Such matters will almost certainly not trouble Finney who claimed that he never became an actor to be famous or even rich, although he admitted that wealth was icing on the cake. Finney is, as Maureen Lipman once said, comfortable in his own skin. Similarly, the lack of an Oscar may perturb some of Finney’s fans.13 But it is unlikely to trouble him one iota. All agree that Finney could have been an even bigger star if he so chose. Bernard Hepton, for example, has not seen Finney since 1959 but he says he still thinks about Finney a lot, ‘His career could have been very starry. He could have been as big as Caine or Connery but he didn’t want it. He has always done what he wanted to do.’
Acting inevitably changes over the years. Ironically, Finney’s style, once acclaimed as groundbreaking and revolutionary, has been superseded by – at least on-screen – a great deal of incomprehensible mumbling. A Finney performance, just like one by O’Toole, was a great crowd-drawing event – what’s he going to do now? But theatre itself has changed. Certain names do attract audiences. Benedict Cumberbatch was the obvious example in 2015. But, in general, a great production is not made or (unmade) by a star turn.
Amanda Waring has also noted the change in acting styles:
Finney had a magnificent aura on stage. He and O’Toole had that slightly maverick quality and an air of danger. You never quite knew what they were going to do next. It was about taking risks. Modern actors have to a certain extent been anaesthetised. Political correctness has come in and, although it has some good aspects to it, it has rubbed out some other qualities. Exorbitant ticket prices don’t help. People go in feeling resentful before a show has even started.
Matt Truman wrote an interesting article in response to the furore surrounding Berkoff’s comments:
Not only are the spaces often smaller – Olivier never played a seventy-seat studio theatre – but design has taken on more of a role in affecting an audience. Sound, lighting and directorial decisions, even movement direction, all come together to create mood, tone and atmosphere, thereby freeing the actor from bombast. Today’s actors can afford to do less, but that requires a different skillset entirely: precision instead of power, subtlety instead of starriness, perhaps even transparency instead of transformation.
Many of Finney’s contemporaries may rue that Finney didn’t succeed Olivier at the National. He could have had the job if he wanted it. He is a powerful figure who could have drawn many famous names. Perhaps, too, he would have shunned what some saw as an over-intellectualised theatre and brought some fireworks to the South Bank. But the commitment was too much for a person like Finney who liked to go his own way.
These days Finney largely sticks to home turf. He has emphysema, a condition probably linked to his smoking. He’s still capable of having a good time, though, and Eileen Atkins remembers Keith Baxter’s 80th birthday party in 2013:
Everyone was there, including Maggie and Judi Dench and Albert Finney and the four of us ended up on a table together. I looked at the bunch of us. Judi can’t see much, Maggie and I don’t hear too well and Albert was drunk. But I thought we all looked rather lovely and we were all roaring with laughter. It was absolutely bloody perfect.
A difficult occasion for Finney was Peter O’Toole’s memorial service at the Old Vic on 18 May 2014. Struggling to contain himself as he paid tribute to his old RADA buddy, Finney posed for photographs alongside Benedict Cumberbatch and Kevin Spacey. Annabel Leventon, who had appeared with O’Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell, shared a stage with Finney as they celebrated their mutual friend:
I’d never met him before and he was utterly charming to me and had no need to be. He had been at RADA with Peter and they adored each other. When Albert got up to give his piece, he broke down a couple of times, but carried on with wonderful presence and humanity.
Finney can look back on a career that has defied typecasting. If there is sadness, it’s that he has been unable to continue acting into old age. Finney, like Olivier, loves acting and to lack the stamina for important parts must be frustrating. Yet he leaves behind several truly great performances on film – Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Murder on the Orient Express, The Dresser, Miller’s Crossing, Erin Brockovich and The Gathering Storm readily springing to mind. And all his screen portrayals, if not touched by greatness, are interesting in their own way. On stage, those who were lucky enough to see Billy Liar, Luther or Orphans will never forget them.
Those who accused Finney of ‘coasting’ in his career have been proven wrong. A tough, challenging role has invariably followed an ‘easy’ one. In the end, whether he inherited the mantle of Olivier was not really as relevant to Finney as it was to a bunch of esoteric critics. His career, notwithstanding the voluntary ‘sabbaticals’ that have punctuated it, has had regular highlights.
Living, not art, was more important to Finney. He has managed to live on his own terms. He has got into the skin of all the people he portrays without succumbing to neurosis. In many ways he is an ideal actor. He has created believable characters without suffering unduly for his craft. He has enjoyed life and its pleasures without battering his liver into submission. He has had an exciting life and made it past his 80th birthday. And he still retains a good sense of humour. Roger Moore recently recalled, ‘Someone’s always asking me to do a eulogy. As Albert Finney, a very funny man, once said to me after he’d done two or three actor memorials, “You’d better get your name down. I’m getting booked up”.’
Few actors are seen as being as professional as Finney and fewer still enjoy such respect and popularity among colleagues. Many fellow actors cite Finney as one of their favourite performers. And everyone I interviewed for this book mentioned him with warmth and affection. And for those who declined, if they cited a reason, it was that they were ‘very fond of Albert’ and did not want to co-operate on an unauthorised biography.
Rather like Harold in Orphans, it seems that Finney has given more than a little encouragement to those around him. He has certainly given a metaphorical tweak of the shoulder to everyone in the profession. A strolling player, sometimes restless, but a mentor for many whose lives he has touched. He might not have been the new Olivier, but many young actors today would be flattered to be called the new Finney.
Not a bad old fellow …
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NOTES
Prologue
1 Where There’s Smoke. Musings of a Cigarette-Smoking Man: A Memoir by William B. Davis.
2 A phrase originally used by Sir Ben Kingsley to describe Sir Richard Attenborough. But Michael Attenborough believes it applies equally to Finney.
Chapter 1
1 Finney’s Salford, at least when he moved to Weaste, was a more comfortable and upmarket version than that depicted in Delaney’s A Taste of Honey.
2 Robert Powell (born 1946) has said that Finney was always a great hero to him, ‘Just down the road from me, as I grew up, was Albert Finney. He was a little bit older, but if ever I needed someone to look up to, follow and admire, then it would be Albert. My mother and his mother used to share the same hairdresser, and would swap notes about us, which was quite funny.’
3 An examination administered to some students in their last year of primary education, governing admission to various types of secondary school.
4 Finney and Harold Riley helped to set up the Eric Simm Award in 1978 in memory of their old headmaster who gained a reputation for encouraging young people in the dramatic and visual arts. Although Finney was never an academic high flyer, he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Salford in 1979.
5 The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art was founded by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852–1917) in 1904. His grandson was the actor Oliver Reed.
6 Richard Briers (1934–2013).
7 Bryan Pringle (1935–2002).
8 Virginia Maskell committed suicide in 1968.
9 From Poorhouse to Penthouse and Back by Roy Maxwell.
10 In the Company of Actors: Reflections on the Craft of Acting by Carole Zucker.
11 Interview with Sheridan Morley in The Times, February 1974.
12 Ask Me if I’m Happy – An Actor’s Life by Peter Bowles (born 1936).
13 Brian Bedford (1935–2016) interview in The Toronto Star – 26 May 2007.
14 Daily Mail, 22 June 2008.
15 Interview with Frank Finlay (1926–2016) quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, 9 November 1988.
16 Dear Tom by Tom Courtenay (born 1937).
17 The importance of this presentation, as a showcase of RADA talent, cannot be overstated. So much so that one student, Roy Maxwell, who was excluded from the final show after a disagreement with Fernald, believed that it hindered him: ‘Fernald, the bastard, overruled the decisions of his tutorial staff, and maliciously excluded me from performing in the Public Show. I have no doubt that the cost to me, career-wise, was inestimable.’ Richard Briers, on the other hand, always admired Fernald, and described him as the first person who saw potential in him.
18 Playing to the Camera: Film Actors Discuss their Craft by Bert Cardullo.
Chapter 2
1 In 1963, Finney came to Birmingham to see Derek Jacobi in Henry VIII. According to Jacobi, ‘Afterwards Winnie Banks invited him and the cast back to the house. All of us sat round while this energetic young actor talked and talked about theatre and his life. It was so inspiring for he had all the coherence of successful talent. He had it all made and he was mesmeric.’
2 June Brown (born 1927) also saw Finney’s Macbeth at the National Theatre in 1978, twenty years after their Birmingham production: ‘I was thinking to myself, well, I don’t know, Albie. Parts of it I liked better when you were 21.’
3 Interview with Mark Kingston (1934–2011) for British Library Theatre Archive Project, 31 March 2006.
4 Interview with Colin George (born 1929) for British Library Theatre Archive Project, 21 November 2005.
5 Pamela Howard interview with Kate Harris for Theatre Archive Project, 9 November 2005.
6 Laughton played Bligh so well that some naïve souls seemed a bit confused. My mother, a London tour guide, once pointed out Bligh’s gravestone at St Mary’s, Lambeth, to some American tourists. An elderly sightseer turned to his wife and said, in all seriousness, ‘Ethel, that’s where Charles Laughton is buried’. Nobody flinched.
Chapter 3
1 Charles Laughton – A Difficult Actor by Simon Callow.
2 Robeson, who had been accused of being a Communist and had had his passport seized by the authorities, had travelled to Russia in August 1959 – performing in Moscow to enthusiastic crowds – after his travel ban was revoked.
3 I will be Cleopatra – An Actress’s Journey by Zoe Caldwell.
4 Peter Hall had already directed several plays at Stratford, including Love’s Labour’s Lost in 1956 and Cymbeline in 1957.
5 Priscilla Morgan, interview with the author, 28 January 2016.
6 Albert Finney in conversation with Clive Goodwin, 4 March 1962.
7 Albert Finney interview with The Rockmart Journal, 10 June 1992.
8 In the Company of Actors – Reflections on the Art of Acting by Eileen Atkins.
9 My Father Laurence Olivier by Tarquin Olivier.
10 Interview with Elijah Moshinsky in The Saturday Paper, 18 July 2015.
11 Sue Johnston – interview in the Coventry Evening Telegraph, 2001.
12 Understudies can indeed steal the show. The story goes that when Anthony Hopkins stepped in for Olivier in Dance of Death he was so good that Olivier, panicking that his own performance was being surpassed, forced himself out of bed.
13 Letters of Louis MacNeice by Louis MacNeice.
Chapter 4
1 Woodfall Films was a film production company set up by Tony Richardson, John Osborne and Harry Saltzman in the late fifties. Among its most famous films were Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones and Kes.
2 Albert Finney in a 1982 interview with Michael Billington.
3 The late Pete Postlethwaite (1946–2011), for example, said of Finney and Shirley Anne Field in the film, ‘I realised, watching them, that you didn’t have to be poncey to be an actor’.
4 Everyone agrees that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Finney, were instrumental in the enormous sea change that followed. Take British actor Patrick Mower: ‘I think Finney was responsible, along with the character Jimmy Porter in Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court, for the change in style and approach of all British actors from that day to this.’ From Patrick Mower: My Story.
5 Quoted in the Nottingham Post, 31 October 2012.
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