Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Willis’s desperate car dealer is too demented to make us care. Finney plays Kildore Trout, an impoverished, unsuccessful pulp fiction writer. A solitary tramp-like figure, with only a budgie for a companion, he receives a fan letter and a cheque inviting him to be the star guest at an arts convention. What ensues, for Finney at least, is mostly a muttered monologue as he hitchhikes cross-country.

  The film was not a success. ‘Muddled and meandering satire on the American dream that misses most of its targets,’ said John Walker. Derek Elley in Variety described it as ‘a hearty meal that starts off tickling the taste buds but ends up smothering them’.

  (Talking of food, the restaurant critic Ruth Reichl remembered seeing Vonnegut and Finney queuing outside the famous Sparks Steak House in New York in 1998. She recalled that, after about twenty minutes, the famous pair simply gave up and walked away, proving that, in some establishments, not even the world’s most celebrated authors or actors can bag a table!)

  Nick Nolte was another talented actor wasted in Breakfast of Champions. He played a demented transvestite. Coincidentally, Nolte was also in Finney’s next film, an altogether more successful one, from Matthew Warchus, the director of Art. Simpatico, by Sam Shepard, tells of two old friends, Vinnie (Nick Nolte) and Carter (Jeff Bridges) who perpetrated a horse racing scam. Twenty years on and one is a multi-millionaire businessman, the other an alcoholic dropout. Vinnie flies to Kentucky, carrying a box full of incriminating, explicit photographs they had used to blackmail a racing official, Sims (Finney), into taking the fall from the scam. Now Vinnie hopes to persuade him to pay for the material.

  The Sims who appears in flashback was a sleazy, violent lecher, operating on the margins of the racing world. Yet the Sims that Vinnie meets in the present is totally uninterested in the box and philosophical about the past. He’s lost his family and been slandered but he’s willing to let sleeping horses lie. Finney is excellent as Sims, a world-weary survivor with a gift for reinvention. He is the most sharply drawn character and, ironically, the most attractive despite his past.

  It’s no wonder that Finney was drawn to the part. Not only was he working with Bridges, Nolte, and Warchus, but also the backdrop of racing – Finney’s milieu. The film perhaps doesn’t quite succeed, lacking as it does a strong narrative drive. But Finney’s character makes one think about the nature of redemption and self-forgiveness. He is also quite the charmer as he invites Cecilia (Katherine Keener) to the Kentucky Derby, something we know Finney enjoys too.

  ‘In the play’s master stroke, it’s this repulsive world-weary lout, reminiscent of Sidney Greenstreet stripped of grandiosity, who emerges as the film’s only character to have made peace with the past,’ wrote Stephen Holden in the NewYork Times. John Walker described it as ‘a muted, melancholy drama of men being overtaken and destroyed by unnecessary guilt; the acting is a pleasure to watch’.

  Sadly, Simpatico was little seen and totally eclipsed by that year’s smash hit, American Beauty, which marked the cinematic debut of another British stage director, Sam Mendes. Yet Finney’s next film was a blockbuster and one that would introduce him to a whole new generation of filmgoers.

  25

  AN ATTRACTIVE ATTORNEY

  I make a lawyer appealing. That is something.

  Albert Finney

  Finney had notched up some multimedia successes in the late nineties, notably Art and Karaoke and A Rather English Marriage, but also some movies, such as Simpatico and Breakfast of Champions, and the TV series Nostromo, best described as curios. Although Finney’s name still carried a lot of prestige, he was never in the Connery or Caine league of fame. Neither had he ever aspired to be. Independently wealthy, Finney had forged his own path. Commercial appeal was never his sole reason for accepting a part. Hence Finney was now a kind of quasi-celebrity to filmgoers. Few people, after all, would have seen The Browning Version or Run of the Country or A Man of No Importance. But Steven Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich was seen by almost everyone.

  Julia Roberts was the queen of cinema at the turn of the century. Pretty Woman, Sleeping with the Enemy and Notting Hill were all box office bonanzas. Yet she was looking for that elusive vehicle to give her critical respect. The part of Erin Brockovich – a bold, brassy, broke, single mother who exposes the tragedies behind a corrupt energy company – was a dream.

  Brockovich was one tough cookie. Audiences just loved the story of a feisty female, an unmarried single mother of three, fighting her way out of poverty. A good script has to present some mighty obstacles for our hero or heroine. And Erin sure is up against it, not only her personal bad luck but also the corrupt Pacific Gas & Electric Company and an old-school lawyer rattled by her impulsiveness. Finney played Ed Masry, the real-life American attorney who loses what was expected to be an easy case involving Brockovich and another driver. Masry is depicted as a jaded, cynical figure – a survivor of cancer, diabetes and a quadruple bypass – battling against the big, bullyboy corporations. He and Erin develop a mutual respect and affection but only after early tussles.

  It’s the tennis match between Finney’s prickly attorney and his confrontational sidekick that provides the on-screen fireworks. Somehow you just know that they liked each other off-screen too. If Roberts’s Erin is a bit too pushy, even over-articulate and almost Superwoman (how the hell does she remember all those phone numbers?), then Finney is a great foil.

  Watch the film again and you will notice that Finney always reacts well to her outbursts even when he says nothing. Given that acting is essentially reacting – it’s what you give the other actor that counts – then Roberts couldn’t have wished for a better co-star. Thanks to Finney, this careworn, crumpled, coffee-stained lawyer becomes something noble.

  Finney loved Julia and indeed the whole experience:

  Julia’s commitment to the part really touched me. When I read the script I thought, terrific part for her – slightly different from what I’ve seen her do and a great opportunity to show what she’s made of. After three weeks I told her how great she was in the role … working with her was enjoyable because it was volatile and unpredictable. I was proud of her as a fellow professional. That’s how a fellow trouper should be.

  I thought the script was terrific, and I enjoyed the task of playing an American lawyer. He was a guy who was thinking about retirement. He was a bit jaded about his practice, and he’d had a bypass, all those things. Then this damned woman kind of comes into his life and gradually rekindles his enthusiasm for life. He still hasn’t gotten to Palm Springs.

  Julia reciprocated, ‘I feel the same way about Albert as Erin does about Ed. I could not have achieved what I’ve achieved in this movie without him by my side, without his friendship and support, and he’s a man I respect and really love.’1

  Masry liked Finney too:

  He’s just a super guy. I can’t say enough about him. Albert Finney is the type of a guy you’d want to have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine with. He’s laid back, very intelligent and a great conversationalist. [As for Finney’s portrayal] all in all, the movie was quite on, and I have no problem with his portrayal. I thought he did a good job portraying what was going on, although there was a tremendous amount going on that couldn’t be portrayed.

  Actor Michael Harney, playing a small part in Erin Brockovich, recalled Finney’s unique way of making every scene seem spontaneous:

  We were doing this scene where Steven [Soderbergh] set the camera up in the middle of this town hall, which was like a school, and Albert was going to come in and explain the case, and explain the suit, and what would happen, how the money would be paid, and all this kind of stuff, and what the potential of that was, and all of this. And he had this long-ass speech that he was going to go in and do, and I was sitting there in the second row, and I thought to myself, okay, well, I’m doing this totally in character, and then trying to break in thinking to myself wow, this is like a master class watching this guy give a speech, right?

  So we st
art. Steven said, ‘Okay, let’s just rehearse it,’ and he rehearsed it, and I thought to myself, ‘oh my God’. It didn’t look like he had it, and I was like, ‘Oh shit’. And that was just my ignorance, see, because then Steven said, ‘Okay, whenever you’re ready,’ and Albert starts going, and what I realised, his speech was beautiful, and I literally felt that he didn’t know what he was going to say before he said it. So it was fresh. The whole damn thing was fresh. It was like a page-and-a-half, two pages, and what I realised was that during the rehearsal process, I think what he was doing was he was just getting rid of everything. He was throwing everything away so that he could just be there and just deliver it.

  Harney believed that Finney was one of the best: ‘Albert would just hang out. He was just a regular guy. To me, I think he’s the best around, or I should say one of the best around, but he’s up there with Bob De Niro. He’s up there with Pacino.’2

  Erin Brockovich, which raked in more than $256 million worldwide, earned Finney nominations for a Golden Globe, Oscar and Bafta as best supporting actor. Finney won the coveted Screen Actors Guild award, usually a sure sign of an Oscar victory. So much so that the Daily Telegraph forecast that he (and Judi Dench for Chocolat) would be lifting statuettes. ‘His role as a curmudgeonly lawyer in Erin Brockovich makes him the clear favourite for an Oscar, according to the guild’s own Oscar rankings issued last night,’ said the newspaper in an article on 13 March 2001, entitled ‘Oscars written in stars for Finney and Dench’.3

  Sadly, for Finney’s fans at least, Benicio Del Toro, who starred in Traffic, triumphed in all three awards. This, Finney’s fifth Oscar nomination, was probably his best chance, so perhaps he was entitled to feel peeved. But, if he did, he kept it to himself. Finney had never even attended the Oscars. ‘It seems to me a long way to go just to sit in a non-drinking, non-smoking environment on the off-chance your name is called,’ he’d say.4

  That same year, 2001, Finney was also given the Bafta Fellowship. Finney did a little dance as he made his way to the podium. ‘If in years to come you cannot say he’s a jolly good fellow, I hope at least you’ll be able to say he’s not a bad old fellow,’ he said. Yet, although always gracious when honoured, awards left him cold:

  All the hoops you have to jump through on those occasions. It’s not my favourite occupation. I’m basically relieved that we’re able to do our job and go back into the woodwork. Walking around in the spotlight having to be me is not something I’m particularly comfortable with or desire. I’d sooner pretend to be someone else.

  In 1999, Finney turned down a knighthood, having previously refused a CBE in 1980. Although not identified with radical politics – usually the reason for ‘refuseniks’ – Finney declined:

  Call me Sir if you like! Maybe people in America think being a Sir is a big deal. But I think we should all be misters together. I think the ‘Sir’ thing slightly perpetuates one of our diseases in England, which is snobbery. And it also helps keep us ‘quaint,’ which I’m not a great fan of. You don’t get much with the title anymore. That was all carved up by the robber barons in the Middle Ages.

  So no ‘Sir Albert Finney’ – even though it would have had a nice ring to it. Michael Gambon thought so too, ‘I lament Albert Finney not being Sir Albert and running the National Theatre, being what everyone thought he would be. He obviously didn’t want it. That’s all there is to it.’5

  Finney’s part in Erin Brockovich and his admiration for Steven Soderbergh6 – ‘he is absolutely obsessed with filmmaking; he can be persuaded to take a lunch break, but he doesn’t like to leave the set’ – led him to agree to a cameo in the same director’s film Traffic. Finney’s involvement was withheld from the cast. According to Finney, the daily call sheet for the scenes between drug czar Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas) and his unnamed chief of staff (Finney’s role) listed Douglas’s name and Giles Archer, a reference to Sam Spade’s slain partner Miles Archer in The Maltese Falcon.

  Douglas was kept in the dark to the end. The ruse worked, according to Finney:

  My hair was severely cut and they had me in full costume and make-up. They brought me to the house where they were shooting, and I knew most of the crew from Erin Brockovich. Then, from across the room I heard, ‘Michael, I don’t believe you’ve met Giles.’

  Douglas started to introduce himself to ‘Archer’ …

  Then he stopped. He couldn’t quite figure it out. Then the penny dropped, he swore at us, and laughed hugely. We then proceeded to try to work.

  Finney was on set for one day. His chief of staff is a stern piece of work.7

  Meanwhile, a sudden death handed Finney another great part on TV. Oliver Reed’s fatal heart attack on the set of Gladiator in May 1999 brought a flood of tributes, even meriting an ITN newsflash. The coverage made one reflect on the bizarre nature of modern celebrity. Reed, two years younger than Finney, had not accomplished anything near as much as Finney. He never had an Oscar nomination, let alone five. Few would have put him in the same league as Finney. And Reed was a totally different animal. He was in love with stardom, not acting. Even in his thirties, Reed was talking about retiring. Only financial constraints kept him working. In interviews he likened acting to prostitution, claiming he was forced to act in any old rubbish to stay a millionaire.

  Most big stars – and here we undertake a little diversion – are more like Reed than Finney. It seems to be fashionable to belittle acting. Take another fallen legend, Richard Burton. His diaries are filled with diatribes against the tedium of filmmaking and acting, along with threats to quit altogether. Marlon Brando, another ‘great’, was adamant in his derision for his profession. ‘There’s no such thing as a great performance or a great film,’ he told Connie Chung in a rare interview in 1989. He hated acting, hence an almost blank sheet in the eighties. It seemed at some point that deriding their craft was almost obligatory for the Burtons, Harrises and others of their generation. Finney is the opposite; even by 2000 his enthusiasm for acting was undiminished. Fame was never a lure. We remember the young Finney telling David Lean that he simply wasn’t interested in becoming a star.

  Reed’s death jeopardised a television adaptation of H.E. Bates’s classic short stories, My Uncle Silas, about a turn of the century Bedfordshire rascal. It was by the same team who had triumphed with The Darling Buds of May. Reed had died before he could sign up. Had he lived, the part would have been his. In a phone call to Michael Winner, just two days before he died, Reed told the director, ‘they’ve offered me a great role on television’. Winner recalled that ‘he was so thrilled because he thought he was all washed up and now he was back’.8

  Superficially, Reed would have made a fine Silas, especially given the actor’s notorious love of ‘wenching’ and drinking. Yet Finney turned out to be ideal casting, perhaps better able to express Silas’s warmth and good nature. Reed’s screen persona was becoming more sinister and malevolent – to say nothing of his aggressive off-screen behaviour. Somehow, an actor like Finney, rather like his contemporary John Stride, exudes a likeability that Reed could never muster.

  Filming was set to begin in the summer of 1999. (The series had to be made during good weather.) But Reed’s death delayed filming by another year as they searched for another actor. Philip Saville, who directed most of the episodes, was surprised that a star of Finney’s stature would accept it. But he jumped at it and even, at Saville’s request, agreed to gain weight for the part. Getting Finney was a triumph, agreed Robert Banks Stewart, who adapted the series. ‘Albert has a kind of humanity and, being the sort of actor he is, he moves from being sort of a rambunctious, bucolic poacher, gravedigger, womaniser and boozer, and he suddenly changes gear and becomes a nice human being.’

  Finney was hooked instantly:

  I felt that it was rich material. I just had to do it. As I read I was almost salivating at the prospect of getting to grips with the character. The story harks back to the days where we were all more in tune with the seasons and nat
ure. Silas is a man of the earth and he knows how to live life to the utmost.

  Finney embodied the character so well that it’s now difficult to see anyone else as Silas. Just as with Scrooge or Miller’s Crossing, he might not have been first choice but he made the part his own.

  My Uncle Silas is a pleasant, rewarding, if totally undemanding, canter through a vanished era. Sue Johnston likened the series to ‘putting on very comfortable slippers. You sit down and enjoy it and let the warmth run over you.’ View the episodes again and you notice some period detail and slices of rural life that you might have missed first time round. Silas’s enjoyment of life’s little pleasures – from Bedfordshire potatoes, whose creamy velvety skins he caresses, through to elderberry wine – is infectious. Finney’s fleshy, pink face, double chin and long sideburns make him just right. By 2000, Finney was portly but it’s very much the 60-year-old Silas, a life-affirming character and, again, a bit of a lecher as he dallies with the likes of Lynda Bellingham and Charlotte Rampling. He certainly nails the accent, a kind of tamed rustic roar.

  Audiences were drawn in as the lovable layabout teaches his nephew, young Joe Prospero, how to spit long distance and regales him with stories about his youth. Bates’s stories are light on substance. Not a lot actually happens. Silas calls on an old flame when he’s supposed to visit his lawyer. He whisks the overworked wife of a temperance inn’s landlord off to the coast (he converts the establishment into a proper hostelry before he’s through). He irritates his housekeeper Mrs Betts (Sue Johnston) with his feckless ways but not enough to stop her cooking rabbit stew and apple dumplings. It all seems rather idyllic.