Strolling Player

by Hershman, Gabriel;

  Mendes confirmed that the writers had originally penned the role with Sean Connery in mind:

  There was a definite discussion about [Connery playing Kincade] – way, way early on. But I think that’s problematic. Because, to me, it becomes too … it would take you out of the movie. Connery is Bond and he’s not going to come back as another character. It’s like, he’s been there. So, it was a very brief flirtation with that thought, but it was never going to happen, because I thought it would distract.

  Finney’s addition was kept a secret. The story goes that the other actors were reading their parts when Mendes introduced a surprise cast member. It was Finney, making his first ever Bond appearance at the age of 75.

  ‘Welcome to Scotland!’ is Kincade’s opening salvo as he blasts some villains away. Finney’s Kincade, rather hoarse and breathless, is still a formidable foe and adept at putting Bond in his place, having known him since childhood. ‘Try and stop me, you jumped up little shit,’ he tells him. Finney thought that Daniel Craig, in his third Bond outing ‘really fits the jacket snugly and has a nice edge to him’. A bonus was working with Judi Dench for the first time. ‘Ridiculous, really. I’ve been in the business for fifty-odd years and Judi’s been in it for some time and we’d never met before. But it was a pleasure. She’s a great lady and it was lovely to be in her presence,’ said Finney during an on-set interview.

  The film was hailed by the critics. The only sniping came from writer Sebastian Faulks. ‘The critics said it was one of the greatest Bond films, which is clearly not true. Albert Finney can’t do a Scottish accent,’ he said, rather ungraciously.7

  Skyfall was to be Finney’s final acting credit. The actor might be ‘resting’, but discussions about Finney’s influence on British acting continue to this day.

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  REFLECTIONS

  He made it possible for the likes of me, my generation, which is one under him, to actually leave the provinces and go to London and make it.

  Malcolm McDowell.

  Nothing much was heard of Finney after Skyfall. But his name was often bandied about in discussions about acting and, in particular, the perennial British obsession with class. In early 2015, the shadow culture minister Chris Bryant said that, although he was delighted by the achievement of people like Eddie Redmayne (who had just won a Golden Globe for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything and would subsequently win an Oscar) the arts world should hire people from more humble backgrounds.

  Bryant’s comments came at a time when perceptions were that privileged ‘posh’ actors like Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic West and Damian Lewis were too dominant. Julie Walters, Ian McKellen, Christopher Eccleston1 and Helen Mirren have all voiced similar concerns. ‘Where are the Albert Finneys and the Glenda Jacksons?’ asked Bryant:

  They came through a meritocratic system. But it wasn’t just that. It was also that the writers were writing stuff for them. So is the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, doing that kind of gritty drama, which reflects [the country] more? We can’t just have Downton programming ad infinitum and think that just because we’ve got some people in the servants’ hall, somehow or other we’ve done our duty by gritty drama.

  To which one could say – consider Danny Dyer or Jason Statham or Ray Winstone, and the endless array of soaps about ordinary people and their problems. And Bryant’s view is not unanimously held. Roger Moore, for example, in a Daily Mail article in 2010, had noted a different trend:

  Commander Bond has to speak the Queen’s English – and how I wish more of us would. I have always spoken that way. But if I were a young actor trying to find work today, the way I talk would be a handicap. In fact, my actress daughter, Deborah, who also speaks like me, claims she regularly struggles in auditions because her accent ‘isn’t regional enough’. For it seems that these days no one wants to speak like Her Majesty, especially on stage and screen. This is a great pity.2

  Moore, with tongue-in-cheek, went on to blame his friends, Michael Caine and ‘Albie’ Finney.

  James Fox also dismissed the criticism of posh actors like Redmayne:

  It’s complete balls … it’s just classist. I was brought up in a generation that despised upper-class people … I was one of the only actors of my background who made it in my twenties. All the rest were working class: Terry Stamp, Albie Finney, Tom Courtenay, Michael Caine.

  Fox implied the rise of ‘posh’ actors was redressing the balance after decades of success for working-class talent. Celia Imrie agreed and again cited Finney in her comments:

  In those days it wasn’t fashionable to have a posh voice. It was the era of Albert Finney and northern accents. I read James Blunt’s defence of ‘posh’ in response to Chris Bryant saying there were too many posh people in the arts. I’m on James Blunt’s side – you can’t help how you were born. Chris Bryant can get stuffed actually.

  Prunella Scales also noted the tendency for non-working-class actors to have to hide their origins:

  My parents came from a theatre background but I kept schtum about those connections. You were meant to be Albert Finney from a raw working-class family with no theatrical antecedents. It’s all right now: my son [Sam West] has two parents, three grandparents and two great-grandparents who have worked in theatre. But there was a feeling then that people who grew up in acting families didn’t know about real life. Whereas Albert Finney did.3

  Finney’s friend, Julian Fellowes,4 who later created Downton Abbey, also went through a period where he thought his class went against him: ‘There was an assumption that if you came from my background, you couldn’t have much to say.’

  Yet there is something inaccurate here about Finney. The press were perhaps in danger of confusing Finney’s persona in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning with the actor. Finney, as we have seen, perhaps more than anyone else, ushered in the new wave of cinema. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was one of the first films set around an authentically working-class character, but the idea that Finney ever represented the typical working-class man, or that his name became somehow synonymous with the working class, is a little odd, especially for someone whose background was not all that uncomfortable. Finney has always studiously resented typecasting anyway and has played, very convincingly, ‘privileged’ parts. For him, Arthur Seaton, groundbreaking though it might have been, was just another role.

  The other misconception surrounding Finney goes to the heart of his character. Finney was never really an angry young man. The label was pinned on him because he played Arthur Seaton so well and because the portrayal coincided with a revolution in British cinema. True, Finney might have made a few pronouncements against the middle-class nature of British acting at the time.5 Yet that did not mean he was angry. On the contrary, everyone who knew, and knows, Finney speaks of his charm and easygoing nature. It was just another label. The press, and perhaps to a lesser extent, the public, like to pigeonhole actors but they got it wrong in Finney’s case.

  Nicol Williamson might have deserved the label ‘angry’; certainly the playwright John Osborne. But Finney? In a sense all young actors who came to fame in the sixties, not only Finney, O’Toole, Harris, Courtenay, Stamp and Caine, but also other leading men like Ian Hendry or Tom Bell, were ‘rebels’. But that was only because British cinema of the late fifties was so stuffy and conservative. And although Finney continued to cultivate an image as a bit of an outsider, for example not attending the Oscars, refusing a knighthood and (perhaps jokingly) railing against Caine and Connery for ‘letting the side down’, this was hardly the stuff of class warfare.

  If Finney was groundbreaking it was in his approach to stardom and his (perhaps conscious) rejection of attempts to conceal his background. Finney’s northern roots showed through in interviews and even sometimes in his interpretation of roles (we recall Ian McKellen’s observation that Finney played Macbeth with a northern accent). So then being a northerner became sexy. Julia Goodman recollects this from her time at the Central School in the m
id-sixties: ‘Some of the boys even pretended to be from the north and working class. The northern boys were even starting to get the upper hand.’ She thinks now that the balance may be too weighted in favour of southern actors but believes that ‘a sexy Albert Finney type mark two’ would change all that. Perhaps Scottish actors Ewan McGregor or James McAvoy are the nearest modern-day equivalents to Finney in terms of talent, sex appeal, looks and background.

  Finney’s breakthrough enabled other actors, a few years behind him and from similar backgrounds, to walk tall. Finney and Courtenay became heroes to northerners like Malcolm McDowell and John Thaw. McDowell, in particular, has cited Finney as his favourite actor, ‘He made it possible for the likes of me, my generation, which is one under him, to actually leave the provinces and go to London and make it. He made it. He was one of the first to do that.’

  And not just big stars are in Finney’s debt. Would British television series like The Likely Lads have been made without the likes of Finney opening the ‘can of peas’ first? (Rodney Bewes is another television star who has named Finney as a hero – even more so when Finney turned down a knighthood.)

  To jaundiced observers, notably the late Lindsay Anderson, Finney might have kept a rough edge to his accent but he had lost some authenticity along the way:

  Working-class actors can become successful now, but only at the price of making themselves ‘respectable’ and conforming to bourgeois standards. Albert Finney is a perfect example. He preserves a certain superficial roughness of speech, but has sacrificed his real abrasiveness and any real quality of emotion he had.6

  But Anderson’s comments came before Finney’s punchy performances in Shoot the Moon and The Dresser.

  Janet Suzman, speaking in 1997, noted the sea change that the likes of Finney, but especially Finney, ushered:

  At the time I went there [to LAMDA in 1959] there’d been a terrific change, there was a new egalitarianism, really. I think the moment people like Albert Finney – which was just pre-me – started hitting drama schools, regional people, vocational training began to change. Because it was with the advent of the Finneys of this world [does regional accent] who talked like that and came from up north, that the whole idea of Received Pronunciation and polite expertise began to devolve.7

  ‘Working-class’ actors in general, like Ray Winstone and Gary Oldman, also owe a lot to Finney. Not to be forgotten too is that Finney helped to launch the careers of directors like Stephen Frears, Ridley Scott and Mike Leigh.

  The real question is whether an actor of Finney’s talent and modest background would be able to break through today as Finney did sixty years ago. Jimmy McGovern, creator of Cracker, believes not:

  I’m constantly looking around for actors who can convincingly portray working-class men. They’re getting fewer and fewer because it’s only the posh ones who can afford to go into acting. If you were to cast Saturday Night and Sunday Morning today, who would you get for the Albert Finney role?8

  Michael Attenborough, on the other hand, who teaches at RADA, makes clear that Britain’s greatest drama school ‘never turns down anyone on the grounds of funding … there’s an element of exaggeration in terms of access to the profession and a lot of contemporary TV is not Downton Abbey.’

  There is no definitive conclusion to all this, especially in such an arbitrary profession as acting. The debate seems to be ongoing, reignited in January 2016 after the passing of Alan Rickman who grew up in an Acton council house.9 Around this time, the director of RADA, Edward Kemp, said that it is not that they ‘train only posh kids’ but rather that they ‘train kids to be posh’ to increase their chances of finding work.

  Connoisseurs of great acting have also noted that Finney is not as well known nowadays as he should be. It’s partly because Finney, although naturally gregarious, is also extremely private. He has (mostly) shunned interviews and chat shows as well as film premieres and award ceremonies. He enjoys a party but not necessarily those on the ‘celebrity circuit’. His reluctance to promote himself means that he has been surpassed in purely fame stakes not only by the ‘obvious suspects’ – Caine, Connery, Moore, Harris and Reed – but also by other peers, the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Ian McKellen, even Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon.

  He has retained his star quality – the late Susannah York said, ‘whether he [Finney] has got fat or thin, he still has that kind of leading man stature’ – without actually being a box office draw. Roger Moore has described his friend’s credo, ‘He’ll turn up, give a great performance and then go home’. Further proof of Finney’s nonconformist streak is that he doesn’t even have an agent, preferring to negotiate through a lawyer.

  Another reason why his name no longer resonates with Joe Public is that, although he has worked prodigiously, he has been selective. Some of his great roles are not well known outside theatrical circles. His name lacks an instant association with an on-screen character. And the public likes to ‘categorise’ actors. For example, Caine is Alfie or Carter; Hopkins is Hannibal Lecter; Connery and Moore are Bond; O’Toole is Lawrence; Finney is … Arthur Seaton, maybe Tom Jones even more? Perhaps, but it’s all too long ago. So was Lawrence of Arabia, but the David Lean classic became an international epic movie.

  Finney also lacks that off-screen notoriety – I’m thinking especially of Harris and Reed – that makes some actors part of the national culture and ‘total legends’ to the man, but not necessarily the woman, in the pub (I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that phrase about Reed). Finney’s chameleon-like transformations mean that his real personality is not as instantly identifiable as, for example, Caine or Connery, both long-standing favourites for impersonators. Who can do a Finney impression? It would be difficult for the most talented mimic. Finney’s timbre is unmistakable, but in interviews his accent tends to change. Finney is more likely to mimic others. And that gives us the final clue as to how he sees himself. He is a character man, slipping in and out of disguise. ‘I’m not the romantic type … I’m a bit like the late, great Peter Sellers, only happy in character roles,’ Finney has said, perhaps slightly self-disparagingly.

  The result is that, to the ordinary viewing public under the age of 40, he is now relatively unknown. (I once showed a picture of Finney to an educated work colleague. He replied, ‘I know him. He was good in Snatch.’) It’s unlikely that Finney would worry about any of this, of course.

  It is not just Finney who is under-appreciated. His contemporary Nicol Williamson, for example, has definitely suffered an even worse fate. His death, in 2011, passed virtually unnoticed outside theatrical circles. And, even in 1993, an Independent article by Robert Butler noted Williamson’s drift into obscurity, ‘When I rang a leading producer for a comment on him, the receptionist said, “Sorry, which production is she in?”’.

  Steven Berkoff has made a more telling, perhaps sadder point – that even many young aspiring actors do not know as much as they should about the greats of yesteryear. Not only Finney but also Richardson, Guinness, Howard, Gielgud, and even Olivier, leave them cold:

  The young actors today are so ghastly, uninteresting, boring, tedious, they know nothing about their culture, they know nothing about the great legends of the past. You say, what do you think of Gielgud – who’s that? What do you think of Trevor Howard? – Oh, I dunno. What do you think of Edmund Kean? – I’ve never heard of him. They know nothing.10

  Berkoff claimed, perhaps with some justification, that too many of today’s breed chase fame but have no interest in learning their craft on stage.

  Brian Cox, in a recent interview, also made a similar point:

  It is important to know the roots of things, where you are from and how acting developed … the passing of people like Peter O’Toole and Alan Bates, people of that generation, they belonged to something which was quite revolutionary, previous to that it was the Oliviers, it was the Gielguds.

  Knowledge of yesterday’s greats was essential, he said, to establish ‘that sense
of a continuum, and where these actors broke ground in very different ways. It just needs attention, if nothing else. I think one of the problems of the day is that history started five minutes ago’. Cox also said that some young British actors weren’t all that interesting:

  The Benedicts, the Redmaynes are very good. But, I look at a lot of young actors and I don’t think they’re very good. There’s a thing that goes on in acting now where they don’t engage, there’s a blandness about them, they’re homogenised.11

  Perhaps the comments of Berkoff and Cox just reflect the sometimes misplaced motives of those entering the business.12 Doubtless, a young professional boxer, aspiring to get to the top, would know about the great fights of Ali, Foreman and Tyson. Acting, however, carries with it the fundamental misconception that anyone can do it. And, in a sense, that is true. But few can act very well. And fewer still can hope to act as well as Finney. Show today’s young aspiring actors the great performances of the past and doubtless they would be impressed. But would they bother to investigate them in the first place? (Actor Jeremy Young once told me that many of the drama students he teaches had not even heard of Laurence Olivier.)

  Part of the problem also lies in the way our fame-obsessed culture devalues the meaning of words. A bit-part actor in some soap is described as a star in the tabloids. Television soaps, in particular, do not necessarily offer a good training ground for actors. But TV is, as they say, ‘where it’s at’. A soap star or indeed the star of a regular TV series, and not necessarily a versatile one at that, can become more famous than a leading man like Finney. John Thaw is more famous than Albert Finney and, while I mean no disrespect to the late, great star of Inspector Morse, my point is that although Finney was more acclaimed, indeed one of the most lauded actors of his generation and the star of many magnificent international films, TV still makes you more famous.