Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Finney and Pene rented a house on the river, staying for just over two months, just outside Alabama. ‘I hardly got to see Alabama. You can’t when you’re filming, you’re just busy,’ he recalled. ‘I used to come home and my girl would make me dinner and it was lovely. We lived on the river floating by and the world going by on the river was nice.’

  He liked McGregor but said they didn’t actually liaise that often:

  The only thing that Ewan and I conferred on was how we cast a fishing line. We said we’d do it round arm rather than over, and that was the only time that we conferred, really. So, we didn’t actually … I thought that I’d leave it to the young fellow to copy me, to lessen my workload.

  Finney said he sympathised with the son in the story and that the father’s endless storytelling must prove tiresome:

  It’s difficult, really, I suppose for the boy when you have a father who doesn’t quite talk to you. He tells you stories, but then, after a while, when you want more, he doesn’t give you more. He insists on this old elaboration, the old stories that never change. It’s very difficult to have a father like that. I understand the angst of the son and the frustration of the son. His father’s not there.

  Finney said that his relationship with his son Simon, 45, at the time of Big Fish, was good:

  Sometimes you feel more at ease with a nephew and he with you. It’s not as complicated or as genetic or as responsible as the matter of being an elder to your own son … if you ask me how my relationship with my son may have flavoured my performance here, I’ll tell you that’s a question for Simon … Of course, I always think my relationship with my son is perfectly fine.

  When Finney did Annie, a magazine article noted that he was the last person one would associate with children. And one can see why. Finney’s whole life indicates a man who believes in moving, one suspicious of permanence. Even when his first two marriages failed, Finney seemed philosophical, oddly disengaged about the whole process. When Simon was growing up Finney admitted he didn’t see him much. But, later, father and son grew closer. ‘I took quite an objective view of this little fellow,’ Finney said in 1982, shortly after Simon had graduated in modern English history from Oxford:

  And, of course, a certain conventional pride in achievement, that I helped make it. And perhaps what I was more conscious of was the surprise that it was not the all-embracing, grasping, illuminating moment of auteur that perhaps one had been led to believe. I became aware of the practicality of birth. I guess I kind of felt Simon would only be interesting to me if he were interesting. Or, if you will, that one’s offspring are possibly interesting or not – I don’t see that there’s any rule that they have to be. When we were together in California, it became sort of a confirmation that we got on, that he was a pal and buddy. I enjoyed being with him; I hope he enjoyed being with me.

  The final scene called for Finney to make himself light – if it were possible – so that his son could carry him to the pond:

  In ballet, when you kind of lift yourself here, it’s all up in the head. So, you can try it when you’re going up stairs next time. Instead of plodding upstairs, think of yourself as going up with your head, and it’s amazing what you can do. There were wires, and I was in a sort of bucket moulded to my body. So long as the wires don’t cross your face … I never thought that it would look like it did because with the crane, it’s an extraordinary contraption. They’re everything.

  Critiques of Big Fish were generally favourable even though some tired of Bloom’s hot air. Roger Eberts said:

  Because Burton is the director, Big Fish of course is a great-looking film, with a fantastical visual style that could be called Felliniesque if Burton had not by now earned the right to the adjective Burtonesque. Yet there is no denying that Will has a point: The old man is a blowhard. There is a point at which his stories stop working as entertainment and segue into sadism.

  O.A. Scott, in the New York Times, also found Bloom a bit much:

  The film insists on viewing its hero as an affectionate, irrepressible raconteur. From where I sat, he looked more like an incorrigible narcissist and also, perhaps, a compulsive liar, whose love for others is little more than overflowing self-infatuation. But all this might be forgivable – everyone else in the picture thinks so – if Edward were not also a bit of a bore.

  Scott added, however, that both McGregor’s and Finney’s accent were ‘not bad at all’.

  Big Fish is pleasant whimsy if you like that sort of thing. Some of us have had bad experiences with inveterate storytellers and, unless they are exceptionally witty, find them off-putting. For Finney, however, it was another enjoyable experience, so much so that, a couple of years later, he agreed to voice Finis Everglot in Burton’s animated feature, Corpse Bride, a part that reunited him with Joanna Lumley.

  Big Fish marked Finney’s progression into (early) old age. At moments of repose, lying on his deathbed, Finney, not just the character, seems a little tired. Smaller character parts awaited him but ones Finney could still imbue with greatness. As his friend Peter O’Toole once remarked, ‘there is no such thing as a small part, only small actors’.

  27

  SLOWING DOWN

  Keep your head down and work hard.

  Albert Finney to actor Lloyd Owen.

  Finney was all set to reprise his Churchill, this time taking him through to the war years. Whitemore was working on a script in 2004 but, in the end, it took several years to complete. When it was finally made in 2009, Brendan Gleeson inherited the part. Finney’s agent said he ‘lost interest’ because he felt ‘the script wasn’t quite right’. However, Tracy Scoffield, one of the producers of the BBC-HBO drama, stated that Finney ‘bowed out gracefully’ only because he didn’t like the idea of playing the same part twice.

  Finney was now entering a quieter period. He told an interviewer that he tried to be selective when picking a part:

  That doesn’t mean that I make the right selections. I’d like to be that selective. It’s true that old actors don’t die, their parts get smaller. You’re less likely to get the part, many parts, if you’re playing people your age as opposed to people who are younger. There are fewer parts around.

  A gentle part was as Uncle Henry in Ridley Scott’s A Good Year, starring Russell Crowe, filmed in the South of France in 2005. It’s a story about rediscovering the innocence of childhood and self-appraisal. Uncle Henry appears in the flashback scenes with young Max, played by Freddie Highmore. Scott cast Finney, in spite of his alleged misgivings over the actor’s performance in The Browning Version, after the screenwriter Marc Klein said that Henry, in his mind, sounded like Albert Finney. And this was a wine connoisseur, after all! ‘A good wine never lies,’ he tells Max.

  Uncle Henry was no great stretch for an actor of Finney’s skill. Yet his role is pivotal, as Crowe said at the time:

  Once Max returns to the place where he spent his childhood summers the echo of what Henry said to him starts resonating in him more and he realises there’s another way of taking those things Henry told him and taking them to a different sum total.

  Scott had been aching to get away from the action genre:

  As I go on, I’m very attracted to comedy. At the end of the day, because you’ve been having a good old laugh, you go home laughing – as opposed to dealing with blood all day and you go home and want to cut your wrists.

  Unfortunately, A Good Year did not engender quite the laughter intended. Somehow the plot – successful, unscrupulous London-based bond trader discovers the meaning of life in the sun after falling for local girl – is rather clichéd. The film is too clearly a bid to replicate the success of Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, on which A Good Year was based. Finney is fine but Crowe is not suited to light comedy; his appearance, manner and voice rather convey masculine authority – as in Gladiator.

  The script is at its best in its incidental details, for example when Max, revisiting the house after thirty-odd years, sees marks on the wall
where he used to play cricket. Suddenly the decades tumble away. A childhood home rockets you back quicker than a time machine.

  Aside from producing The Browning Version, Scott had been executive producer of The Gathering Storm. He had also directed Finney’s cameo in The Duellists. So this marked their fourth collaboration. Scott said at the time:

  I know him pretty well. What you see on-screen in this film really is Albert. Uncle Henry is Albert Finney. He’s as jolly as that character, he’s full of joie de vivre and I couldn’t think of anybody who could play the part better. Freddie Highmore, who plays young Max and spent a lot of time with Albert, adored him too.1

  The critics generally thought it predictable stuff. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times observed:

  The scenery may be attractive and the cast likewise, but something vital is missing in this all-too-leisurely film … The fact that we know exactly what will happen to Max from the moment he appears on-screen is not what’s wrong with A Good Year. After all, we go to films like this precisely because the satisfaction of emotional certainty is what we’re looking for.

  Todd McCarthy called the film ‘a simple repast consisting of sometimes strained slapsticky comedy, a sweet romance and a life lesson learnt, this little picnic doesn’t amount to much but goes down easily enough’. The film went down all right. It made a slender profit but was viewed as a box office bomb in the industry.

  In Amazing Grace, the story of William Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade, Finney played a real-life figure, John Newton,2 the former trader who undergoes an epiphany and backs the abolitionists. Finney, first seen in flashback sweeping a church floor, dressed in a sackcloth, brings dignity, depth and a kind of unusual (for him) asceticism to the part. He is, he says, living in the company of 20,000 ghosts, and adds, ‘I’m not strong enough to hear my own confession.’ Finney, as Newton, is almost spitting with rage when he urges Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) to ‘throw their dirty, filthy [slave] ships out of the water’.

  Newton, by now blind, appears at the end to hear the House of Commons pass the Slave Trade Act in 1807 – actually shot at a church within Chatham Historic Dockyard. And Finney portrays blindness convincingly. As he listens to the final vote in favour of abolition his whole face brightens. His eyes stare ahead, locked and vacant, but somehow his face is monumentally expressive. Technically, Finney was always the master of his craft and his performance here is every bit as naturalistic as in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  The film, directed by Michael Apted, who had delivered some taut, fast-moving atmospheric thrillers like The Squeeze and Gorky Park and the Bond movie The World is not Enough, is well-meaning and earnest. Yet it feels like one of those old Sunday night BBC plays. The acting, however, is a joy. Alex von Tunzelmann, in The Guardian, said, ‘Amazing Grace’s strong performances sometimes lift its plodding pace but it’s a stodgy and old-fashioned historical drama’. For Peter Bradshaw, ‘a decent cast under Michael Apted’s direction does its best, but it’s dull, naïve and dramatically inert’.

  As Finney turned 70, the parts were getting smaller. He enjoyed a pleasant reunion with Sidney Lumet, his old pal from Murder on the Orient Express in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Finney played a widower whose wife is inadvertently killed in a bungled jewellery shop robbery, one planned by their own sons. The film, which repeatedly jumped back and forth in time, was compelling yet not quite credible. The late Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke were excellent as scheming brothers. For Finney it was a breeze, until the ending which had him murdering his own son!

  The Bourne Ultimatum was a part that Finney could normally have done with his eyes closed. The film itself is a fast-moving thriller, complete with dizzying camera angles, and quite a nice tour of various capital cities. Finney, bespectacled and ruddy-faced, could still command a scene. ‘We didn’t pick you. You picked us,’ Finney, as Dr Albert Hirsch, tells Bourne in a rumbling deep voice.

  Finney looked a bit rough in The Bourne Ultimatum, betraying his declining health. Up until now, the odd minor gripe notwithstanding, his health had been fine. But in 2007 he faced serious illness. He developed cancer of the kidney and needed an operation and six rounds of chemotherapy. Like many of his generation, when he spoke of illness it was simple, matter-of-fact, no bullshitting or self-pity. ‘I didn’t feel anything on the first two, then the third one, I thought, that’s funny, I feel bad,’ he said. ‘That got worse. It took me about a year or a year-and-a-half to feel it was out of my system. But it saved me.’

  It must have been a depressing time, but Finney seemed remarkably sanguine. In (rare) interviews – such as one for the Manchester Evening News when he visited his sister’s home in Davyhulme – he reminisced fondly but without sentimentality. He told Paul Taylor that he accepted change:

  The Lowry painting of the industrial north with the factory chimneys and smoke … that was going to be forever. It looked eternal, and yet it’s all gone. Now when you see the test match from Old Trafford on the television, you can actually see the Pennines, which you couldn’t before. It’s change for the better in some ways.

  Finney was mostly out of action between 2007 and 2011. He had a minor role in The Bourne Legacy, his puffy, bloated appearance reflecting his illness. By now Finney and Pene spent most of their time in West Sussex. Emsworth, not far from Chichester, is a beautiful seaside town near the affluent yachting fraternity that formed the backdrop to the popular TV series Howard’s Way. Lynda Bellingham described an idyllic trip to see the Finneys:

  Albert and Pene have the perfect home within walking distance of the sea and, as Albie pointed out, the town boasts over thirty pubs. Their house has a walled garden and herb patch, and it was full of gorgeous flowers. It had that wonderful calm about it which I always associated with walled gardens, as the old brickwork seems to absorb all outside noise except the birds and the bees. We sat and had a lovely glass of something cool and fizzy while awaiting the arrival of [Finney’s close friend] Julian Holloway. It was good to see him again and remember old times. We then adjourned to Albert’s local, the Bluebell, and had a glorious boozy lunch. It was bliss.3

  As a lifelong supporter of Manchester United, Finney narrated the documentary Munich, about the 1958 air crash that killed twenty-three passengers, including eight United footballers, known as the Busby Babes in honour of manager Sir Matt Busby. Finney donated his fee for the voiceover to the Manchester United Foundation. The programme aired on United’s TV channel MUTV in February 2008.

  Finney explained why he did the narration:

  Being a Salford lad, the Munich disaster meant a lot to me at the time. Although I was away from Salford then, I was in the theatre working at a matinee and in the evening that day.4 I was very hurt by it, shattered by the loss of such potential … We talk about the Swinging Sixties, but the seeds of change were happening earlier and I suppose Matt Busby was instrumental in that, to focus so accurately and smartly on youth. He saw what was happening and what could happen and should happen. And therefore in a way, the Busby Babes were the forerunners of that social revolution. They were certainly in the vanguard.5

  Finney also spoke of his excitement at seeing United win the European Cup in 1968, beating Benfica 4–1 in the final:

  I was there. We couldn’t believe it. I mean, that victory was, it seems an odd word to say, almost justification of everything. But truly, it really justified Matt’s insistence on going into Europe. I mean he was quite right. The old farts at the FA couldn’t see their noses, couldn’t see a yard in front of their faces and he was saying this is the way the future is. This is the way the game will go. And he’s absolutely right. Look at the size of the game. But it was an incredible night. And I was very lucky to be there. I was glad I wasn’t working at that time so I could go out at night instead of being stuck in a theatre saying some silly lines.

  ‘Silly lines?’ In a theatre? Surely not!

  By now, Finney could afford to be extremely selective with the
parts sent his way. His lawyer, Nigel Bennett, speaking in 2011, made clear that his client was careful about roles, ‘Mr Finney is at the time of life when he can be extra choosy about the roles that he accepts. These are difficult times for film producers and he won’t even read a script unless the film is fully financed.’

  In 2011, Dustin Hoffman wanted Finney to play the part of Wilf in Quartet, written by Finney’s long-time collaborator Ronald Harwood. The film, about a home for retired musicians, would have reunited Finney with his friends Tom Courtenay and Maggie Smith. Sadly, he felt that a long shoot was beyond him. (His part was taken by Billy Connolly.)6 Courtenay, in particular, was looking forward to working with Finney again. They remained close friends who met often.

  Another venture, a possible remake of Sheridan’s 1775 comedy The Rivals, in which Finney was supposed to appear alongside Imelda Staunton and Joseph Fiennes, fell through because of financing problems. Talk of another series of Rumpole of the Bailey (with Finney in the role made famous by Leo McKern) came to nothing.

  Later, in 2011, Finney had a comeback of a sort, albeit in a small role, but one that introduced him to a new generation of filmgoers. Sam Mendes cast him as an old gamekeeper in the Bond movie Skyfall. The film is named for the Scottish ranch and ancestral home where Bond (Daniel Craig) and M (Judi Dench) take refuge in the film’s climax. There they meet a gruff, bearded old rascal who has known Bond since he was a child.