Hudd cites another example of Finney’s generosity. During filming Hudd heard that a burglar had broken into his wife’s home and stolen her jewellery. When he returned home that evening he found that his wife had received flowers from Finney, accompanied by a message – ‘nil desperandum – love Albert’. Finney had never met Roy’s wife. It was just a typical spontaneous gesture.
It was a strange fusion of Potter, Feeld and Finney on Melvyn Bragg’s The South Bank Show. The programme offers us a fascinating insight not so much into Potter as into Finney. Firstly, as often repeated by Finney, he ‘likes to have lunch’, the sentence uttered with some relish. Finney and Bragg banter about booze. Bragg tells Finney he has just survived sixty-six ‘dry’ days. Finney eyes him suspiciously. The actor has no such compunction, ordering a Negroni cocktail and a French white wine while settling down to enjoy what he calls, with a touch of irony, ‘a light lunch’ of carpaccio and then braised lamb shank. By the end of the meal Finney has moved on to red wine, calvados and coffee and is happily blowing cigar smoke in Bragg’s face.
‘When I’m working on a film then during lunch I don’t drink – and I just have cheese and crackers,’ Finney tells Bragg as if it were a surprise to himself. ‘Half of the time I sleep [at lunchtime] … I believe in the sensuality of the ambience of food and drink. I love that, not having to work in the afternoon.’
Asked about Karaoke and his approach to the part, Finney stressed that he was not trying to imitate Potter. ‘We were not saying that Daniel Feeld is Dennis Potter. I never met Dennis and I’m not trying to impersonate him and neither am I trying to imitate his Ross and Wye burr.’ Rather, said Finney, playing a part and studying a script is a bit like being a detective:
You’re looking for clues as to why he’s doing this and that. When you’re filming you try to get the sense of it being freshly minted, the spontaneity. It’s a bit like playing jazz. There’s no point in saying I glanced at him last time so I must do it the same way again. When you’re recording it, immortalising it, it’s a case of you’ve done the homework, you just go out and do it.
Bragg managed to coax some private revelations from Finney. ‘Travelling and horses are very important to me,’ he told Bragg:
In the horse trade I meet people from a totally different world. I think that’s invaluable. Life is more important than art. I like talking to my butcher, baker and candle-stick maker. I don’t know where my life is going to lead. I reserve the right to make my own road. And hopefully I have some time left.
When Bragg mentions that there’s a lot of drinking in Karaoke, Finney wryly remarks, referring to himself, ‘there’s a lot of drinking on The South Bank Show’.
Karaoke went down well with the critics and even the carpers liked Finney’s roustabout performance. ‘This is a television event like no other. And to make it even more so, both films [Karaoke and Cold Lazarus] star Albert Finney, one of the greatest actors on the planet,’ noted The Washington Post:
The riddles are fascinating and you’re kept deliriously off-balance for most of the film. Even if you didn’t buy a word of it otherwise, Finney’s performance would win you over – he’s roguish, robust, ferocious, desperate, a magnificent crank railing against evils and conspiracies that may be actual or fanciful. In the last analysis, which he himself is facing – what’s the difference? … The high point is when Finney himself does a karaoke number in the final hour, a tune with heavenly resonance for even casual fans of Potter’s. Finney, with an assist from Bing Crosby, makes this a triumphant, exhilarating, mystical moment.
We should add that Bragg’s film, which has shots of Finney and director Renny Rye in the recording studio, show Finney having a rip-roaring time as Feeld. When Finney sees himself doing the Bing Crosby number, his eyes mist over. The only brickbats were reserved for the other subplots, notably ‘Roy Hudd’s spoonerizing literary agent, a running gag in search of a decent punchline,’ according to Stuart Jefferies in The Guardian.
In Cold Lazarus, altogether a more sombre affair, a Potterish dystopian vision of a future commercial hell, Finney only appears either in flashback or as a disembodied head. Hence, it’s rather out of our remit.
Finney’s performances in Karaoke and A Man of No Importance, enjoyable though they were, were not especially subtle. Rather, they were full-on, red-blooded assaults on convention in which Finney appeared to be having as much fun as his audience. This brought the occasional accusation that he was overacting; a little broad in his impersonations. In Karaoke, Finney had little choice but to take him where the script led him; Daniel Feeld was never going to be less than exuberant.
Finney’s style of acting is starry. He likes to let rip and show the full range of his talent. Many times, even in his sixties, Finney said that he couldn’t wait to tackle a certain part. His enthusiasm and professionalism are undiminished. He loves acting and isn’t too self-effacing. He likes to make an entrance. It’s a grand flourish that is increasingly unfashionable in an era of mumbling soap actors, often without theatrical training, who probably couldn’t project beyond the fourth row of a theatre.
The director John Dove categorises actors as either red or white wines. Michael Gambon and Finney, according to Dove, are full-blooded reds, while Derek Jacobi and Nigel Hawthorne are examples of vintage whites. To the list of reds – but this is a far from complete list, merely some notable examples – we could add O’Toole, Harris, Burton, Nicol Williamson and Trevor Howard. To the whites we could add Tom Courtenay and Ian McKellen. Anthony Hopkins, for all his relish in playing Hannibal Lecter, is not naturally extroverted or full-bloodied. He is perhaps a white? Or maybe, taking this a little further, a rosé? Another rosé could be John Hurt and, I think, Ian Hendry, the subject of a previous biography. These are two actors whose brilliance is sometimes unobtrusive. This is a superficial summary of some great actors but perhaps not entirely unsubstantiated. (And I have it on good authority that Finney’s favourite wine is indeed red – an Italian wine called Barolo!)
Not only is Finney’s style of acting a definite ‘red’ but his voice – commanding, rich and fruity, at times even extravagant in such a way that could lead to the accusation that he is overacting, even when he isn’t – is that of a smoker. We would not wish to recommend the benefits of smoking but Michael Gambon, another transgressor, believes that the weed lends the actor’s voice an extra dimension. ‘I think that [smoking] helps, I think it makes the voice. Olivier smoked quite heavily. And Gielgud always had a fag in his mouth. Alan Howard is a chimney. Ron Pickup, my good friend Ron Pickup, is a chimney,’ said Gambon.
The new naturalistic style of acting perhaps lends itself more to white than red. You are not supposed to make an entrance but, rather, sink unobtrusively into character. You must conform to the director’s vision. Richard Harris, on a chat show in 1988, said he believed we were suffering from ‘a plague of good taste’, by which he meant that many modern actors were too bland. He cited an incident from an Olivier play in which Sir Laurence swung from a rope on to the stage, making an entrance that made the audience gasp (probably Coriolanus). The new breed of actors struck him as ‘bank managers’. One suspects that Burton and O’Toole would have agreed. And almost certainly Finney.
Finney always said that he didn’t want to become a prisoner of a lifestyle which forced him to run faster and faster simply to pay the bills. As Finney turned 60, and his earning power had peaked, his life had become a little quieter. He was still living in Chelsea but not quite in the grand style of old when a plate of venison would appear on command. ‘I used to have a couple living in, and there was a button under the carpet you could press with your foot so they’d come in with the next course. Everybody thought it was a miracle.’
He also told a reporter that he had once had a Rolls-Royce Phantom which could take five in the back – ‘great for going to the races,’ he added. But Finney couldn’t get insurance to drive it, had to have a chauffeur, and sold it. Then he bought a Mercedes convertible
. But he did only 3,000 miles a year, so he sold that too. By 1996, Finney, rather like Daniel Feeld, was without a car and dependent on taxis:
As this wonderful Jewish fellow once told me in New York, ‘If it flies, floats or fucks, rent it.’ He was right. He was against buying planes, boats and all those silly things people do with their money. So here I am – servantless and carless, but not horseless … It’s important to live as you want to. Which I have, you know.2
A chauffeured limousine also came in handy when Finney visited his elderly mother in Davyhulme. By then Alice was living with her daughter, Marie. Apparently Finney was revered by all the chauffeurs in his employ because he never put on ‘airs and graces’ and he was always a generous tipper. Finney continued visiting his mother regularly right up until her death.
Carless and servantless perhaps, yet Finney, more importantly, was not womanless. By now he was living, since 1989, with travel agent Pene Delmage, eighteen years his junior. They would eventually marry in 2006 and she would nurse him through a period of ill health. The late Lynda Bellingham described Pene as (like Finney) ‘just gorgeous’ (Pene and Lynda shared a mutual friend, the late Sally Bulloch, the entertainments manager and lavish hostess of the Athenaeum Hotel). Julia Goodman was another admirer of Pene, although she only met her once, at her Uncle Gordon Smyth’s 70th birthday in 1996 in a country hotel. ‘I liked her a lot. She was very warm, down to earth, funny, rather diffident and shy,’ Julia recalled.
Finney continued to charm the ladies, but that was it. ‘I’m exceptionally happy with Pene,’ Finney said in 2003. ‘I’m a born flirt and that will never stop but I would take things no further. I’m loyal and content.’ Womanising may have been behind him by the nineties but the love of horses and travel remained. He believed that he ‘travelled well’. He was happy to get a free plane ticket, take off somewhere new for a few weeks and immerse himself in different, albeit temporary, surroundings.
Washington Square, filmed in Baltimore in 1996 by Agnieszka Holland, was a world away from Karaoke. A screen version of Henry James’s novella of the same name about a plain, rich girl courted by a handsome fortune hunter in New York in the 1890s, it had been previously filmed in 1949 with Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland as The Heiress. Holland thought The Heiress was ‘a beautiful film’, but she ‘found it different from Jamesian philosophy; it was very much a revenge story, whereas I was more interested in identity issues’.3
Finney was the prickly Dr Sloper who had nursed a grudge against his daughter, Catherine, ever since his wife died during childbirth. The novel seemed to indicate that the doctor, while aware of his daughter’s shortcomings, her lack of good looks and charm, had a residue of affection for her. In the film he seems to have little or no time for his daughter at all, regarding her clumsy affections as irritating. Dr Sloper, as played by Finney, views her with a condescending sneer throughout. ‘I never thought of her as delightful and charming,’ he says of her at one point. He dismisses her suitor, Maurice Townsend (Ben Chaplin), as a calculating mercenary. ‘He’s altogether too familiar, too self-assured,’ he says of him. He’s convinced that Townsend is just after her money. ‘He thinks she has 80,000 dollars a year’. The book, although retaining the same themes, is a little vaguer about Townsend’s motives and marginally more sympathetic towards Sloper.
Dr Sloper is a control freak and distinctly cool to everyone around him. Although he is vindicated, in the sense that Townsend turns out to be every bit as mercenary as he predicted, he evokes little sympathy. ‘She [Catherine] didn’t fulfill his expectations and he [the doctor] loved himself too much to love somebody so imperfect,’ said Holland. Chaplin does a good job as Townsend and Jennifer Jason Leigh conveys the heroine’s awkwardness and diffidence.
Holland loved working with Maggie Smith, playing Catherine’s meddling aunt, Lavinia, in their second film together. (They had previously teamed up on The Secret Garden.) Smith would advise the younger actresses on how to wear their corsets. She found Finney not so involved in collaborating with the younger actors but remembers him as ‘a fine actor’. She also recalls that he enjoyed exploring Baltimore. Holland related how Jennifer Jason Leigh had read the entire works of Henry James in critical editions and several other books about the period, ‘Her knowledge was even greater than mine!’
Washington Square is delightfully quaint and visually pleasing, but doesn’t quite gel as a whole. Somehow the characterisations are a little forced and starchy. The finest touches are the period feel and the little clues sprinkled throughout – for example, when Townsend surreptitiously opens a silver cigarette case or seems overcome by Dr Sloper’s lavish home. Jamesian fans may take note that Holland believed that Townsend was not just motivated by money, although he craved the good life, but ‘he loved also the image of himself fighting over the woman with somebody like Dr Sloper. When Catherine decided to leave her father (and his money) – Maurice lost his interest in her. She ceased to be the object of desire’.
Washington Square failed at the box office. Holland believes that Disney simply didn’t know how to market it, ‘You also need some momentum. Sometimes more complex period movies can find a larger audience. But frankly, one doesn’t know how to make a successful movie. It’s better just to try to make the good one.’
John Walker found the film ‘a clumsily routine adaptation, with generally unconvincing performances, and given a feminist slant that confuses the point of James’s world’. Michael Coveney, in his biography of Maggie Smith, thought that Finney ‘didn’t really seem austere or frightening enough in the role, his outbursts sounding like those of someone in a bad temper after too good a lunch’. Janet Maslin, by contrast, praised Finney for his ‘caustic authority’ as the father.
By 1996, the year of his sixtieth birthday, Finney had not trod the boards for four years. By his standards that was a long time. His next production was to be his last stage hurrah. But, in the best traditions of show business, he was to go out on top.
24
ART AND MARRIAGE
He’s not tormented in real life. He’s a tremendous lover of life.
Michael Wearing on Albert Finney.
‘Nobody can have expected a play for three male characters by an obscure French Iranian to have run for more than seven years in the West End, getting through twenty-six cast changes,’ reflected The Times’s theatre critic, Benedict Nightingale. But that was just what had happened to Yasmina Reza’s Art by 2003 in London.
By then, stars as diverse as Richard Thomas, Nigel Havers, Anthony Valentine, Barry Foster, Patrick Duffy, George Segal, Roger Lloyd-Pack, Ben Cross, Jack Dee and Richard Griffiths had appeared in the play. But the first cast, and by far the most esteemed, teamed Finney with Tom Courtenay and Ken Stott.1
I mentioned that a hit play is a fusion of many ingredients but, above all, a feeling that suffuses the theatre. Orphans was such a play; A Chorus of Disapproval and Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell were others. But Art, which opened in London in October 1996, of all these, was perhaps the least likely. At first sight it seemed rather lightweight, even frivolous. The plot is deceptively simple. Serge spends a fortune on a blank canvas and is ridiculed by his best friend, Marc, a hearty, extrovert aeronautical engineer whose first reaction is to call it ‘shit’. The friendship starts to disentangle before our eyes. And it’s only a mediator, Yvan (Stott) who seems capable of resolving their differences.
Reza’s play is manifestly not about art. It is how a friendship can be tested and even destroyed by an argument. We want to trust a friend’s judgement. If we disagree too violently about anything – politics, a film, even a new purchase – then we can feel betrayed. Mundane arguments can even lead us to reappraise the friendship. Reza’s later play, God of Carnage, although on a different theme, shows how a spat involving two children exposed simmering anger among their parents.
Tom Courtenay and Finney were now firm friends, so their teaming seemed natural. Courtenay had always been, as he cheerfully admitted
, ‘in awe of Albert’, to which, as Courtenay acknowledges, Finney would (jokingly) reply, ‘he still is.’ Their friendship has flourished despite their differences. Tom is an introvert; Finney, tangibly, is not. Courtenay admits finding Finney’s youthful ebullience, and tendency to tease, a bit overwhelming.
By the time they did Art, however, Courtenay could stand his ground and bite back. The two men, then both around 60, traded stories about their medical complaints. Courtenay, in particular, seemed health-obsessed, so much so that Finney gave him a medical encyclopedia during the run. Tom would rib Finney about his love of food. Their relationship was playful and ‘unluvvie’. The previous year, when Courtenay scored a hit with his off-Broadway production of a one-man show, Moscow Stations, Finney had burst into his dressing room with the immortal words – ‘You little fucker!’ Courtenay knew that this, coming from his friend, was high praise indeed!
Tom, perhaps influenced by Finney, also developed a love for a little flutter on the horses. When, in 2010, he won £626 after placing £20 on Great Endeavour at Cheltenham to win the Byrne Group Plate, his first reaction was, ‘wait ’til I tell Albert’.
They’d also tease each other about awards. ‘I had won the Volpi Cup [acting award at the Venice Film Festival] in 1964, for King & Country,’ Courtenay says:
Albert had won it the year before, for Tom Jones. Then Albert won the Silver Bear for The Dresser, over me. But I got the Golden Globe. So Albert sent me a telegram saying, ‘The score is Manchester United, 1, Hull City, 1. The scorer for Manchester, S. Bear; for Hull City, G. Globe’.
Matthew Warchus, later to become artistic director of the Old Vic, directed Art. Stott eventually won most critical plaudits just as, five years later, Richard Griffiths stole the notices in the same role. Ironically, Stott had serious reservations about the play:
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