One was about the last days of a dying writer who believes that events in the real world are mirroring his final work. The other was a kind of fantasy, but one floated more often in the twenty years or more since Potter’s passing, that a corpse could be subject to cryopreservation and then somehow resuscitated in the future once a cure has been found for whatever ailment proved fatal. The two screenplays were later christened Karaoke and Cold Lazarus. And, said Potter, in that gentle, charming bucolic burr, he felt he would ‘go out with a fitting memorial’ if the BBC and Channel 4 would agree to co-produce the two works. Such a proposal from a dying man could hardly be refused. One feels that, even if Murdoch had been in the studio alongside Potter, he would have been forced to, if not offer his own disembodied head on a platter, then at least run a respectful interview in the Sun, the newspaper Potter so abhorred. It was impossible to refuse and Potter knew it.

  Two years later and Bragg was again interviewing another chain-smoking 59-year-old. But this time it was Albert Finney who had agreed to be filmed over lunch at London’s L’Escargot restaurant, ostensibly to discuss Cold Lazarus and his role as Daniel Feeld in Karaoke.

  Potter is not to everyone’s taste and I was surprised when surveying people that Karaoke seemed to have slipped through the radar. The four-part series has all the usual Potter touches, nostalgia for the past, a lead character with a penchant for singing and the sense of broken, discarded memories returning to haunt you. Daniel Feeld, the writer in Karaoke, is manifestly not Potter, and Finney made it clear he was not out to impersonate him. Yet there were certain similarities, not least the writer’s determination to complete his final work before he dies. And Roy Hudd, playing Feeld’s literary agent, was unnerved to find that Finney, on their first meeting, was wearing an identical corduroy suite to the one favoured by Potter – whether intentional or not is unclear.

  Finney’s character, Daniel Feeld, is drinking heavily, even straying into dipso territory. He becomes convinced that conversations and events around him are duplicating the screenplay he’s working on, that his words are literally coming to life. Meanwhile, the director of the television play of Feeld’s work (Richard E. Grant) has problems of his own. Yet it’s Feeld’s drama, the story of his last few days as he faces up to his fatal tumour, which grips you. The fallen writer rediscovers a meaning to his final act as he stumbles upon a sadistic club owner, Arthur ‘Pig’ Mailion (Hywel Bennett) who has ‘glassed’ the mother of a karaoke dancer, Sandra, (Saffron Burrows), leaving her scarred for life. If all this sounds grim, it’s leavened by healthy doses of graveyard humour and the sheer force of Finney’s personality. Whether running around the rain-swept seedy streets of Soho, smoking slyly in his hospital bed, or imitating Bing Crosby in the final karaoke song, Feeld, alias Finney, is the whole show.

  Also in the mix were autobiographical elements common to Feeld and Potter, in particular an aversion to anti-smoking fanatics and ‘moderate’ drinking campaigners (something that Finney, doubtless, would have shared). It’s easy to see why Finney was drawn to Feeld. And there’s the voice of Potter speaking through Finney’s Feeld, ‘I’m not the sort of writer who thinks that his words are some sort of holy tablet of stone!’ Not arf! It was Potter’s way of saying goodbye.

  This was a Finney who makes even Maurice Allington look healthy – pushing 60, heavyweight, blustery, irritable, pugnacious, chain-smoking and sweating as he fights to get his affairs in order and disentangle the mess surrounding Burrows. The subplots in Karaoke – the likeable but loopy agent forever mouthing spoonerisms, the cheating television director, the emergence of the still delectable Julie Christie, the ubiquitous silly Japanese tourists in the karaoke club – all pale beside the main event, which is Feeld’s, or should we say Finney’s, or Potter’s, story. Getting confused?

  Fin
ney projects considerable charm as Feeld, guffawing with laughter in between stabbing stomach pain as he is offered a hand job by Sandra, the cockney girl who evokes passions he had long since suppressed (the script makes clear that Feeld’s last love was forty years earlier). Karaoke was also in the capable hands of Renny Rye, who was familiar to Potter territory having directed Lipstick on my Collar.

  As ever, Finney was a delightful colleague. Roy Hudd recalls:

  They always say the bigger the star, the nicer they are. I think so too but perhaps I’ve just been lucky. Albert was a diamond: a superlative pro and a funny, generous and thoughtful workmate. His knowledge of the technicalities of filming was amazing and he certainly helped me to understand all the bits I needed to know … I love to act with people who give you the truth. If they can make you believe the situation, and that they, as characters, are real, the work is an absolute joy. I immediately think of Sue Nicholls, Albert Finney, Stephen Lord, Neil Dudgeon, Billy Dainty and Jack Tripp.1

  Ironically, although in Karaoke it was Daniel Feeld (Finney) who couldn’t drive and he is chauffeured by his agent (Hudd), the reality was just the opposite. Hudd could not drive. This presented a problem because one scene called for Hudd’s character to take Feeld home in a Jag. Hudd recalls Finney’s dexterity: ‘“You just steer the thing,” he said. “I’ll handle the rest.” I did and he did. With his right foot across mine, he accelerated, braked and changed gear while doing all his dialogue – he could have been doing a tap routine with his left foot!’